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Registered: 07/25/04 Posts: 17,504 |
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Blunt Assessment: The Need for Legal Weed in Philadelphia
March 2, 2011 - Philadelphia Weekly Outside Room 404 of the Criminal Justice Center on 13th and Filbert streets, men sitting on the long, wooden bench in the blindingly white marble hallway slide over to make room for the latecomers. On one end of the bench, a man nods off. On the other, a few guys trade stories about the “bullshit” that landed them here. In the middle, laughter and a heated debate over the Eagles and Andy Reid’s coaching skills fill time as the men wait to enter Philly’s Small Amounts of Marijuana program, the diversion court started by District Attorney Seth Williams back in June.Inside the courtroom, it’s time to get down to business. Offenders caught possessing 30 grams or less get to make a deal: Agree to pay a $200 fine and attend a three-hour treatment class and avoid going to trial and risking jail time. Since there’s no legal representation in the court, the director presiding over the process makes sure to state the rules clearly. “We will not hear testimony or the particulars of your case. Upon successful completion of this class, your record will be expunged within six months. You may pay cash or money order on the date of your class.” Most defendants nod their head in agreement and opt for the fine and treatment class. When they’re done, the offenders trickle out a few at a time, stopping to mingle; some discuss what happened inside. A little girl with a hot-pink backpack exits holding her mother’s hand. Her older brother walks beside them. The mom seems unsure about what happened inside. “This means we don’t need a lawyer, right?” she asks. A few people voice their shared suspicions about the lack of legal representation in the court. Others are just happy to be getting out of there. “I love weed,” says a smiling 20-year-old Desmont Brown as he exits the room. This isn’t the first time he’s been busted with weed, and he’s sure it isn’t going to be the last. The Germantown resident, clad in a Hugo Chavez-inspired military jacket, adds that he’s going home right now to smoke. “Marijuana is not a drug!” Brown says. “It’s weed! It’s everywhere!” The rolled-up Metro in his hand gets tighter as he waves it around to make his point. “Politicians smoke weed. Actors smoke weed. Everyone smokes weed!” Despite the outspoken opposition from offenders, the diversion program is being hailed as a success in some circles. Nearly 80 percent of the 1,636 arrests for possession of 30 grams or less between June and September 2010 were diverted to the program, putting the city on target to collect an estimated $3 million to $5 million in savings and unclogging a criminal court system that was spending a tremendous amount of resources on misdemeanor offenses. Others see the program as just another incarnation of the never-ending war on weed. “This whole thing is … just an excuse to make more arrests,” says a man donning long dreadlocks and a black leather jacket, as he exits the courtroom. What is made clear with each passing day in Room 404 is that black Philadelphians continue to represent a disproportionate number of those arrested for carrying small amounts of marijuana. Of the roughly 4,700 pot possession arrests in Philly in 2009, whites comprised an estimated 800 of the arrests. Blacks made up the overwhelming majority of the rest. To many inside the criminal justice and pro-legalization arenas, that disparity is nothing short of an ongoing conspiracy. Pot arrests, they say, are profitable—for the police, for the government and for big corporations. And a look into the policies and practices behind marijuana prohibition reveals a gully scheme in which weed culture is supported by the very agencies charged with eliminating it. The result? The increasing criminalization of just one demographic: inner-city blacks. For decades, federal studies have shown that whites consistently report higher uses of pot than blacks. Yet blacks continue to suffer disproportionately under the drug’s prohibition. In the early 2000s, Philly’s racial disparity in pot arrests was roughly 2 to 1. Today, it’s 4 to 1. As much as the issue of legalization is a focal point of American dialogue, the war on weed shows no signs of slowing down; it’s netting simple pot possession arrests more than ever before, both in Philly and across the country. In 1980, police made nearly 340,000 marijuana possession arrests in the U.S. By 2009, arrests for the same charge jumped to more than 750,000. Also in 1980, law enforcement made 63,000 marijuana trafficking (sales and distribution) arrests in the U.S. By 2009, the number had risen to 100,000. There’s no denying that busting traffickers is taking a backseat to busting pot smokers. “Police officers know that a clerk is selling marijuana out of a store, but they bust the customer because they know they always have that store to go back to,” says Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Washington D.C.-based Drug Policy Alliance. “I’m not criticizing law enforcement. It’s a criticism of their performance measures.” The Philly numbers are no different. There were over 10,000 more pot possession arrests than trafficking/sale arrests between 2000 and 2010, according to the state's crime database. And policy makers are using this same logic with regard to the number of people in treatment for marijuana “addiction.” According to a report released in December by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, treatment for marijuana abuse is on the rise nationally, with a 30 percent increase in admission rates. Pennsylvania is high on that list. This could be considered a success if there were actually more people in need of treatment. But as Harry Levine, a Queens College, N.Y., sociologist and a prominent researcher who has documented the racially charged pot arrests in New York City and California, points out, marijuana use peaked nationally around 1980 and has never again reached those levels. Which means that it’s unlikely that the growing number of people in marijuana treatment actually reflects a country struggling with increased marijuana addiction. Case in point: Philly’s pot diversion program asks you to choose between a criminal trial and a treatment class. And between June and September, according to the D.A.’s Office, 79 percent of offenders who entered the diversion program opted for treatment. There is no Door No. 3. Which would you take? “The majority of people in treatment are there because they’re forced to be there,” Piper says. “The criminal-justice system is the biggest reason people are getting treatment. It doesn’t mean they have any marijuana-related problems.” But the more arrests there are, he says, the more people in treatment there are, and the more money there is to be made by everyone—except the young people arrested and stigmatized by arrest records, which Levine says nobody can “expunge.” (The D.A.’s Office says successful completion of the class results in an expunged arrest record, but that the eradication process takes a few months. This leaves open the possibility that the information can be mined by companies that sell this information to potential employers and agencies, which can then deny a young person a job, a school loan or housing assistance). When Philly first announced the diversion court, residents and the media celebrated what they thought was a progressive move toward decriminalizing marijuana use. But Willia ms set them straight. “We are not decriminalizing marijuana—any effort like that would be one for the Legislature to undertake,” the D.A. said last April. “The diversion court is … working better for the people, as well as saving significant money for the city,” says Chris Goldstein, communications director for the Philly chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which was instrumental in getting the policy changed. “But I’d like to see us take on a serious debate about decriminalizing marijuana.” The end goal, says Goldstein, is for Philly to catch up to the rest of Pennsylvania. “It’s possible we will see the city come in line with the rest of the state, in terms of issuing tickets on the street.” But when is anyone’s guess. Since the court started, the D.A.’s Office has denied speculation that the program is in any way part of a larger effort to legalize marijuana. “We are not in the business of decriminalizing something that’s a criminal offense,” says Jodi Lobel, chief of the D.A.’s charging unit. “Our purpose, our function, is to be sure that people who are arrested for small amounts of marijuana are addressed or punished for a criminal act, but in a way that’s productive and cost-efficient and smart.” For now, state law requires that the Philadelphia Police Department continue to detain, cuff, arrest and process anyone carrying small amounts of pot. The diversion court will help offenders stay out of prison, but pot arrests will continue. Back outside Room 404, a visibly annoyed Brandon Void exits the courtroom, heading toward two friends waiting for him on the bench. Clean cut and wearing dark jeans and a dark green vest, Void looks at them, laughs and shakes his head. One of the friends gets up to look at Void’s sheet of instructions. “I don’t know, man,” Void says. “This is crazy.” The friends are eager to hear what happened, and are hanging on Void’s every word as he recounts his run-in with the cops. The 25-year-old father of two vividly recalls the Sunday night he got busted back in December. Void and his girlfriend had just left her Olney house after watching an Eagles game, and were caught off guard when five undercover narcs rolled up on them at a stop sign on Fifth and Wingohocking streets, guns drawn. The cops surrounded Void and demanded that he hand over his gun. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about? I don’t have a gun.’” No gun was discovered during the stop and search, but a small baggie of weed found in Void’s pocket was enough get him arrested. He remembers asking the cops, “You didn’t find a gun, and now you’re locking me up? For a little bit of marijuana?” Void was cuffed and taken to headquarters, where he spent 18 hours before he was given a court date and released. Void shrugs the whole thing off because the cops, he says, are a regular presence in his Logan neighborhood. “Man, they roll up twice a week.” Activists reiterate that legalizing marijuana is the only way to put an end to the disparaging cycle that continues to increase the criminalization of select pot smokers. Even some local anti-drug groups, which have historically taken a zero-tolerance policy against all illegal drugs, are shifting their view—if only slightly—on marijuana prohibition because they have acknowledged that it has done little to curb the use. “We need to try different things,” says Greg Wicks, president of the East Mt. Airy-based community group Wadsworth Concerned Neighbors Against Drugs. Though Wicks isn’t on board with legalization, he does question the effectiveness of the war on weed, and acknowledges that a simple “pot arrest can affect young people with regard to jobs and education.” He says one of the reasons for the arrest disparity is that “a lot of [black kids] are just getting caught. [Marijuana] is in the white neighborhoods also. But I see [black kids] doing it on public transportation, places where you easily get caught.” Jerry Mondesire, president of the Phildelphia NAACP and editor of the Philadelphia Sunday Sun, echoes that sentiment. He attributes the racially disparate arrests to police “acting what they see on the street.” While Mondesire says the NAACP has not taken a position on legalization, he’s clear on one thing: Black kids are getting arrested because they “[smoke weed] on the street. White kids do it in private.” But there’s a dangerous disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of marijuana use. Like Void, most of the people going through the revolving door of diversion court aren’t actually smoking weed when they’re busted. The weed is tucked away in a pocket, out of public view, and usually recovered during routine stop-and-frisks. “The single most common thing a young person is possessing is a tiny amount of marijuana,” Levine says. “But the black kids are walking around or hanging out in the low-income, high-crime neighborhoods where they live, and where the police are making most of their stop-and-searches.” Meanwhile, the white kids are hanging out in places the cops never go. And why should they? There’s money to be made in the hood. Every year, state and local law enforcement agencies across the country apply for and receive federal funding through the Byrne Formula Grant Program, created by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. These grants are awarded to “improve the functioning of the criminal justice system—with the emphasis on violent crime and serious offenders.” Solving violent crimes and busting serious offenders takes time. But low-level marijuana arrests quickly boost police productivity stats, which look good for “the chief of police [who] can go in front of City Council and tout arrest numbers,” Piper says. Of the $2 billion in Byrne grants authorized by President Obama in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Philly received $13.5 million. The city gave $3.5 million to the PPD, according to the Philadelphia Recovery Office, which says the money is going toward technology, training, nonlethal weapons and community outreach. Over the years, the Byrne funds have also paid for overtime in the PPD’s narcotics investigations, according to the office. The specific uses of this money is not available, but Levine says that when police departments file reports showing what they have produced with the federal funds, the first thing they list is the drug arrests, including the large number of misdemeanor pot-possession arrests. The Byrne funding program has been heavily criticized for years for failing to deter crime and to use the money and resources for more important criminal-justice work. Piper calls the program a huge waste of taxpayer money and is fighting hard to defund it. “If the money goes to narcotics task forces, they’ll use it to arrest low-level drug offenders. Then the feds have to pay for incarceration. The Byrne grant money that the PPD is using is going to end up costing the state far more in incarceration costs.” But it’s been a challenge to convince anyone otherwise. “This is the heart of the problem—money from the Byrne grants,” Piper says. It’s money for overtime. Money for promotions. It’s policing for profit.” Many associated with law enforcement say the funding puts pressure on police departments to make the low-level marijuana arrests. “The police are sent to make arrests, clear corners … that will never end as long as they cater to the illegal drug market,” says former cop Neill Franklin. During his 33 years on the Baltimore and Maryland state police narcotics forces, Franklin has seen the escalating war on weed first-hand, having locked up countless pot smokers, pot dealers and pot growers. Now, he’s fighting tooth and nail to keep legalization at the front of everyone’s minds. As the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (its tagline is “Cops say legalize drugs”), Franklin has penned dozens of editorials and appeared on countless talk shows calling for nothing less than strict, legalized pot regulation. He calls Philly’s diversion court is “modest reform,” and questions the rationale behind its creation. “If it makes no sense to charge, convict and sentence someone for using marijuana, why is it a police priority to arrest that person?” “Policing in America has zero opposition,” says Levine, whose research compelled the California NAACP to support Proposition 19, the now-defeated bill that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. “The system operates absolutely unanswerable to anybody whatsoever.” Operating with total freedom has allowed the war on weed to become a money-making machine for police departments. When crime is up, police get more money to fight it. When crime is down, they get more money to keep it that way. It’s a relationship where money and arrests are inextricably tied. And criminal-justice experts say that is by design. Franklin says the lack of supervision of cops on the street slowly turns good cops into bad cops. They begin to rationalize what they’re doing, and sooner or later: “‘I don’t even consider this stealing. I work hard every day dealing with these knuckleheads, and they’re making this money illegally. So I’m going to take this $2,000 to pay my water bill.’” Former PPD officer Ray Carnation agrees. “Say you got four guys doing [weed] busts,” “I can say ‘OK, you got the buyer, you got the seller, you’re the surveillance guy,’ and all of a sudden, you got four guys off the street who just easily made up a story.” “Do they make up stories? Absolutely.” Carnation, who worked as a Philadelphia police officer in the ’90s, was fired from the force in 1999 for “conduct unbecoming an officer.” What really happened was that he blew the whistle on racial discrimination within the PPD. He sued, and after years battling it out with the city in court, he won. “There isn’t a quota, but there is a quota,” says Carnation, in his thick Philly accent. “There’ll be a roll call where the captain says he wants more narcotics arrests. They don’t say, ‘You have to give me 20 tickets this month.’ They can’t do that because it might blow up in their faces. But they’ll come to you and say ‘Listen, you don’t have any narcotics arrests this month. What’s up with that?’” And because weed is the most common product in the illegal drug trade, there is always an opportunity to make an arrest. “I'm a big supporter of marijuana,” says West Philly-born rapper Tone Trump, as he and his boy Smutty blaze a sweet-smelling blunt inside a burgundy Acura parked outside the house Trump grew up in near 54th and Market streets. “It’s natural, it’s relaxing. We smoke the Gucci of weed … official fucking purple [haze].” Trump says the entire weed culture is a lose-lose situation for inner-city blacks. As the demographic most likely to be arrested for pot possession and use, they’ve become both the victims of marijuana prohibition’s policies and the target audience for the drug’s use. “That shit is a set-up,” Trump says. “Walk into any store in the hood … you’ll see cigars,” says the rapper, looking relaxed in a burgundy Phillies hat, a black T-shirt and baggy jeans. “They got strawberry and blueberry … they’re putting sexy girls and Lil Wayne on the blunt covers. They’re doing so many things to beautify weed … It’s just like when you watchin’ TV, the commercial they show you is for the demographic they think is watching. “When they put [rappers on wrappers] … they market that shit directly to these kids. If you stand in the corner store for 20 minutes, and think about what the people are buying … Blunts is the common purchase.” Trump, who was busted last year for possessing less than a gram of weed, believes nobody should be convicted for smoking weed. “We got all these legal accessories for marijuana. And then you can’t smoke it. It’s kinda hypocritical.” The hypocrisy became abundantly clear just last month, when the state Supreme Court struck down a city ban on cigars and rolling papers, saying that only the state can regulate tobacco products. The ban had quietly been in place since 2007 when Councilman Brian O’Neill pushed through the bill that would prohibit these products, but it was never enforced—the tobacco industry won an injunction almost as soon as the ink dried. The city became aware of paraphernalia in 2005 when local anti-drug activists noticed an abundance of cigars and rolling papers popping up in Sunocos and Wawas in well-to-do neighborhoods, many of which were right next to high schools, and saw this legal drug paraphernalia as a “welcome” sign to kids. But really, not a whole lot has changed since the war on weed began decades ago. The kids are still smoking. On a different day outside room 404, black men gather in the hallway near the bench to talk about legalization. An especially young-looking kid walks out, looking left, then looking right, before he chimes in. He’s younger than the rest but his feelings are the same. “It seems silly to spend all this money [criminalizing] weed,” he says. “Weed should be in the drugstore, like right next to the aspirin.” An older guy chimes in: “It’s not a drug, it’s a plant. The man upstairs put it here.” The men are alone in the hallway, but every now and then a couple lawyers pass by. They lower their voices temporarily, as if even the mention of enjoying weed will get them arrested. “If the cops can’t find a suspect, they’ll grab whoever’s outside,” one of them says. As much as the guys outside 404 love talking about weed, they love talking about the cops more. “They’ll take it out on the community.” Another says: “Yeah, and how did [the undercover narcs] get those clothes? They’re always showin’ up in different uniforms. Starbucks. Comcast. Shit!” The group erupts in loud laughter. At that moment, a sharply dressed couple walks out. They look out of place—the unofficial dress code in Room 404 is a hoodie, jeans and sneakers. The couple, who use air quotes when they talk about not living a “black” neighborhood, is split over legalization. He isn’t sure. She’s definitely against it: “It’s one thing to be against the arrests; it’s another to be for legalization.” The other men look at her but don’t comment. They clearly don’t see a difference. As they talk, more men exit—instructions in hand—and join in. They don’t know each other, but in way, they do. They’re brothers in the war on weed.
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Registered: 03/03/10 Posts: 10,783 Loc: above the smog l Last seen: 1 year, 2 months |
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good article veggie
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Duke of Nuts Registered: 11/29/10 Posts: 281 Loc: Mountain State Last seen: 11 years, 11 hours |
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why did they have to turn this into a black and white thing? i dont think the cops in Philly are gonna stop a car with two white kids and 2 blacks kids and just take the black kids. marijuana prohabition affects us all. ive been to cannabis intervention classes probably more than most people. im just sayin maybe we shouldnt look at it as a black/white problem but a countries policy problem
-------------------- Its not always about the harvest Sometimes, the hunt is just as good
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Working on it Registered: 10/07/08 Posts: 6,745 Last seen: 6 years, 11 months |
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Quote: Race, ethnicity, whatever you want to call it; skin color/ "perceived race" plays a large part in arrests and convictions in these United States of America.
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Outside Room 404 of the Criminal Justice Center on 13th and Filbert streets, men sitting on the long, wooden bench in the blindingly white marble hallway slide over to make room for the latecomers. On one end of the bench, a man nods off. On the other, a few guys trade stories about the “bullshit” that landed them here. In the middle, laughter and a heated debate over the Eagles and Andy Reid’s coaching skills fill time as the men wait to enter Philly’s Small Amounts of Marijuana program, the diversion court started by District Attorney Seth Williams back in June.
