When Virginia NORML and the VCU chapter of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) assembled a panel of experts to talk about marijuana laws at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond last weekend, one of the speakers was Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, which is based in Silver Spring, Maryland. (Another was Lennice Werth of Virginians Against Drug Violence.)
Sterling started working on drug-law issues in the 1980s, when he was the legal counsel to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives. In that job, his responsibilities included oversight of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and writing the nation’s drug laws.
‘Political cynicism’
During his tenure on Capitol Hill, he told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview on Saturday, “I saw the political cynicism that Members of Congress had in trying to simply advance their personal careers or their parties’ ambitions, and it was through seeing that that I became involved in this work.”
Over the past quarter-century, Sterling has observed changes in the ways policymakers approach drug issues and their attitudes toward drug laws.
“They haven’t maintained the same opinion,” he said. “There has been a tremendous change in policymakers -- meaning elected officials -- at all levels.”
Sterling said he has testified before state legislatures in half a dozen states and that he knows Members of Congress from his work in Washington. The views of both state and federal legislators, he said, “have changed enormously since the days of ‘Just Say No’ and Nancy and Ronald Reagan.”
He gave a close-to-home example.
“Recently, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, who represents me, referred a medical marijuana patient to me,” for legal advice, something that would have been unlikely, if not impossible, 20 or 25 years ago.
Pot laws ‘immoral’
Sterling argued that laws against marijuana use are immoral. He cited “an outstanding professor of the philosophy of law named Douglas Husak at Rutgers University,” who wrote a book called Legalize This.
In that book, Sterling explained, Husak “explores in depth the philosophical justification for law,” laying out a framework for what is morally permissible and impermissible for legislators.
“The legislature’s power to punish is only moral when the conduct that is being punished is wrongful,” in the sense that it harms another person or violates someone else’s rights, he said. “It is immoral for the legislature to punish conduct that’s not wrongful. It’s outside the moral authority of the legislature to punish” such conduct.
Sterling noted that people have certain duties, such as paying taxes, “and we would argue that it’s wrongful not to meet that duty.” But, he added, “you don’t have a duty to be sober. You don’t have” a duty to avoid “certain conduct, such as using marijuana, [that] does not hurt anybody.”
Society encourages risk
Taking risks is not harmful even if those risks “might hurt you” personally, he said, “because we, in fact, believe in risk as a society.”
Sterling ticked off a list of types of risk that society encourages: “corporate risk, business risk (investment), intellectual risk [or] scientific risk is called research; athletic risk, like going to Olympics’”
Doing things like trying “to ski the fastest, to run a whitewater rapids, to be the best [or] the fastest,” he said, “involves tremendous risk.”
These risks often result in physical injury and they “are not all about productivity,” which is often used to justify risk.
“They’re about pleasure, competition, exhilaration, and the risks from using marijuana are so insignificant by comparison,” Sterling noted. “Yet the pleasure, the rewards are so great, it’s clearly within the range of things that our society would allow people to do if we were starting from square one,” rather than “with the historical baggage that this carries” since marijuana prohibition began in the 1930s.
Sterling is optimistic about the reform of marijuana laws at both the state and the federal level. In his presentation at VCU, he pointed to the likely approval of Proposition 19 by California voters on November 2 as a bellwether, not just in the United States, but internationally. Proposition 19 will decriminalize possession of marijuana for personal use and make it legal for individuals to grow their own pot without fear of arrest and imprisonment.
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