Kentucky must consider decriminalizing marijuana

Column by Richard Becker

Gatewood Galbraith, Kentucky author, activist and perennial political candidate, is a man for whom no cow is too sacred to be dragged out into the great sanitizer of the public eye. The most sacred of these are America’s draconian drug laws, which have earned the brunt of Galbraith’s abundant ire. Galbraith is celebrated and praised by some and maligned and criticized by others all for the same basic idea: his advocacy on behalf of saner marijuana laws in Kentucky and across the country.

Galbraith and I don’t agree on much in the way of our positions on the various political issues of the day, but we most assuredly do agree on one thing: The time has come for us to end our insane, draconian marijuana laws. With economic instability and pain sweeping across the land and with state budgets strapped for cash and looking into every nook and cranny for new sources of revenue, renewed attention is being paid to a notion that Galbraith has been discussing for upward of 30 years: the decriminalization, regulation and taxation of marijuana for medicinal use in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

That we have reached this point as a society in terms of our social development and economic stature and still have not made the common sense moves toward fiscal solvency by way of the regulation and taxation of marijuana use is, in a word, insane.

Galbraith’s latest project is working on a narrow facet of the issue, specifically advocacy of marijuana use for strictly medical purposes. The obvious problem this poses for the law enforcement officials whose job it is to enforce our drug laws is that police will now have the added requirement of legitimately determining the veracity of each individual user’s claim to need the drug for medical purposes. His new organization is called Kentuckians for Medical Marijuana (K4MM) and has as its charge, according to its Web site, “to organize and lobby for an Immediate Change in Kentucky’s marijuana laws to allow the use of marijuana for all the ailments for which it is therapeutic.”

Galbraith’s group is calling for “reasonable” marijuana laws in the state. Kentucky’s number one cash crop is in fact marijuana despite the state’s absurd and outdated laws on the matter.

According to the FBI, in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, 11,883 people were arrested for drug-related crimes in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. When one takes into account that Kentucky has among the highest incarceration rates of any state of similar size, this makes for quite a little black mark on our image as a state. Which is perhaps why I had such a difficult time finding any relevant or even up-to-date statistics on drug crime in Kentucky. Drug crime, of course, is the great unspoken of elephant in the room in any discussion about the quality of life in a given state.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Galbraith, who told me he believes the political will “already exists” in Kentucky for a change in our marijuana laws. Yet he acknowledged the difficulties that advocates like him face in their fight.

Galbraith had particularly harsh words for Kentucky State Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, whose recent quashing of a bill, which would have loosened Kentucky’s marijuana laws, earned him Galbraith’s characterization as having “arrogance and ignorance [that] has cost Kentucky hundreds of millions of dollars.” While Galbraith maintains his characteristic optimism about the prospects of his life’s cause, it seems to me that Kentucky will remain in the legal dark ages on the issue until such political roadblocks as Williams’ Senate presidency have been wiped from the slate.

The national mood with regards to decriminalization is growing better and better by the day, with celebrities like comedian and public commentator Bill Maher loosely joining ranks with conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan in the public fight for saner drug laws. On the official level, the Obama administration, through Attorney General Eric Holder, has recently slackened the federal restrictions that have prevented states from having sovereignty over their own drug laws. Essentially, the federal government had, until Holder’s ruling, continued drug-related raids even in states that have loosened their own drug laws, thus circumventing the loosening of those state laws in the first place.

So, in the end, there is reason for hope. Galbraith, while taking a more conservative tack in his approach than I, believes, as I do, that “freedom is about self-determination, about being your own individual,” and that the best exemplification of this aphorism is a revolutionary, back-to-the-basics reform of our unreasonable drug laws. The very fiscal health of our state depends on us finally coming to the conclusion that as uncomfortable as people toking up may make us, their paying taxes for it is infinitely healthier for our society than their not doing so.