Rick Steves and The ACLU: It's High Time for A Conversation
The Washington State Chapter of the ACLU and local travel guide guru Rick Steves have joined forces to reform marijuana laws in the United States. Steves has long been an outspoken advocate of marijuana reformation. He sits on the board of the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and has been a featured speaker at Seattle's annual Hempfest. Steves and The ACLU are comparing the criminalization of marijuana to the failed prohibition of alcohol in the 1920's and say it's time to have a national conversation about marijuana.
To encourage that conversation, they have created a 30 minute infomercial-style video entitled Marijuana: It's Time for a Conversation. The video is currently available on Comcast's "On Demand," and is being shopped around to local television stations. (Seattlest doesn't have Comcast, so somebody needs to have a watching party!)After starting with what they hope will be a receptive audience in the Pacific Northwest, the ACLU and Steves plan to take the campaign nationally.
While Steves says he is not pro-pot, per se, he believes that the cost of the criminalization of marijuana is too great on families and that the government should differentiate between hard and soft drugs.
"Our government's war on drugs sounds very tough and results-driven, but all it really succeeds at is being enormously expensive, tearing families apart and treating nonconformists as criminals."830,000 people are arrested every year for a marijuana related offense; about 90 percent of the arrests are for simple possession. The estimated annual cost of marijuana enforcement in the U.S. clocks in at $7.5 billion. As Steves points out, "In Europe, people smoke marijuana, and nobody is facing hard time. We just want to talk about new policies." And, excuse the pun, it's high time that we did.
