Perhaps the tipping point that put Paul Ryan into the retirement column wasn’t one of Donald Trump’s latest eye-rollers or seeing the trickle of Republicans announcing they won’t be running for re-election this year turn into a river. Perhaps it was instead John Boehner’s announcement that he has shifted his stance on marijuana and joined Acreage Holdings, which legally grows, processes, and dispenses marijuana in 11 states.
After all, what’s better than raking in cash for personal use with no more obligation than a few board meetings a year, compared to constantly having to grovel for re-election campaign money that can’t be used to pay off the mortgage?
And in Ryan’s case, joining Acreage wouldn’t even require the fancy dancing that Boehner—now being tagged as BONGner by Twitter wags—has done to paper over his anti-pot past. Boehner was previously strongly opposed to legalization, or even taking marijuana off the nation’s Schedule I list of most dangerous drugs, while Ryan has recently tempered his history of voting against rescheduling, decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana, including for medical purposes.
The Wisconsinite says he still remains personally opposed to legalization, but he now calls it a 10th Amendment matter: something for the states—not the federal government—to deal with. Thus he could continue to say he objects to legalization while potentially making wads of Benjamins when legalization actually occurs (which has been steadily happening, state by state) by claiming he’s just standing up for the Constitution.
Okay, okay: we’re deeply into speculative territory here based on nothing more than knowing that Greed Over Principle is ingrained in the majority of Republicans, even if it isn’t spelled out quite so brazenly in the party platform. Ryan may have no pro-pot intentions, particularly if it means working with Boehner. Maybe he is planning to spend more time with the Koch family after he retires, or join some other lucrative enterprise.
Boehner, on the other hand, could prove his switcheroo on marijuana is about something more than padding his purse if he announced that he favors freeing —and expunging the records of—everyone convicted of non-violent marijuana offenses.
Yes, people are in prison for that.
Christopher Ingraham reports:
Marijuana possession remains one of the single largest arrest categories in the United States, accounting for over 5 percent of all arrests last year. More than one in 20 arrests involved a marijuana possession charge, amounting to more than one marijuana possession arrest every minute.
In 2016, the FBI reported an estimated 650,000 arrests for possession of pot, 578,000 of them for simple possession. That’s more than the FBI says were arrested for murder and negligent homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault combined. Pot busts made up about 40 percent of all drug abuse arrests that year.
While most of these arrests, particularly those for a first offense, don’t lead to prosecution much less conviction, there are currently some 40,000 Americans in state or federal prison for pot violations. But it’s not just the ones who are still in the slam that are at issue. Millions of Americans have been and continue to be negatively affected by such convictions.
Throughout the criminal injustice system, all people of color (but especially black people and American Indians) collide with discrimination every step along the way. They are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, given lengthy sentences, and stuck with a record that follows them throughout their lives. All the more so for drug law offenses.
Persons convicted of drug crimes can lose their access to welfare, food stamps, federal housing, and student loans. And, of course, having that conviction on one’s record can make it tougher to get a job.
A few of the 19 states that legalized or decriminalized marijuana—including California, Colorado, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Oregon—have made it easier for people with criminal convictions for pot possession, cultivation, or manufacture to get their records sealed or expunged. In California alone, that could affect nearly half a million people who were arrested between 2006 and 2015 for marijuana-related offenses. But the majority of states have not done so. And in Texas, that accounts for tens of thousands of arrests each year, the vast majority for simple possession.
Since John Boehner is perched to make money off his newfound pro-pot stance, perhaps he could use whatever political influence he has to lobby every state to clear the records of people who violated laws that should never have been on the books in the first place. Expunging these records isn’t doing these people a special favor: it’s exercising common-sense justice.
Is Boehner familiar with that concept?