Perhaps by now you have all heard that the Tax Cannabis campaign in California has succeeded in qualifying an initiative to make marijuana use legal for all adults for the November ballot.
For some of you -- like our good friend, Dr. Zombie -- this is big news. The biggest! For others, you may be supportive, but at the same time you are somewhat dismissive. It is just not that important an issue. We need to deal with health care (at least we did) and bring our troops home from Iraq.
Moreover, you say, this is a political blog. We are supposed to be figuring out how to get Democrats elected so they can enact policies to help the American people.
Well, wake up people. This IS going to help get Democrats elected. In fact, Jerry Brown should be the happiest man in America today. He just won the gubernatorial election.
For years, Democrats sat around bemoaning the fact that allies of the Republican Party were using anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives to turn out its Christian conservative base. Most famously, one of these initiatives was used in Ohio in 2004 to tip the election to George W. Bush. Check out this sub-head from an October 2004 article in Salon:
Churches in Ohio are rallying their massive flocks behind the most strident anti-gay marriage amendment in the nation -- and the Republican National Committee is in heaven.
It hurts just thinking about it.
The Democrats have tried to find an issue to inspire similar turnout among progressive voters. They have had some success with initiatives related to minimum wage and renewable energy, but nothing has really produced the kind of surge of irregular voters needed to provide a margin of victory for candidates up and down the ticket.
Well, hello, marijuana!
You want to give some irregular voters a reason to vote in an off-year election (or even a presidential election)? Tell them that they have the opportunity to make the use and possession of marijuana legal for the rest of their life. How does that sound? You think that might get some young people -- and some middle-aged people and even some older people -- to the polls in November?
You all may think this is a joke. But the time for snickering about marijuana as an issue is over. If the fact that people's lives were ruined for simply using a substance safer than alcohol wasn't enough motivation for you to embrace this issue, maybe the promise of resulting Democratic victories will help you along.
Perhaps you aren't sold yet. That's cool. Let's make 2010 a test year. Let look at the polling in California. Let's look at the turnout. Let's see how the presence of the initiative on the ballot helps the candidates.
And when Jerry Brown is the next governor of California in 2011, let's start thinking about where we can run marijuana legalization initiatives in 2012.