With all the focus on the ugly, roller-coaster presidential campaign, a referendum closer to Rhode Island’s borders hasn’t received much media attention in the waning days of the campaign. That would be the Massachusetts ballot question that would legalize recreational marijuana, which voters consider on Tuesday.
The latest public opinion survey for WBUR, Boston’s npr affiliate, shows a 15-point gap in favor of making the weed legal. The poll, conducted by MassINC, showed 55 percent in favor and 40 percent opposed.
“This one follows a long string of polls which shows the marijuana question with the yes side leading by somewhere between the mid single digits and the mid double digits,’’ says Steve Koczela, president of MassINC.
The Boston Globe, New England’s most influential newspaper, has endorsed the ballot question that would make pot legal.
If Massachusetts approves legal pot, Rhode Island’s political hierarchy will have to answer by taking the issue seriously, not shuttling it off to legislative Siberia as the General Assembly and Gov. Gina Raimondo have done in recent sessions.
Except for speeding on Route 95, is there a law more frequently violated by citizens than the ban on recreational pot?
As everyone knows, the four-decade War on Drugs has failed in so many ways. It has resulted in thousands of Rhode Islanders and millions of Americans having the taint of a criminal record and even serving prison time for cannabis-related crimes. The anti-pot laws have been woefully inadequate in preventing youths from getting weed; it’s likely easier for a high-school student to get pot nowadays than an adult.
The recovery community doesn’t like legal weed. That’s to be expected. But the current regime isn’t working. Wouldn’t a well-regulated system of distributing marijuana be superior to the current black market, where the same dealer who sells pot also markets more dangerous hard drugs, such as cocaine, heroin and the usually array of highly addictive narcotic pain-killers?
It’s too bad that we don’t as yet have a reliable way to test motorists for marijuana intoxication along the lines of the protocols for alcohol. Colorado, which has legal pot, is working on such a test.
Cultural issues tend to bring to the surface `sky is falling’ rhetoric. Colorado’s experience with legal weed is evidence that the sky isn’t going to fall. Remember all the naysayers who predicted moral rot when Rhode Island in 2011 caught up with the rest of New England and gave government sanction to gay marriage. The church doors still open on Sundays. Nobody is forced to get gay married.
This we know: If Massachusetts approves legal pot, it’s impossible for the other four New England states that border the Bay State to prevent their citizens from buying it in Massachusetts. (Unless you want a police state, which is infinitely worse than legal pot). This especially true of Rhode Island; 75 percent of our population lives within a half-hour drive from Massachusetts. The cops can’t stop the illegal flood on pot in our state now. How are they going to cope with legal weed?
There is obviously tax money to be harvested on state-regulated marijuana. If Massachusetts approves it, Rhode Island will once again be playing catch-up, establishing a regulatory regime after Massachusetts and losing out on tax revenue. But isn’t that the way it always works in Rhode Island, which arguably has New England’s most dysfunctional state government?
