You Don’t Understand the Difference Between Decriminalizing and Legalizing, Do You?

Activist and cultivator Todd McCormick discusses the difference between legalization and decriminalization with the late, great Jack Herer.

“My first question was; “How do you legalize marijuana?”

Jack answered with a single word: “Democracy.”

My second question was; “Why legalize instead of just decriminalizing?”

Jack got pissed; “You don’t understand the difference between those two terms do you?”

Clearly I did not, so I apologized for my lack of knowledge and I asked; “What’s the difference?”

Jack went on to tell me that decriminalization leaves the cops in charge of who they harass and who they let walk because it allows for selective prosecution by bigoted cops.’’ - Todd McCormick

“Decriminalization only quasi-legalizes the end user for a small amount of cannabis. Producers, distributors and people who make hash, would all be felons under decriminalization and their activities would still be illegal. Retail stores, testing, quality control, and all production would all still be completely illegal. Even research into how cannabis can help cancer or AIDS patients would be completely illegal. While explaining this, Jack would get angry and tell me that cannabis should have never been criminalized in the first place and that we should never settle for decriminalization because we would all still be living under the oppression of bad laws.

Legalization makes all aspects from production to testing to distribution completely legal for people to engage in. Under most legalization, you have a legal right to grow cannabis at home and to give some to your sick friend or to give some to your friend at their wedding as a gift.”

I got it, Jack made clear sense and he realized that I had got the point, he smiled and he made me take an oath that I would fight for legalization until cannabis was legal.

In 1994, there was only one place in California where a medical patient could get medical cannabis and that was from Dennis Peron at the Cannabis Buyers Club in San Francisco. The San Francisco police would raid the SF CBC multiple times to try to shut it down and the oppression was incredible. Dennis would be successful in pushing a medical necessity defense initiative in 1996 that became known as proposition 215 and then California law; 11362.5 after it passed. 

In the 1990s in California, close to 20,000 people were being arrested each year for marijuana possession, by 2009 that number would climb to almost 80,000 people arrested annually, and even then, that would not be close to the over 100,000 California citizens being arrested during each of the years 1972 and 1973. 

Between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million people arrested for marijuana possession in the United States, which accounts to one arrest every 37 seconds and billions of dollars wasted by pushing them through the criminal justice system. History has also shown us that the laws against cannabis were racist from their inception. People of color get arrested for cannabis in some places at four times the rate of white people. 

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