Reefer Reform

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

October 2 -- The war on drugs came down to the grassroots level when supporters of Measure Y squared off against local police on the enforcement of marijuana laws in Santa Monica in a debate on CityTV.

Comparing current drug laws to the Prohibition laws of the 1920’s, advocates of the proposed municipal code ordinance that would make adult personal use of marijuana the police’s lowest enforcement policy see their campaign as part of a larger response to a national policy they call “indefensible.”

“Over the last 35 years, the United States has been involved in one of the most massive public policy failures in our history. It’s called the war on drugs,” said Bill Zimmerman, chairman of Americans for Medical Rights, a medical marijuana lobbying group based in Santa Monica.

The federal government has spent “billions of dollars, jailed millions of people, and at the end of 35 years, we find more drugs in circulation in our society,” Zimmerman said.

But the police officers who defended Santa Monica’s current drug enforcement policy kept their vision closer to home.

Calling the proposed ordinance “a solution looking for a problem,” Sergeant Jay Trisler, chairman of the Santa Monica Police Officers Association, said that citations for adult personal use of marijuana are already a low priority, and, unless convicted of additional offenses, violators get off easily with a citation and a $100 fine.

Further, Trisler said that codifying the priority below “barking dog calls” and report calls -- in which officers gather information but there’s no crime in progress -- will interfere with the department’s ability to guarantee the “quality of life” that Santa Monica residents have come to expect.

The debate bounced back and forth, between global policy issues such as racism and laws in Seattle and Oakland to the nitty-gritty of actual cases in which Santa Monica Police used neighbors’ calls about suspicious smells to zero in on felons.

Michael Gray, author of “Drug Crazy,” an indictment of the federal government’s war on drugs, challenged Sergeant Mohamed Marhaba of the Police Activies League -- a center that works with local at-risk youth.

“The problem, Mohamed, I think, is the racial component,” said Gray.

Black youth are three times as likely to be caught, four times as likely to be convicted and five times as likely to be imprisoned as white youth, although the same percentage in each group uses marijuana, he said.

“If that can be described as anything other than a race war, I don’t know how you do it,” Gray said, adding that current national and state laws give the police “the ability to arrest someone at will.”

Zimmerman added that Santa Monica’s $100 fine is just the tip of the iceberg. Students who are cited lose their federal student loans, and families can be evicted from subsidized housing if one of their members runs afoul of the marijuana laws.

“They could keep those benefits if they simply followed the law,” Marhaba shot back.

Gray and Zimmerman cited similar laws on the books in Seattle, Oakland and West Hollywood, and said they’re working out well.

“I think the make-up of this city is unique and I’m not too sure we can compare it to the other cities,” Marhaba responded.

“Crime is at an all-time low since the 1950s,” added Trisler.

“We take pride in our service orientation,” Trisler said. “Having this go down lower than a parking citation is not what the community is going to want.”

As the debate focused in on the particulars of the ordinance, both sides agreed that it would require police to respond to every other request for service before checking out suspicions of indoor pot smoking.

“I would much rather see the police department taking some of those report calls for crimes like burglary than busting some of my friends for smoking a joint in the privacy of their homes,” Zimmerman said.

But it’s not that simple, the officers rejoined. In one case, a neighbor’s complaint led to an arrest of an armed dealer who took his four-year-old niece driving with him when he made his drug sales rounds.

In another recent example, complaints by business owners led to the discovery of 175 pounds of marijuana, grown hydroponically in a storage facility across the street from a public school.

Had the officers had to wait while they responded to “barking dog” calls, the evidence might no longer have been there, they said.

Both sides went back and forth on the issue -- proponents of the ordinance saying Measure Y would in no way interfere with making such arrests, while opponents argued that it would.

As the argument went on, it went through a logical warp in which the officers said that no matter what, they’d still cite violators of the state’s marijuana laws, even if they couldn’t respond as quickly as they’d like, while the measure’s advocates claimed that ultimately, it would slow down police efforts.

“This ordinance doesn’t prevent the person being arrested,” Tisler said. “All it does, it just makes our response a little lower.”

“But it’s going to make it less likely the person’s going to be arrested,” responded Zimmerman.

The debate wound down with competing appeals to community values.

The ordinance “will appeal more to law-abiding citizens than law-breaking citizens,” said Zimmerman.

“We don’t consider someone smoking a joint in the privacy of his home a law-breaker, and we don’t believe that most of the voters in Santa Monica consider such people law-breakers either,” he said.

Perhaps because of his job, Marhaba sees the community from a different angle.

“I don’t know that this is a message that we really want to send to our children that smoking marijuana is not a big deal,” he said. “Marijuana is not purchased from a vending machine…the drug deal is involved in a trade that is illegal.”

Measure Y “is a bad example to give to our children…a dangerous measure for our safety.”

The debate was co-sponsored by CityTV, the League of Women Voters of Santa Monica Education Fund and the Center for Governmental Studies.

CityTV is making its election programming available with prime time airings on cable channel 16, 24/7 airings on cable channel 75, video-on-demand on Time Warner Cable, and on its election websitewww.smvote.org.