Jacob Bell
New Member
David Nathan is a psychiatrist based in Princeton, with plenty of patients who abuse alcohol, marijuana or both.
He is the sort of person we should be listening to when it comes to the war on drugs. Because the people on the front line – cops, judges, shrinks – can see that the hard line isn't working.
They are like the generals who have fought in war and counsel the hawkish politicians against provoking combat.
Nathan himself is a clean-cut fellow who measures his words carefully. He grew up in a family where booze was rare and drugs were nonexistent. If he could snap his fingers and eliminate all recreational drugs, he'd do it in a second.
And now, he is an unlikely defender of the marijuana movement. Not because he feels any cultural affinity with potheads, but because his years of practice and his study of the medical literature have led him to this conclusion:
Marijuana is nowhere near as dangerous as alcohol, and it should be made legal.
"Society has this one backwards," Nathan says. "It's across the board. Alcohol is much more habit forming and creates greater dependence. It accounts for much of the domestic violence in this country, and a lot of unplanned and unprotected sex.
"People don't haul off and hit someone who accidently bumps into them when they are high on marijuana. But it happens all the time when they are drunk."
Know this: His message will not penetrate many skulls in Trenton. It's way too dangerous politically, and after the governor's slow-footing sabotage of the medical marijuana program, it is impossible to imagine him signing such a bill.
Assemblyman Reed Gusciora (D-Mercer) is hoping, though, that a smaller step just might make it.
He wants to decriminalize marijuana, to make it like a traffic ticket, a small fine that brings no criminal record. Fourteen states have done this, the most recent being Connecticut this year.
Even that is a long shot in Trenton. But Gusciora has 17 co-sponsors, including a handful of Republicans, and the governor hasn't taken a position yet. And Gusciora's going to make a charge in the lame-duck session after the election, no matter how tall the odds. Because like Nathan, Gusciora is on the front line. He is the municipal prosecutor in Princeton and Hopewell boroughs, as well as Lawrenceville, and he's tired of busting people for no good reason.
"Just today, I had a kid who now has a criminal charge that will show up if a prospective employer does a background check," he says. "It ruins you if you want to go into law enforcement or the military. And it can ruin your chances of getting a student loan. As a municipal prosecutor, probably 90 percent of our marijuana cases are minute amounts, like a joint.
"And you can't plea bargain a drug offense. You can plea bargain murder or rape, but not a drug offense."
The wasted money also just drives Gusciora nuts. Prosecutors in New Jersey bring about 26,000 marijuana possession cases a year. It almost never brings a jail term, but the police and judges and lawyers spend enormous amounts of time on this steady stream of cases. And each scrap of pot has to be tested at police laboratories that face backlogs on more serious criminal cases.
To add to this, he sees racial disparities. Black kids in Trenton get convicted. White kids from Princeton typically get lawyers, he says, and demand a trial, knowing the state often will back down.
"They say they want a trial because most defense lawyers know full well that the lab technician is not going to show up," Gusciora says. "That's the other unfair thing."
The statistics bear him out. White kids are more likely to smoke pot, but black kids are much more likely to be arrested.
Nathan is a doctor, not a politician, so he looks for hard evidence of harm. And he has his caveats about marijuana.
But the biggest problems encountered by his patients who use marijuana stem from the legal prohibition itself. They have criminal records, so they can't get work. They lose access to student loans. Their spouses are furious.
"I'm not a politically minded person," he says. "I treat substance abuse and I don't like the use of drugs generally. If I could make all recreational drug use go away, I would be happy.
"But the fact is that people have used recreational drugs as long as there has been civilization. It has never stopped, including during Prohibition."
If you accept that, the only question left is how to contain the damage. With booze, we rely on education, treatment and medical care. With pot, we call in the cops, repeating the mistake of Prohibition.
"Prohibition did, indeed, reduce the incidence of alcoholism," Nathan says. "But it came at too high a cost. My argument is that prohibition of cannabis has a similarly high cost."
News Hawk- Jacob Ebel 420 MAGAZINE
Source: blog.nj.com
Author: Tom Moran
Contact: Contact Us
Copyright: New Jersey On-Line LLC.
Website: Marijuana legalization supported by those on front lines
He is the sort of person we should be listening to when it comes to the war on drugs. Because the people on the front line – cops, judges, shrinks – can see that the hard line isn't working.
They are like the generals who have fought in war and counsel the hawkish politicians against provoking combat.
Nathan himself is a clean-cut fellow who measures his words carefully. He grew up in a family where booze was rare and drugs were nonexistent. If he could snap his fingers and eliminate all recreational drugs, he'd do it in a second.
And now, he is an unlikely defender of the marijuana movement. Not because he feels any cultural affinity with potheads, but because his years of practice and his study of the medical literature have led him to this conclusion:
Marijuana is nowhere near as dangerous as alcohol, and it should be made legal.
"Society has this one backwards," Nathan says. "It's across the board. Alcohol is much more habit forming and creates greater dependence. It accounts for much of the domestic violence in this country, and a lot of unplanned and unprotected sex.
"People don't haul off and hit someone who accidently bumps into them when they are high on marijuana. But it happens all the time when they are drunk."
Know this: His message will not penetrate many skulls in Trenton. It's way too dangerous politically, and after the governor's slow-footing sabotage of the medical marijuana program, it is impossible to imagine him signing such a bill.
Assemblyman Reed Gusciora (D-Mercer) is hoping, though, that a smaller step just might make it.
He wants to decriminalize marijuana, to make it like a traffic ticket, a small fine that brings no criminal record. Fourteen states have done this, the most recent being Connecticut this year.
Even that is a long shot in Trenton. But Gusciora has 17 co-sponsors, including a handful of Republicans, and the governor hasn't taken a position yet. And Gusciora's going to make a charge in the lame-duck session after the election, no matter how tall the odds. Because like Nathan, Gusciora is on the front line. He is the municipal prosecutor in Princeton and Hopewell boroughs, as well as Lawrenceville, and he's tired of busting people for no good reason.
"Just today, I had a kid who now has a criminal charge that will show up if a prospective employer does a background check," he says. "It ruins you if you want to go into law enforcement or the military. And it can ruin your chances of getting a student loan. As a municipal prosecutor, probably 90 percent of our marijuana cases are minute amounts, like a joint.
"And you can't plea bargain a drug offense. You can plea bargain murder or rape, but not a drug offense."
The wasted money also just drives Gusciora nuts. Prosecutors in New Jersey bring about 26,000 marijuana possession cases a year. It almost never brings a jail term, but the police and judges and lawyers spend enormous amounts of time on this steady stream of cases. And each scrap of pot has to be tested at police laboratories that face backlogs on more serious criminal cases.
To add to this, he sees racial disparities. Black kids in Trenton get convicted. White kids from Princeton typically get lawyers, he says, and demand a trial, knowing the state often will back down.
"They say they want a trial because most defense lawyers know full well that the lab technician is not going to show up," Gusciora says. "That's the other unfair thing."
The statistics bear him out. White kids are more likely to smoke pot, but black kids are much more likely to be arrested.
Nathan is a doctor, not a politician, so he looks for hard evidence of harm. And he has his caveats about marijuana.
But the biggest problems encountered by his patients who use marijuana stem from the legal prohibition itself. They have criminal records, so they can't get work. They lose access to student loans. Their spouses are furious.
"I'm not a politically minded person," he says. "I treat substance abuse and I don't like the use of drugs generally. If I could make all recreational drug use go away, I would be happy.
"But the fact is that people have used recreational drugs as long as there has been civilization. It has never stopped, including during Prohibition."
If you accept that, the only question left is how to contain the damage. With booze, we rely on education, treatment and medical care. With pot, we call in the cops, repeating the mistake of Prohibition.
"Prohibition did, indeed, reduce the incidence of alcoholism," Nathan says. "But it came at too high a cost. My argument is that prohibition of cannabis has a similarly high cost."
News Hawk- Jacob Ebel 420 MAGAZINE
Source: blog.nj.com
Author: Tom Moran
Contact: Contact Us
Copyright: New Jersey On-Line LLC.
Website: Marijuana legalization supported by those on front lines
