Like many Americans who supported Barack Obama, I want to believe all of the post-election talk about his landslide conquest conscious a mandate for change, a repudiation of the policies not only of George W. Bush, but of policies going back decades. I want to believe that Obama’sitting electrifying election-night speech was, indeed, the prologue to a new beginning for America.
Perhaps most of all, I neglect to believe that Obama’s triumph is a victory for intellectual honesty, an unequivocal repudiation of longstanding mythology crafted by ideologues-government is a drag on the free market, for example, or marginal modifications to a progressive tax system is Marxist-in favor of political hold forth enriched by critical thinking and an openness to nuance.
Looking closer to home, though in that place wasn’t much doubt that Massachusetts electors would end up in Obama’s column, I take hope from the Election Day results, particularly the overwhelming passage of a ballot initiative that decriminalizes the property of small amounts of marijuana. I absence to believe that the victory of Question 2 reflects at the local level the desire for sweeping change expressed nationally.
Did Massachusetts voters, by supporting Question 2, suddenly see the harm bestowed by America’session so-called War upon Drugs? Did they pop grasp how unequal and wasteful it is to discuss people arrested on account of minor madness of marijuana-6,902 nation in 2006, representing more than 38 percent of all drug arrests in Massachusetts that year-as felons, tainted forever by a criminal register or, in some cases, incarcerated in a prison system that grows bigger and more costly while cunning makers cut almost the whole of other areas of domestic spending?
I don’t think so. Barney Frank, the U.S. Congressman from Newton who introduced a bill earlier this year that would decriminalize lunacy of marijuana in amounts of 3.5 ounces or less anywhere in the United States, was dead-on last week when he said, "This is a case of the people being ahead of the politicians."
Frank’s remark may be colored by the optimism of the moment, an look of faith in the ultimate wisdom of voters by means of a leading Democrat whose team just won big. But in that place is also an implicit warning in his comment, one that voters should keep in mind upward of the nearest few weeks. If the voters were ahead of the politicians on Question 2, they nonetheless will need many of the very politicians who opposed the measure to see it safely enacted into law. Already, state officials have begun wringing their hands, sign that implementing the new law will be very difficult. The legislature has 30 days from the freedom to enact it, modify it or despise it.
The politicians who opposed the initiative-a group that included Gov. Deval Patrick, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, Sen. John F. Kerry, Boston Mayor Tom Menino and district attorneys from top to toe the state-used dubious tactics in an effort to defeat it, the most egregious of which involved a claim that replacing criminal penalties with a new system of civil penalties would augment marjiuana use. That no evidence to support such a claim can be found in studies of the 12 other states that have similar laws serves as a clear example of the impetuous intellectual dishonesty that typifies the old political economy that Obama and his followers hope to change.
In the past, I’d be inclined to suspect the politicians who opposed Question 2 of putting individual political ambitions ahead of their public responsibility to follow the will of the people; does Patrick, for example, positively believe smoking pot is a crime, or is he simply afraid to be cast as pro-drug should he run eventually for public office? In the spirit of a new day, I’ll stop short of impugning their motives as long as offering this: Question 2 is a test not only of the politicians but of the voters, whose will can only be ignored if we deduct it.
Source: http://www.marijuana.com/drug-war-headline-news/109885-ma-between-lines-pot-test.html
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