Page 16
February 21, 2018
New Prices
Effective
April 1, 2017
O PINION
Martin
Cleaning
Service
Carpet & Upholstery
Cleaning
Residential &
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Minimum Service CHG.
$50.00
A small distance/travel
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1 Cleaning Area (only)
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Includes Pre-Spray Traffic Area
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$40.00 Minimum
Heavily Soiled Area:
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(Requiring Extensive Pre-Spraying)
UPHOLSTERY
CLEANING
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Throw Pillows (With
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The Racist and Disastrous War on Pot
Federal laws are
broken and need
fixing
J esselyn m C C urDy
If polling is correct, pot
no longer gives Americans
fits. Recent Gallup polls
indicate that 64 percent
of Americans approve of
legalizing marijuana —
the highest level of public
support in almost 50 years.
Nevertheless, we have an administration that
is tone deaf to the will of the people and in-
sists on reinstituting failed policies of decades
past.
But there are members of Congress who
are listening. Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. and
Ro Khanna, D-Calif. Recently introduced the
Marijuana Justice Act in the House of Rep-
resentatives. Both agree that legalizing mar-
ijuana under federal law is an important step
to confronting and eroding the harms that the
failed war on drugs has had on people across
the country, disproportionately on black and
brown communities.
In addition to legalization, the bill would
cut federal funding for state law enforcement
and prison construction if a state dispropor-
tionately arrests and incarcerate people of
color for marijuana offenses. It also would
retroactively apply to those currently serving
sentences and allow people in federal prison
by
for marijuana offenses to go to court and ask a
judge to reduce their sentence.
When Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., intro-
duced the bill in the Senate last summer, he
acknowledged “our country’s drug
laws are badly broken and need to be
fixed. … [T]hey don’t make our com-
munities any safer.”
Booker, like Lee and Khanna, un-
derstands that laws that do not make
communities safer must be questioned,
and in this case, stricken.
Currently more than one in five
Americans live in the eight states and
the District of Columbia that have le-
galized small amounts of marijuana for
recreational use, not to mention the 29 states
that approve medical use. The federal govern-
ment should follow the states, and the people,
and legalize pot.
In a groundbreaking 2013 report, the
ACLU documented that black people are
almost four times more likely to be arrested
for marijuana possession than white people,
despite comparable usage rates. Even more
disturbing, in the District of Columbia in
2013, where black people make up 49 per-
cent of the population and whites and people
of other backgrounds make up 51 percent,
nearly 91 percent of the people arrested for
marijuana offenses were black. These stun-
ning statistics led D.C residents to support
marijuana legalization in 2016. They should
likewise spur people to support the Marijua-
na Justice Act.
As John Ehrlichman, former domestic poli-
cy chief for Richard Nixon, has confirmed, the
war on drugs was never about the stated pur-
pose of protecting the health and safety of the
American people. Instead, it was really about
undermining the black and anti-war commu-
nities.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the
Nixon White House after that, had two ene-
mies: the antiwar left and black people,” Eh-
rlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994,
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be
either against the war or black, but by getting
the public to associate the hippies with mari-
juana and blacks with heroin, and then crimi-
nalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities.”
He continued, “Did we know we were lying
about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Unfortunately in 2018, we have an attor-
ney general who is stuck in the past and has
embraced these divisive Nixonian policies
and tactics. Last month, Attorney General Jeff
Sessions rescinded several Obama-era poli-
cies that recognized states’ rights to legalize
marijuana for recreational and medicinal pur-
poses.
Although this administration does not recog-
nize or seem to care about the harm that antiquat-
ed drug policies have caused to communities of
color, it is refreshing to see that some members
of Congress — like Cory Booker, Barbara Lee,
and Ro Khanna — do. They are fighting back
with the Marijuana Justice Act, which lives up
to its name and would be important to criminal
justice reform for our nation.
Jesselyn McCurdy is a deputy director of
the American Civil Liberties Union in Wash-
ington, D.C.