Source: The University of New Mexico | New Mexico Daily Lobo
Website:
http://dailylobo.unm.edu/ Author:
Angela Williams
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Gov. Gary Johnson discussed plans to
push drug
legalization on a national level while speaking to the New Mexico
Chapter of
the Humanist Society Saturday at the University of New Mexico Law
School.
Johnson said he presented his stance on drug legalization to the
Western
Governors Association during one of its meetings and it was met
favorably.
He said he presented it to the eight governors and every governor
in the
room said they would reconsider their drug policies.
He said
within a week after the governors met, Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer
distributed
a press release stating Wyoming needs to stop getting tougher
on
drugs.
"It is my hope to get this on the National Governor's
Association agenda and
make the proposal to the national governors," Johnson
said.
Johnson said he has put together a drug policy task force, with a
federal
appeals judge from Denver and health and law professionals to come up
with
different suggestions for legalizing drugs. He said he has purposely
stayed
as far away from the force so they will create concrete proposals
without
his persuasion.
Johnson outlined why he is in favor of drug
legalization during his speech.
He said he supports the legalization of
all drugs, including heroin and
cocaine.
Although Johnson had
previously backed off his stance that cocaine and
heroin should be legalized,
he pursued the subject during the meeting,
citing several statistics about
cocaine- and heroin-related deaths versus
tobacco- and alcohol-related deaths
to support his case.
He said last year, about 450,000 tobacco-related
deaths, 150,000
alcohol-related deaths and 100,000 prescription drug-related
deaths were
reported nationally. He compared those statistics, which were all
the result
of using legal, controlled substances, with the 5,000 cocaine-
and
heroin-related deaths nationwide last year.
"Now clearly, tobacco
is the boogey man in society, followed by alcohol,"
Johnson said.
He
said 1.6 million people are arrested annually for drug-related crimes,
and
added that half of those arrests are marijuana-related. He said half of
the
people arrested for marijuana-related offenses are Hispanic, making the
laws
discriminatory.
"They're the worst when it comes to blacks, who are
arrested and actually
end up in jail, relative to whites who are arrested and
end up in jail," he
said.
Johnson said after legalizing marijuana,
distinctions would be drawn between
smoking marijuana and doing harm to
others, similar to alcohol laws. He said
it should always be against the law
to smoke marijuana and drive and for
children to smoke or be sold
marijuana.
"If you're just smoking marijuana and doing no harm arguably
to anybody but
yourself, is that criminal?" he asked.
Johnson said
people want to put drug pushers in jail but they don't truly
understand who
the pushers are. He said the profile of the average pusher is
a single mother
of three children, who is selling cocaine to get extra money
to support her
own habit. He said when the mother is caught after the second
or third
offense, she is sentenced to 15 to 20 years in jail under federal
law and the
children are placed in state care.
Johnson asked whether it is so
farfetched to think that the government could
legalize drugs and actually
reduce use. He used Holland, the only country to
decriminalize marijuana, as
an example to support his theory.
He said 60 percent of the people in
Holland use drugs, and the country has
one-fourth the violent crime rate,
one-fourth the homicide rate and
one-tenth the incarceration rate as that of
the United States.
"Certainly we can argue that Holland is not the same
country at the United
States and Europeans are different than we are,"
Johnson said. "But that
argument, based on their experience, does not suggest
usage will go up."
(C) 2000 Daily Lobo