Use Pot Shop Tax Money To Armor The Cops

Can this stop crook bullets?

There were three victims in the marijuana section of the War On Drugs.

One was the smoker, who has been persecuted, jailed, obliged to become immersed in the black market and sometimes killed.

Victim #2 was the taxpayer. They were pouring money into a war on a substance that wasn't doing that much harm (the prohibition of marijuana did more harm than the drug itself did), eventually realizing that they never got the marauding hordes of killers or mindless zombies that the War On Drugs propaganda promised.

Victim #3? The police! They wasted a lot of time, effort and blood chasing marijuana around. They got to lock horns with the recipients of that soon-to-be-taxed drug money, and they kind of got walloped in the long-term fracas.They now have to totally revamp their Marijuana M.O. to fit the new reality imposed upon them by the will of the voters.

Victim 1 gets his payback with legal weed. There you go, Stoney, don't drop that ball.

Victim(s) 2 get their payback when marijuana gets taxed, and the money starts flowing into the coffers. This is sort of leading in to Victim 3.

I am led to believe that the cops will get some funding from marijuana sales taxes... whenever our pols stop trying to subvert the stated will of the voters and open up the marijuana shops. That money will be fed into the bureaucracy, and little will go to the cop-on-the-street. I think those street cops are owed more, and that they should get more.

I have an odd belief about policing as a task, and I'm not even sure that it is practical. Make no mistake, this is more of a Me Floating An Idea Out There article than a This Is What Must Be Done article. A few insightful comments from some of our more Blue readers might sway me mightily on this topic. Just a short bit of research on this topic shows me that cops rightfully view a non-cop going "This is what cops should do" as a special sort of fool. I just think that the idea merits mention, and I'd hate to have this forum without beating one of my favorite drums.

Anyhow, here goes...

I think that,in 100 years and maybe much less, people will look back at today's policing and say "They sent them out there in cotton shirts???? Where's the armor? Who the f*** would take that job???" It'd be like playing NFL football without a helmet, with the added variable of people shooting guns at you.

Right about when they start saying "What brave people they must have been," someone slides a cop-casualty list from our era into the mix. Then, instead of getting amazed at the cop, a thinking man would probably start to get angry at the people who sent them out into the streets in a blouse.

I was an advocate for marijuana reform laws in this state, and based that advocacy on Getting Modern. In the interest of being Post-Modern, I am an advocate for heavily armoring police. I have trouble seeing the other side of the issue, aside from very valid "It's harder to chase people in plate mail" arguments.

I don't put a lot of stock in They'll Be Too Intimidating complaints. I got popped in Hyannis just the other day, and the cop who did it- a very nice guy, by the way- was wearing a gun, a nightstick/tonfa thingy, a can of pepper spray, prob'bly had a Tazer handy, had a shotgun in the car, had a radio that he could summon a gang o' cops with and a uniform that would establish him instantly as the good guy to any passerby who might decide to intervene if we started fighting.

I'm always polite when I get pulled over, so it never came to that. If we did fight, he's a battle-tested cop and I'm some geek journalist... and if he didn't kick my ass himself, his fellow officers would eventually have gotten the better of me.

The point I'm making here is that we're already very used to having police interacting with us who are capable of inflicting great harm upon us. Armoring cops would make them no more dangerous. The outcome of my Me Interacting With The Barnstable Police story is going to have the same Winner almost every time, and the only question is how difficult I make it.

That sword cuts both ways. If I waited until he was out of the car and came out shooting... that cop would have had nothing between him and the Great Answer except his jersey, his quick-draw skills and whatever good luck he'd accumulated during his tenure on this third stone from the sun.

As near as I can tell, the present scenario paints a bleak picture of "Well, that cop will die, but we'll catch the shooter eventually." Military historians call that strategy "attrition," and it is almost always bloody when it is put into practice.

I think that's wrong, that it's a problem, and that we should solve it immediately.

Yes, cynical reader, there is a self-centered element of "Efforts to re-criminalize marijuana will take away armor funding, thus putting bullets into cops, thus making re-criminalizing it more difficult with voters" to my motivation for this article. There is also an element of "towns that refuse to have marijuana shops will have cops who are far less safer than the cops in towns with shops are." I don't feel badly about this, as I like to have my ass covered... like Napoleon once said, "Kneel before Popes, as long as their hands are tied."

The questions I have involve:

1) Can They Police Effectively When Heavily Armored?

 and

2) How To Pay For It?

I don't know the answer to the first one, although I may rephrase it as How Heavily Armored Can They Be Without Sacrificing Effectiveness, and might even sneak "Much" in front of "Effectiveness." That's a question to be solved by cops, and I'd be wasting your time and mine if I started hacking away at it with whatever knowledge I could glean off of the Wikipedia. Feel free to use our Comments feature to weigh in on the matter.

If armored cops are too intimidating to operate effectively, make the armor pink or whatever color the shrinks say is least threatening. I wouldn't worry about a loss of respect. The line to laugh at the badass, invulnerable pink guy with all the weaponry starts at the left.... and, by Golly, it looks like you're the first guy in it!

I think that an invulnerable cop would be a friendlier cop. Imagine how much calmer Ferguson, MO would have been if Michael Brown punched a cop, broke his hand on the armor, and- instead of shooting him- the cop just laughed and said "Nice try, son.... now, weren't you 'bout to go back and pay the little Korean store owner guy for those blunt wraps?"

I have an idea for the second question. Why not use the sales tax money from the legalization of marijuana to drape cops in armor?

Sure, there will be a lot of hands reaching out for that money. Some will have good reasons of their own. Hospitals, while not exactly swarmed with weed OD cases, still had to sew up many people who got shot out in the prohibition-birthed black market. Schools had disinterested. distracted stoners long before Jeff Spicoli made an archetype out of it. Community groups might argue that a new teen center would help keep kids off the drugs.

They can all get in line. I think that we should armor cops with that money before anyone else gets a nickel of it. They earned their drug-funded armor just as much as the formerly persecuted stoner earned his legal weed.

It's funny, because I was on the other side of the drug war from the cops for most of my life. Now, with the battle won, I feel nothing but magnanimity. Much like General Grant, I have no desire to break their sword over my knee. Much like General Chamberlain, I view armoring cops with marijuana money as "honor meeting honor."

I can think of no better ending to the Marijuana part of the drug war than this scenario:

I'm walking down Main Street. My weed falls out of my pocket, and I fail to notice it. An invulnerable policeman sees it, and goes "Hey, Buddha.... you dropped your marijuana." I pick it up, pocket it, and say "Thank you, officer." The cop smiles (I don't see the smile, because he has a helmet on that could stop a carbine shot, but I sense it), pats his impregnable body armor, and just says "No... thank YOU."

The Great Massachusetts Smokeout

Marijuana becomes legal in Massachusetts at 12:00 AM on December 15th. The persecution is (almost) over.

The legalization of marijuana in Massachusetts is a wonderful thing. In one vote, we opened up a powerful new revenue stream, dealt a death blow to the black market, decriminalized hundreds of thousands of our citizens, found a lucrative new use for every town with an empty storefront in their business districts and freed police up to pursue actual dangerous criminal activity.

We can kick all that around some other time. What we are here to discuss today is the Great Massachusetts Smoke Show.

The Great Massachusetts Smoke Show (aka The Great Massachusetts Smokeout) is an underground, grassroots celebration of marijuana legalization in Massachusetts. As important as it is, it should hardly be something anyone would notice. It should hurt no one at all, and should have zero in-your-face mean spirit to it.

The basics are that, at 4:20 PM, any marijuana smoker in Massachusetts should drop whatever they're doing and have a nice, legal smoke.

It's a distant cousin of the Boston Tea Party, but it is much more of an end zone dance than an act of somewhat civil disobedience. 4:20 PM smokes on December 15th may also become an annual celebration among the Blessed.

"4:20 PM" and "4/20" are sweeping terms used to describe marijuana activity, based on some California school where the kids would meet at 4:20 PM (after afternoon classes) and have a smoke. The use of the term is now prominent enough that there was no runner-up when a start time for the Great Massachusetts Smoke Show was being discussed.

The time may not work for everyone. I don't expect that a surgeon in the middle of a surgery should stop, say "Hold this vein shut, Nurse," and then go outside to get high at 4:20 PM. A teacher in a class or a preacher in a mass would also e good examples of people who can't observe the ceremony because of job-related reasons.

Other than that, you have no excuse. The late afternoon kickoff time means that someone with no weed has sufficient enough time to get somewhere Kind for the ceremony.

We ask you to remember that smoking marijuana in public is still illegal, and doing so- even at 4:20 PM on December 15th- gives any policeman who may not agree with the decision to legalize an opportunity to teach some stoner a little lesson in Applicable Law.

There are rumors that NASA are aiming some satellites at Massachusetts for a 4:20 PM flyover, and expect to get pictures of pot smoke rising from Massachusetts akin to those seen when Quebec is having a forest fire.

Employers are expected to deal with the GMSS on a business-by-business basis.

The hashtag #GreatMassachusettsSmokeShow is trending.

Get Nice, folks!

Smoke envelops Bourne....

LEGALIZE!

Massachusetts voters are being asked whether or not to legalize the recreational use and sale of marijuana. You have no doubt seen the commercials from both sides.  We thought that today would be a good time to drop some knowledge on the matter.

- Marijuana is the least harmful drug out there that is used recreationally, incuding legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco.

- Alcohol, which is legal and regulated, is a far greater killer of Americans than marijuana, both suddenly (overdoses and accidents) and long-term. Alcohol kills about 15,000 Americans a year just in OUI accidents.

- Much of the fight against the end of marijuana persecution is being paid for by both Big Al (alcohol suppliers and distributors) and Little Al (bars, retail alcohol stores), in a direct effort to avoid losing market shares for their far more dangerous product to a less harmful alternative like marijuana.

- The same can also be said about Big Pharma, who are to blame for the Oxycontin plague killing our children right now.  They want the status quo, with doctors pushing their pills onto people who will get hooked and turn to heroin when their prescriptions run out... while US soldiers are dying in a mountain hell defending Afghan poppy fields.

- You are in far more danger of a drug-related death from visiting a doctor (and his/her hook-you-on-painkillers prescription pad) just once with a broken bone than you are from a lifetime spent making weekly visits to the den of even the most shadowy purveyor of black market marijuana.

- Every instant that a Massachusetts cop spends focusing on marijuana (and even in  decriminalized Massachusetts, cops spend countless hours pursuing the black market marijuana trade, and rabidly consider anything more than a sandwich bag full of the stuff to be a crime worthy of a murderer's jail time) is an instant that he/she is not pursuing far more dangerous and harmful criminal activity.

- Police are safer in a world with legalized marijuana. They will be freed from the raids which get them shot by drug dealers. They will lower their number of citizen confrontations, which also gets them (and some citizens) shot.

- While some cops will tell you that maarijuana should stay illegal, you have to remember that they have worked their whole lives as the foot soldiers in the failed War On Drugs, and consider the fact that people are voting to legalize weed as disrespect to their brave (if misdirected) efforts. It ends up as an Us vs Them scenario where it is almost impossible to expect a balanced view.

- Even then, and even with intense inter-profession pressure for law enforcement people to be anti-pot, it is sort of funny to see the main pro-marijuana commercials on TV featuring calm policemen speaking about the benefits of legalized marijuana, while the main anti-marijuana commercial is a ridiculous paranoid fantasy production.

- Note that the commercial that I speak of, the one where the sheltered soccer mom awakes to a world with legalized marijuana, is contemptible. The only scenario shown that doesn't exist already is the daughter grabbing for the edibles (from a window in a shop that she wouldn't be allowed into), and the son buying weed legally from a licensed, regulated purveyor. The increase in crime inference is a lie exposed by states where marijuana is leglized. The man shown in the commercial billowing smokestack-style clouds of smoke would most likely be doing so with weed being either legal or illegal.

- What the commercial doesn't show is Mom drinkng  bottle of wine and backing the car over the daughter, hubby drinking a 12 pack and smacking Mom, the son getting post-concussion syndrome from organized sports and becoming hooked on the pain medication that the doctors provide him, the cops- freed from pursuing harmless weed- chasing actual dangerous criminals, and the pot shop paying taxes that pour money into the schools and law enforcement apparatus of the town that they serve.

- Weed shops will take the sale of marijuana out of the hands of a drug dealer who would happily sell it to a child and put the sale of marijuana into the hands of a licensed, regulated businessman who will then diffuse tax money into the community. A child would be persona non grata in a weed shop, a potential business-wrecking failure.

- I can only speak for Buzzards Bay, but if I could take one of those several dozen empty stores on Main Street and replace it with a guaranteed winner of a business sporting a pre-existing and sizable in-town client base... you'd better come up with a better argument than some 1930s Reefer Madness nonsense when telling me why not.

- A vote for Legalization immediately takes about a quarter to a half million of our harmless citizens from Outlaw status to the status of respectable, revenue generating lawful citizens. This vote will also inflict immense damage on the actual harmful drug people, the guys running and selling it.

- If legalized marijuana is not overtaxed, it will indeed slaughter the black market. Overtaxed, it will generate a black market.

- A legalized marijuana society with a mortally wounded black market will make it much more difficult for children to acquire marijuana.

-  Home-grown weed, not subject to taxes, will generate income for the state via sales of gardening materials. It's a piddling sum, granted... but it is more than we take in under the status quo, with people potentially facing years in prison for growing marijuana in-home.

- You are in far greater danger of being killed in a mass shooting by someone really into alt-right conspiracy or religion than you are by someone who has been driven to kill by his marijuana use. Marijuana has a mellowing effect, and her users are more likely to kill a box of Pop Tarts than they are to kill everyone in an elementary school.

- States with legalized marijuana yield interesting stats on weed and driving. 66% of road fatalities involving marijuana also involve alcohol, with alcohol being the far more likely culprit for the crash.  A lesser % involve other, harder drugs. Of the remainder, Causality becomes an issue. Was the weed responsible for the crash? It's a tough sell in a snowy, mountainous state like Colorado. It's also a tough sell when the stats consider a stoner driver stopped at a red light who is then plowed into and killed by a drunk driver to be a "road death with marijuana present in the bloodstream."

- The fun part about the weed/driving stats is that, once you eliminate the drunks and the blizzard deaths, you have a number of deaths in the teens/single digits, from among a population of 10 million or so. Any insurance agent will tell you what the pro-persecution commercials won't tell you... the driver with weed in his blood is statistically less likely to get into a fatal road accident than a guy without weed is. We're not saying that the stoned driver is safer, as stats can vary year to year and a stoner bus accident could raise the % in a given period. We're just saying that the present information doesn't suggest that persecution is warranted.

- Legalized marijuana will pour millions and eventually billions into the state's coffers, money which can be used for better schools, better roads, better (and, via legalization, more efficient/useful) police... just a better life in general, and that's just for the non-smokers. It will be a considerably better life for the hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts smokers who are currently Outlaws under these Jim Crow-era laws.

- Understand that an anti-legalization vote wont make marijuana go away. It was out there before, and usage is widespread. It will just keep smokers in the black market, untaxed, unregulated, pursued endlessly by costly and mis-utilized police squads.

- If your views on marijuana have evolved past the colored people water fountain-era paranoid fantasies about armies of zombie stoners stumbling down Main Street, and if you accept that millions of people are already smoking it nationwide, you will basically see this ballot question as a vote on whether marijuana should be regulated and taxed.

- If legalization is batted down, don't goof on your local stoner too hard. The general effects he will suffer include "Not being able to buy it in a store" and "Not being able to grow it at home," moves that will feed the black market that awaits the stoner if his legal persecution is voted for. The modus operandi of the stoner will just continue as it was... untaxed, unregulated and persecuted by a costly legal system.

- Just don't complain to the stoner when the information presented in your daughter's aging History books cuts off at the Nancy Reagan era, or when a cop gets shot in a town which couldn't afford to properly armor him. We were offering tax dollars to pay for those things, but you chose to Just Say No.

- The stoners are tired of persecution, and they number in the hundreds of thousands in Massachusetts. They aren't going anywhere, no matter how you vote. The police have better things to do, as do the courts. The towns and state need the tax revenue. You're choosing between legal, regulated, taxed marijuana on one side and our police fighting a losing battle against both the black market and hundreds of thousands of harmless citizens on the other side. Get off of Mary Warner's back.

It's time to evolve, my friends. Stop the persecution of harmless marijuana smokers. We urge you to vote for the legalization of marijuana in Massachusetts.