Last week, various state and local agencies, the U.S. Marshalls and this University wasted an enormous amount of scarce resources in an apparently successful attempt to damage the lives of 74 of our fellow citizens (61 of them students) for no good reason.
In this way, they betrayed the various public trusts, which are the nominal reasons for their employment. For this they will receive their 30 pieces of silver in the ongoing War on Drug Users, assuming the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force can keep track of it. The overtime checks will be signed, and the officers are already patting themselves on the backs.
If I had been tasked with drug enforcement in Alabama, and had been caught spending any time on something other than catching meth cooks, I would die of the shame. I do not mean this glibly. I would have a difficult time showing my face in public.
But somehow, rather than being wracked with remorse for burning truckloads of taxpayer money in pursuit of harmless users of a relatively benign drug, our leaders are proud.
The chief of the Tuscaloosa Police Department, Steven Anderson, reinforced unfortunate stereotypes about Alabama law enforcement’s critical thinking skills by affirming “it is still illegal to possess [marijuana], sell it, distribute it in the state of Alabama. Therefore, it is against the law. We are still going to enforce the law, no matter how harmless people think it is.”
Littering is also illegal in this state, and yet people do it all the time. You can’t walk outside in our fair city without stepping on a cigarette butt. The police could spend their time staking out public places, waiting for litter bugs, and citing them as soon as they throw a cigarette to the ground. They don’t do this because they are busy. Law enforcement has limited resources, and chooses which crimes are worth pursuing and which are not.
Thus, it is surreal to hear Mr. Anderson tell us that something is illegal, and therefore multiple law enforcement agencies needed to hire criminal informants in a two month coordinated effort to pursue people violating a specific statute. “It is illegal, so it must be stopped,” sounds more like the catchphrase of an obsessive-compulsive vigilante than the utterance of a professional.
UA President and temperance movement throwback Judy Bonner crowed about the University’s attempts to protect students from “choices about substance abuse that can have such a significant and negative impact on their lives and others, including their families, their friends, other students and this University.” I copied and pasted that from the email, lest I be accused of misquoting her.
This ignores the obvious fact that the major negative impacts from marijuana are precisely the arrest and subsequent penalization of average citizens, not the direct effects of the drug. Young people, in college or not, tend to experiment. We arbitrarily burden some of those experimenters with criminal records.
Others, both randomly and in nefarious systematic ways, walk away with no adverse consequences. The result is a country in which the last three Presidents have all admitted to marijuana use, while a significant proportion of the adult population is incarcerated for the same crime, and many more face significant legal and professional consequences.
Instead of helping to perpetuate this incredibly stupid system, the University should drop its zero-tolerance policy, and do what’s right for its students. The Task Force has been increasing its number of cases, without producing many more defendants, presumably because they can ruin people’s lives with drug arrests even without getting convictions. Rather than rewarding the police for shoddy work, the University should take no action to deprive these students of their educations.
Some of you are planning to protest, but I sense that the message might be vague. While I support full legalization of marijuana, and as a Colorado native, I got to vote for such a measure last year, I am doubtful that that will soon be accomplished in Alabama. Instead, let your rallying cry be to protect your fellow students from the harm caused by overzealous and senseless enforcement of a silly law.
Brad Erthal is a doctoral student in economics. His column runs on Tuesdays.
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