Prop 19 falls… but with 46% of the vote

Yesterday’s mid-term elections in the United States saw the whole of the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate, and various state legislatures up at the polls. The big story has been the Republicans taking control of the House, and a number of high profile victories for the crazy far-right conspiracy theorists that make up the Tea Party. Elsewhere, the Democrats have retained slim control of the Senate. Widespread disillusionment with Obama’s failure to deliver the ‘chaaaange’ he’d promised, alongside a radicalisation of the Republican grassroots through the Tea Party, is largely being blamed.

The exception to this right-wing tide sweeping America seems to have been California, where the Democrats held onto both their Senate seats, and gained the Governorship back from the GOP (The Governator RIP). In California, however, there was another election going on which has been the subject of much attention over the past few months, since it qualified to get on the ballot back in March. This was Proposition 19, a proposal to legalise, tax and regulate the manufacture and use of cannabis.

Unfortunately, Prop 19 fell yesterday, but it was a close run battle, with 46.3% – nearly 3.3 million – voters favouring legalisation, and 53.8% against. The bill had attracted widespread support, backed by a number of high profile former police chiefs, medical professionals, district attorneys, trade unions, politicians from all ends of the spectrum, and even the guy who invented Gmail. But lining up on the other side was an equally high number of police chiefs, politicians, big business, nearly every newspaper in the state, and Arnie himself. The state attorney general had also vowed to use the full force of federal authority to crack down on the legalisation.

The opposition to Prop 19 ran a ridiculous scaremongering campaign, claiming that if it passed that the state’s entire workforce, from school bus drivers to teachers, would suddenly be incapacitated by pot, that streets would be flooded with ‘marijuana advertisements’ and that the proposals are a ‘jumbled, legal nightmare’. Much unlike current drugs laws then!

Although the vote was lost, Prop 19 campaigners are heartened by the huge support that they did gain, and have succeeded in bringing arguments against drug prohibition into the mainstream. Cannabis use is already a huge grey area in the state, where there’s a thriving medical marijuana business. But there’s still tens of thousands of arrests relating to cannabis every year – 78,000 in 2008. It’s particularly notable that the legalise campaign received big support from black civil rights organisations like the NAACP – drug prohibition is a civil rights issue, with the arrest figures speaking for themselves: in LA, 10% of the population is black, but are 30% of cannabis-related arrests.

California borders on part of Mexico, where the drug war continues to bring daily death and destruction to millions of peoples lives. A new approach is needed, and although the proposition fell, it was nonetheless an important step forward in the fight to bring an end to the madness of global drugs prohibition.

California: where retired police officers do TV adverts for legalising weed