It wasn't the gangster violence or deaths from home-brewed bathtub gin that led to the end of Prohibition. It was the money, says former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. Specifically, the revenue that states lost after they couldn't tax alcohol anymore.
Fast forward 90 years to America's Great Recession and the issue is again money, Stamper says. Only this time the illegal drug is marijuana.
With the state already looking at privatizing liquor sales, the idea of raising more than $300 million by taxing and regulating the sale of marijuana is one reason, Stamper says, that state legislators are considering House Bill 2401, introduced by Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), to regulate and tax sales of the drug to those 21 and over.
Another bill sponsored by Rep. Dave Upthegrove (D-Des Moines) -- House Bill 1177 -- would decriminalize marijuana by reducing the penalty for possessing 40 grams or less from a misdemeanor to a civil infraction and a $100 ticket for those 18 and over.
Neither Stamper nor Dickerson say they expect the bills to make it out of a committee vote scheduled Wednesday by the House's Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness Committee, which, Dickerson notes, includes several retired police officers who aren't so supportive of the idea.
That's to be expected on a bill's first try, says Stamper, a legalization supporter and spokesperson for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. But with a new KING-TV/SurveyUSA poll showing that 56 percent of adults in Washington state say they endorse legalization, it's a good bet he says, that a citizens' initiative filed Jan. 11 to legalize pot will at least qualify for the November ballot.
In California, where three marijuana initiatives have been filed this year, one gathered the signatures required to get on the ballot in record time, he says.
"For the first time in our lives, we feel that the wind is at our backs," Stamper says. "The corner has been turned. I believe we'll see legalization in the next five years in a handful of states, perhaps as early as this or next year."
At a joint public hearing on the bills held last week by Hurst's committee, the changing times were evident. In addition to users of medical marijuana -- which Washington voters legalized in 1998 -- mainstream lawyers' and doctors' groups endorsed relaxing or abolishing marijuana laws.
"The way we handle the War on Drugs is clearly wrong and we can do better," James Anderson, president of the King County Bar Association, said at the hearing.
"As doctors, we are concerned about the health consequences," said Charles Heaney, executive director of the King County Medical Society, which supports decriminalization. "People who are incarcerated are at risk for physical violence, sexual assault and related communicable diseases and exposure to harder drugs a lot more harmful than marijuana."
Thirteen states have already decriminalized the drug, said Shankar Narayan, legislative director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington. He added that decriminalization, which the ACLU supports, would save at least $10 million in criminal prosecution.
Marijuana laws have not only served to drive up the price of the drug for traffickers, others said, but have ruined young people's lives with criminal records that can prevent them from getting financial aid for college or jobs -- for no clear reason, said Gil Mobley, a physician who said he has interviewed hundreds of marijuana users in his occupational medicine practice.
"Anyone saying that marijuana is addicting is either misinformed or flat out lying, with a hidden agenda," Mobley said. "It's no more addicting than your favorite TV show, sex with your spouse or playing with your dog. [And] it is certainly not a gateway drug, any more than caffeine or Coca-Cola is."
Don Pierce, with the Washington Association of Sheriffs, disagreed. Marijuana is used much less frequently by the young today than alcohol specifically because it is illegal, he said.
"We have substances now that are legal [and] we have issues with impairment," said Bruce Bjork of the Sheriffs and Police Chief's Association. "I, for one, would prefer not to have another substance that's going to allow an impaired individual in a legal fashion during the hunting season, for instance, using a firearm, operating a vessel on a very crowded lake, operating a motor vehicle [or] flying a plane."
Rick Smith with Sensible Washington, the group that has filed the initiative to legalize marijuana, said it doesn't really matter what legislators do Wednesday. "We're going to take it out of your hands," Smith said. "Penalties for cannabis, no, it's no good."