the message that made marijuana legal in colorado!

Updated and

Expanded Edition

foreword by Norm Stamper, former Chief of the Seattle Police Department

Foreword

When you pick up a book touting marijuana as a safer recreational alternative to alcohol, I imagine the last thing you are expecting is a foreword from the former chief of police of a major U.S. city. Well, if youre surprised, I guess we are off to a good start. You see, the goal of this bookand the purpose of this forewordis to encourage you (fan and foe alike) to reassess the way you think about marijuana. In pages that follow, you will find objective comparisons of marijuana and alcohol. You will learn about the ways in which the federal government and other influential institutions have maintained marijuana prohibition while simultaneously conspiring to turn public opinion against its use. And you will be exposed to a plethora of statistics quantifying the damage caused by alcohol use in our society. Steve, Paul, and Mason have done a terrific job of presenting all of this information in an objective, compelling, and thoughtful manner. I am certain, whatever you may think about marijuana laws at this moment, that you will look at the issue differently by the time you reach the final chapter. Encouraging individuals to see the marijuana issue from a new perspective is precisely what happened in Colorado between 2005 and 2012. During those years, the citizens of the state were constantly exposed to the marijuana is safer message and the facts that support it through an aggressive and focused public education campaign led by Mason and the organization he cofounded, Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER). As you will see in
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chapters 10 and 11, this simple airing of the truth literally helped change the course of history. But before you dive into this bookwhich I truly couldnt put down the first time I read itId like to give you an insiders perspective on the question of marijuana versus alcohol. By insider, I refer to my decades of law enforcement experience, during which time I witnessed firsthand how these two substances affect consumers, their families, and public safety overall. As you can imagine, those of us who have served our communities as officers of the law have encountered alcohol and marijuana users on a frequent if not daily basis, and we know all too well how often one of these two substances is associated with violent and aggressive behavior. In all my years on the streets, it was an extremely rare occasion to have a night go by without an alcohol-related incident. More often than not, there were multiple alcohol-related calls during a shift. I became accustomed to the pattern (and the odor). If I was called to a part of town with a concentration of bars or to the local university, I could expect to be greeted by one or more drunks, flexing their beer muscles, either in the throes of a fight or looking to start one. Sadly, the same was often true when I received a domestic abuse call. More often than not, these conflictsmany having erupted into physical violencewere fueled by one or both participants having overindulged in alcohol. In case you might be thinking my observations are unique, let me share the results of some informal research I have conducted on my own. Since my retirement from active duty, out of a general interest in this subject, Ive frequently asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and Canada) two questions. First: Whens the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (And by this I mean marijuana only, not pot plus a sixpack or fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause; they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask, Whens the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look
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at their watches. Its telling that the booze question is answered in terms of hours, not days or weeks. The plain and simple truth is that alcohol fuels violent behavior and marijuana does not. As described in great detail in chapter 7, alcohol contributes to literally millions of acts of violence in the United States each year. It is a major contributing factor to crimes like domestic violence, sexual assault, and homicide. Marijuana use, on the other hand, is absent in that regard from both crime reports and the scientific literature. There is simply no causal link to be found. As one who has been entrusted with maintaining the publics safety, I strongly believeand most people agreethat our laws should punish people who do harm to others. This is true whether we are talking about violent crimes like murder and assault or nonviolent crimes like shoplifting or insider trading. It is also appropriate to punish other behavior that threatens public safety, such as speeding or driving through red lights. All of these laws are clearly designed to protect our citizens. But by banning the use of marijuana and punishing individuals who merely possess the substance, it is difficult to see what harm we are trying to prevent. It bears repeating: From my own work and the experiences of other members of the law enforcement community, it is abundantly clear that marijuana is rarely, if ever, the cause of harmfully disruptive or violent behavior. In fact, I would go so far as to say that marijuana use often helps to tamp down tensions where they otherwise might exist. That marijuana causes very little social harm is reason enough in a free society to legalize it for adults. But as Steve, Paul, and Mason so brilliantly demonstrate in this book, an even more persuasive reason is that by prohibiting marijuana we are steering people toward a substance that far too many people already abuse, namely alcohol. Can marijuana be abused? Of course. But, as this book makes clear, it is a much safer product for social and recreational use than alcohol. Where is the logic, then, in allowing adults to use
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alcohol but arresting them and branding them as criminals if they choose to use marijuana instead? Let me be clear. The problem does not lie with law enforcement officials. Your police officers take an oath to uphold the law and cannot simply turn their backs when they see marijuana statutes violated. It is therefore up to us to change the laws, as the voters in Colorado and Washington state did last November. We must replace the current system of prohibition with new laws that permit and regulate the sale of marijuana, an excellent framework for which is provided in this extraordinary book. Read it, and youll agree it is time we stop driving the American people to drink. Instead, we should simply and logically allow them to use a safer alternative, if that is what they prefer. Norm Stamper March 2013

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