By The Editors

A prominent association of black police officers last week endorsed the California ballot measure that would legalize marijuana in the state.

Ron Hampton, executive director of the 15,000-member National Black Police Association, said taxing and regulating the drug would end the destructive affect arrests for marijuana have on black and Latino communities, help reduce the state’s huge inmate population, which is heavily black and Latino, and provide the cash-strapped state with badly-needed revenues to improve social services.

The NBPA endorsement, given at their annual convention in Sacramento, marks the third signal of support for the measure from a prominent black organization or individual.

Proposition 19 would allow anyone over 21 to possess up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use.

Earlier this summer the California state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People endorsed the ballot proposal, as has Dr. Jocelyn Elders, the first African American appointed to be United States Surgeon General.

However, on the other side, a group of highly visible black ministers is vigorously opposing the initiative, declaring it at a recent rally in Sacramento “the most sinister drug” whose legalization would wreck the black community. And Kamala D. Harris, the San Francisco District Attorney who is the Democratic nominee for California Attorney General has declared her opposition to it as well.

The intensifying jockeying for the black electorate’s ear underscores the heated contest between advocates and opponents of the measure, Proposition 19, as they seek to capture the relatively small, but critically-placed black vote for the November election.

Blacks, who make up just 6.6 percent of California’s population, are far less numerous than Asian Americans (nearly 13 percent) and Latinos (37 percent). But they are a stronger, more cohesive voting blox, and observers expect they will be a crucial swing vote in this contest.

Indeed, for many black voters, and certainly for many of the advocates and proponents of the measure, the issue goes far deeper than just the decriminalization of the use of small amounts of marijuana, particularly for those who say it helps them relieve the pain of certain illnesses.

The reason: Studies show that the arrests of blacks, especially black youth, for possession of small amounts of marijuana in California has long been at epidemic proportions – routinely two to four times that of whites, even though whites smoke marijuana more often.

A report released this summer by the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports Proposition 19, found that in each of California’s 25 largest counties, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession “typically at double, triple, or even quadruple the rate of whites.”

For example, blacks make up less than ten percent of Los Angeles County’s ten million residents; but they constitute 30 percent of arrests for marijuana possession. In Santa Clara County, blacks are less than 3 percent of the population, but 11 percent of the marijuana possession arrests.

These arrests, the document, “Targeting Blacks for Marijuana: Possession Arrests of African Americans in California, 2004-08,” are “a system-wide phenomenon, occurring in every county and nearly every police department in California, and elsewhere. [They] are not mainly the result of personal bias or racism on the part of the individual patrol officers – who are doing what they are assigned to do.”

The study explains that disproportionality stems from the police practice of deploying most of their patrol and narcotics units to “high crime” neighborhoods, which are overwhelmingly black and Latino in composition.

“It is in these neighborhoods,” the report states, “where the police make most patrols, and where they stop and search the most vehicles and individuals … The item that young people in any (their emphasis) neighborhood are most likely to possess, which can get them arrested, is a small amount of marijuana. In short, the arrests are racially-based mainly because the police are systematically ‘fishing’ for arrests in only some neighborhoods, and methodically searching for only some ‘fish.’” (PDF)

So, because conviction for possessing even small amounts of marijuana produce a permanent drug-arrest record, Proposition 19 advocates and other criminal justice reformers contend they are a trap that can severely damage the ability of individuals to lead productive lives.

“A criminal record lasts a lifetime,” states the “Targeting Blacks” report Drug. “The explosive growth of criminal record databases, and the ease with which those databases can be accessed on the Internet, creates barriers to employment, housing and education for anyone … including white, middle class and young people. For low-income African Americans and Latinos – whose use marijuana less than young whites and who already face numerous barriers and hurdles – a criminal record for the “drug crime” of marijuana possession can seriously harm their life chances”

Alice A. Huffman, president of the California state NAACP, cited that report in writing earlier this summer that “the so-called ‘war on drugs’ is not a war on the drug lords and violent cartels [but one] that disproportionately affects young men and woman and is the latest tool for imposing Jim Crow justice on poor African-Americans.”

In 1996 California became the first state to allow the sale of marijuana to people with doctors’ prescriptions. Now, 14 states allow use of the drug for medical purposes. They are: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, , Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.