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Yes on 19 Marijuana Legalization Campaign Poster. (Bolerium Books/LA Weekly)
This weekend the California Democratic Party’s executive board will decide if the party should endorse Proposition 19, the state’s ballot initiative for marijuana legalization. Despite the ballot initiative’s clear positives for the party, it’s unclear where the party will fall. While there’s an outside chance the CDP could vote to throw its weight against Prop 19, the real debate will be whether the party should endorse the initiative, or stay neutral.
No matter what the party delegates voting this weekend think about the merits of the initiative, they should vote to endorse Prop 19. Here’s why.
Economic Benefits to California
Marijuana legalization will almost certainly be a boon for the state’s economy; one study predicted California could raise $1.4 billion annually from tax revenues from marijuana. Tens of thousands of jobs will come out of the shadows and into a legitimate economy, leading to more taxable income. Unions are already starting to organize employees of dispensaries, and thousands more jobs could be improved through organizing efforts. Those Californians can have their wages raised, get access to affordable health care, and have increased job security. Police departments can stop wasting money on enforcing marijuana laws and on battling the Mexican drug cartels. Those cartels will see their primary revenue stream – the sale of marijuana – dried up.
Political Benefits to California Democrats
From a political perspective, Prop 19′s presence on the ballot alone will help Democratic candidates. Marijuana legalization could easily do for Democratic turnout what anti-gay marriage initiatives did for Republicans at the ballot last decade. Some Californians tried to vote for legalization in the state’s June primary election, but were disappointed to learn it wouldn’t be on the ballot til November. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to get people to vote in a primary?) With the backing of the California Democratic Party, Prop 19 will have a better chance as the Party’s resources go to helping turnout.
About half of all Californians support Prop 19; the most recent poll from SUSA shows Prop 19 winning by 10 points, while some other polls show the state split. No matter what individual polls say about the state, one thing is clear from recent polls on marijuana legalization: California Democratic voters overwhelmingly favor legalization. A Field Poll last week that found the state split also found Democrats supporting legalization 53% to 38%; the aforementioned SUSA poll also found Democrats favoring legalization, 56% to 32%.
Some Democrats Organizing Against Prop 19 Endorsement
But opponents of Proposition 19, including Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown and Senate candidate Barbara Boxer, are going to be pressuring executive board members of the CDP to vote against endorsing. While there have been a number of excuses made by Democratic opponents of Prop 19, two seem to be the most prominent:
- The excuse many Democrats use for opposing Prop 19 is that while they support the idea of marijuana legalization, they say they are concerned that the initiative on the ballot is “flawed,” “full of loopholes,” and “poorly written.”
- The reality of why some Democrats oppose Prop 19 is they fear Democratic candidates in red and purple districts – as well as Brown and Boxer – will have to “explain away” their party’s support for marijuana legalization, leaving open a political vulnerability.
Let’s look at the first excuse. Democratic Prop 19 opponents say that they fear the initiative isn’t worded correctly, and that could present vulnerabilities in how the law is implemented. They say they prefer other methods of legalizing marijuana, either through a better-worded initiative in the next election cycle, or through a bill introduced in the state legislature. But this argument doesn’t hold water: if you actually support marijuana legalization, let voters in the state decide this November. If the initiative has problems with implementation, the legislature can easily fix it with legislation. If you really support legalization, support this legalization now in order to shift the conversation from prohibition to legalization.
The second excuse has its foundation in typical chickenshittery of the Democratic Party: by running away from the base and towards the mushy middle in fear of “political independents,” the party sacrifices its core beliefs for voters who might only marginally support the party’s platform. Instead, if the party votes to endorse legalization, you can flip that dynamic on its head. The CDP’s support for Prop 19 could lead to a new era of the Obama model of turning out new voters. By turning out new, young voters excited about marijuana legalization, you will inevitably drive more votes to Democratic candidates across the state.
Indeed, marijuana legalization may be the only hope for Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer.
The choice should be clear for the California Democratic Party. If the party votes to endorse Prop 19 and marijuana legalization, the state and the party can only gain from its benefits. If the party votes against endorsing Prop 19, it is embracing the same failed strategy of abandoning the base for the “political center,” and will have only itself to blame if its candidates lose in November.
30 Comments
The Scarlet “T”
Yeah, California Dems, go ahead and endorse this idiotic proposal. Then stand there looking stupid when you get savaged in November.
Can the Dems possibly be that stupid?
The Dems should endorse Prop 19 and clearly state the reasons why. The economic help to Ca should be a vote getter.
Possesion of pot for personal use should be legal. Selling it should not. Legalizing it will encourage use and make the state dependent on drug use for funds.
How about high lighting the savings of not locking up a stoner , that harmed no one,at the cost of about $25,000 a year and taking them out of the workers pool that pays all kinds of taxes.
How many are locked up in California for simple possession times the cost of locking them up and you start to really drive the economy again.
There are so many reasons to support California Proposition 19 that we sometime forget some of them. A YES vote on Prop 19 will have the following benefits:
Reduce violence and crime
Reduce racially biased arrests
Generate $1.2B to $1.4B in taxes
Create 60,000 to 110,000 jobs
Reduce police corruption
Increase respect for police and the law
Free police to focus on property and violent crimes
Reduce prison costs and prison overcrowding
Expand California economy by $16 to $23 billion
Reduce drug cartels’ revenue
Reduce environmental damage from illegal grows
Allow adults to choose a safer alternative to alcohol
To read the studies documenting these outcomes, and to learn more about Prop 19, please visit yes19.org
I am very much in favor of Prop 19. I’m tired of all this throwing people in jail for possession. Would rather have the money spent on schools, roads, etc.
You’re absolutely correct. It would require courage, brains, and clarity of purpose. It’s been so long since I’ve seen that in the ruling class that I’m not holding my breath. Once upon a time union support for the initiative might have swayed Dems but nowadays they seem happy to piss all over unions.
Hope springs eternal, though…
Political cowards Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer: too scared to actually take a progressive stand on decriminalizing pot. Pooh. Marijuana was criminalized back in the 1930s because racist white folks did not like to see black jazz musicians smoking pot, getting high and getting some cute white girlfriends. Social prejudice. Time to give up our endless stupid expensive wars on drug users, Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis and the nature of the Gulf of Mexico…
Blue Texan’s regularly scheduled post is ready: Other Than Photographs, Lots of Objective Polling, and Public Statements by Their Leaders — There’s Absolutely No Evidence Tea Parties are Racist
Scools and roads, more like unimployment.
Someone please just tell me why alcohol is so much less harmful than marijuana that the former should reamin legal and the latter il-. Tell me why 40 years of marijuana prohibition have been such a success that we must continue this policy. Tell me what the great harm that marijuana legalization is going to cause. Or rather, what is the harm that will continue, given that so many people are smoking it already.
Here you go:
Cost/Benefit of America’s Favorite Drugs
Should we make producing beer illegal to. It is a big source of Cal taxes.
Well,
Clearly, if the measure’s content was supported by the political establishment, as this article proposes, it would have been legislated already. That’s the whole purpose for the initiative.
We in Oregon reside in the first state to adopt the initiative.
There will prolly be a measure here in Nov to set up dispensaries, as an amendment to the medical marijana law, on which Oregonians voted TWICE, in favor. Of course, all the puritans in the poli establishment have come out against it, even though Oregon, by initiative, was the first state to decrim personal possession of pot.
Support of any kind of drug legalization, even medical use, is still tantamount to political suicide in puritan America. Even tho I’m a recovering addict, and no longer do pot or any other drug, including alcohol, I’m still rooting for the initiative. It’s way past time to legalize it, not criticize it. Tax it, too. Let’s end the hypocrisy.
It’s eighty years. Marijuana was made illegal back in the early 1930s
Actually, if you refer to the book “The Emperor Has No Clothes”, the historic record is that the wood products/paper industry lobbied hard for criminalization, because they wanted to grow/sell wood pulp on the millions of acres of forest land they got for pennies on the dollar after homesteaders defaulted on their land claims. Hemp pulp, an annual crop, was highly competitive w/wood pulp, a long-range and slowly growing resource. The wood products industry spent millions of dollars lobbying Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Narcotics Agency, and congress, to pass the law criminalizing marijuana.
During this period, the early 1930s, there was an epidemic of opium importation into the US through New York and San Francisco. You can view old copies of the NY Times and the SF Chronicle to see articles about seizures at those ports of huge shipments coming in on ships. The addiction rates during the depression (DUH!) skyrocketed. There was a hysteria about it. That’s the origin of the film “Reefer Madness”. This hysteria contributed to the overall attitude about drug use, and unfortunately the reference about musicians, etc, is true in that context. This hysteria contributed to congress’ decision to illegalize pot.
You’re right, I was thinking of Nixon’s War on Drugs.
Here’s a doctor who agrees with me:
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_15525522?nclick_check=1
There’s apparently fairly solid evidence for medical uses of marijuana, including some evidence that some of the medically-active compounds aren’t the ones that they they thought.
Boxer and Brown will want to do the politically cowardly thing that also is policy stupidity. Whether they can get the E-Comm to go along is something else entirely.
“Unions are already starting to organize employees of dispensaries”
If CA had any sense they’d keep the unions out of this whole thing.
Frankly, the most harmful drugs out there are those prescribed by the medical prof and advertised incessantly on your tv machine. Addiction to prescription meds is at an all-time high (cough cough) in this nation, but it’s not tracked as such, and it wouldn’t “do” to disuss it much bc BigPhARMA wouldn’t like it, now would they?
It’s a waste of money to criminalize marijuana. The drain on the judicial and prison system is just stupid, but conservatives, who whine & cry endlessly about their taxes, have total blinders on about pot.
Big PhARMA has had it’s hooks in on maintaining the criminalization of pot bc they are also afraid of it (much like the wood-pulp industry some decades ago). Big PhARMA sees it as cheap competition, and they cannot patent it and make big buck$$ out of it, so they don’t want the peons to have legal access to it.
Yes, there are issues with legalizing it, but not any worse than legalizing alcohol and tobacco. If anything, pot is much less addictive and the medical issues much less dangerous than with either alcohol or tobacco. And finally: unlike alcohol and tobacco, it’s just soooo much easier to grow your own weed and smoke it. So, in the end, there’s this giant worry from Big Alcohol and Tobacco that they’ll lose customers to free weed.
Follow the money. There’s nothing stupid at all abut legalizing it, and I happen to know quie a few conservatives in CA who will be voting in favor of Prop 19.
If I were a Californian I would vote yes on legalization and disregard the politicians on the ballot. I’m down to state and local issues, let the monied interests have the rest.
So……Democrats, what r we to do? We can, wring or hands and vote to continue down the road we’ve been on since the “war on drugs” was “declared” or we can vote to let our own citizens grow marijuana or we can continue just having it grown here by employees of the Mexican drug cartels. Seems like a no brainer to me. Our citizens…..in our country contributing to our economy. And it can be taxed just like anything else we legally smoke and hopefully regulated better than what were smoking now…..Duhh!!!
It’s unbelievable that anyone would favor continued prohibition of a useful herbal including criminalization of people for having some of this herb. It is sad that so many people continue to fall for this awful travesty against human rights and civil liberties and think they are somehow upholding “morals”.
Cannabis is non-toxic and non-addictive. Why shouldn’t the Democrats do the right thing and support the end of prohibition of cannabis? The continued prohibition of cannabis is so stupid.
It should be interesting to see if the Democrats are capable of doing something different than just preserving the status quo.
The war on drugs is a fraud just like the war on terror.
Like that stops people from drinking and pot is worst somehow? PLEASE This is what happens when you have a Big Tent party.
Based on? Had your anti-union rant today?
Cha-Ching! Give that man a new car. Americans are scared of their own shadow now, whatever boogie man they want to trout out. I don’t even smoke or drink and want to see it legal because that’s just the right thing to do? The Government; this is my libertarian streak – has no right to tell you what you can do with your body, this includes assisted suicide.
Most Americans are too busy being hypocrites