Earlier this month,\u00a0video footage of police in Bolivar, Missouri searching the hospital room and possessions of a cancer patient for cannabis \u2014 cannabis that turned out not to exist \u2014 went viral, and did so for a few reasons.<\/p>\n
There was the\u00a0spectacle<\/a>\u00a0itself: Three uniformed and armed police officers, in a town with a violent crime rate higher than the state average, not only bothering to respond to someone calling them reporting a weed smell, but actually going through with the search. This wasn\u2019t going through the motions; they were\u00a0trying\u00a0<\/em>to find weed that, like Saddam\u2019s WMDs, was not there.<\/p>\n Then there was the\u00a0familiarity\u00a0of the spectacle. Turns out police rifling through your stuff looking for something they can ring you up on \u2014 a humiliation, an indignity, an abuse of power and, quite often, a colossal waste of time \u2014 is something people can relate to.<\/p>\n In the Bolivar case, a hospital security guard phoning police to report a marijuana smell triggered a search. In other states, police need only believe they smell cannabis in order for a warrant-less search to become legal,\u00a0a standard\u00a0upheld recently<\/a>\u00a0by the Kansas Supreme Court.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The obvious preventative measure is to legalize marijuana,\u00a0but as the Cato Institute recently\u00a0pointed out<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 yes, the Koch brothers\u2019 libertarian think-tank \u2014 the effects of marijuana legalization are felt in instances even when marijuana is not involved. There is a strong case to be made for legalizing cannabis as a way to rebuild trust in police, who in turn should have an easier time doing their jobs.<\/p>\n As data\u00a0crunched by the Stanford Open Policing Project demonstrated<\/a>, highway searches of all kinds plummeted in Washington and Colorado after voters in those states legalized marijuana.<\/p>\n The takeaway is that marijuana remains a \u201cmajor justification used by police to stop motorists,\u201d as NBC News observed. This implies the presence of cannabis is a pretext for police to search a vehicle or an individual, be the cannabis real, perceived or applied later as post-facto justification.<\/p>\n That conclusion \u2014 search now, say you believed there was marijuana present later \u2014 is not likely to make police watchdogs any happier. Nor will the conduct in Bolivar.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the utility of marijuana legalization as a broad\u00a0social justice<\/a>\u00a0tool can and should regularly feature in the marijuana legalization debate, even in a way beyond righting the wrongs of the drug war,\u00a0creating jobs<\/a>, or raising tax revenue.<\/p>\n Because not only does fewer pretext for searches keep police honest, it makes their jobs easier.<\/p>\n \u201cSearches where you don\u2019t find something are really negative towards a community,\u201d Jack McDevitt, director of the Northeastern University Institute on Race and Justice, told NBC News. \u201cHave a police officer search your car is really like, \u2018Why are they doing this to me?\u2019 And you get more pissed off. If you\u2019re trying to do relationship building, it\u2019s not a good thing to do a lot of searches.\u201d<\/p>\n Police do seem to know this, even if they are slow to admit or to adjust. Marijuana legalization \u201cwill change the way we do our job,\u201d James Batelli, chief of police in the college town of Mahwah, New Jersey,\u00a0told NorthJersey.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is ample evidence that the public continues to be annoyed and alienated at overzealous police. Evidence of just how\u00a0popular\u00a0marijuana remains as a pretext for police to conduct searches can be seen in Ohio highways leading to Michigan, where some patients accuse cops of snaring them in roadside \u201cweed traps.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That, in turn, is\u00a0compelling\u00a0a state lawmaker<\/a>\u00a0to introduce legislation decriminalization possession of small amounts of cannabis for all adults.<\/p>\n It is true that quantifiably unjust police practices do not require marijuana to be legalized in order to end. After all, it was a series of lawsuits that ended New York\u2019s notorious practice of \u201cstop and frisk,\u201d in which police had near-free reign to detain and search mostly young men and boys of color,\u00a0nearly 90 percent<\/a>\u00a0of whom were completely innocent of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n But, as the episodes above demonstrate, it helps.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, have you ever been stopped and searched by the police?<\/p>\n The post How Marijuana Legalization Keeps Law Enforcement Honest<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month,\u00a0video footage of police in Bolivar, Missouri searching the hospital room and possessions of a cancer patient for cannabis \u2014 cannabis that turned out not to exist \u2014 went viral, and did so for a few reasons. There was the\u00a0spectacle\u00a0itself: Three uniformed and armed police officers, in aContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,1574,119,6755,687,1593,9501,97],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33930"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33931,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33930\/revisions\/33931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Beyond the War on Drugs?<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: How Marijuana Legalization Keeps Law Enforcement Honest<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"