Mile High City Lights a Fire in Pro-Pot Vote
Thursday, November 3, 2005 8:44 AM PST
By Los Angeles Times
Printable version
E-mail this articleDENVER -- Bring on the jokes about the Mile High City.
Denver on Tuesday became the first city in the United States to wipe out all criminal and civil penalties for adults caught possessing a small amount of marijuana.
About 54 percent of voters supported a ballot measure legalizing possession of less than an ounce of pot by individuals 21 and over.
The ordinance is more radical than pro-pot measures approved over the years in San Francisco, Berkeley, Calif., Oakland, Calif., and half a dozen college towns around the country. Most of those initiatives decriminalized marijuana for medical use, or replaced criminal penalties with small fines or directed police to make enforcement of marijuana laws a low priority.
Denver, by contrast, erased adult possession as an offense entirely.
State laws banning pot, however, still apply in Denver. Police for years have cited most offenders under state law rather than city ordinance, as a matter of convenience.
The state law is pre-printed on the front of tickets, so just by checking a box, an officer can issue a fine for as much as $200. To use the city ordinance -- which carries the threat of as long as a year in jail if convicted -- an officer would have to write out the relevant code by hand.
"Citing under state law has been a tradition here for years. . . . We intend to keep doing what we've been doing," said David Broadwell, an assistant city attorney.
Although the Denver vote might have no practical effect, advocates of relaxed drug laws said it was symbolic.
In large part, that's because of the tactics activists used to promote the measure. The pot-liberalization group SAFER ran a provocative -- critics said deceitful -- campaign to cast the measure as vital for public safety.
On yard signs and billboards, online and in voter forums, campaign director Mason Tvert, 23, tried to convince voters that marijuana is a safer alternative to alcohol. He argued that street crime and domestic violence would drop if residents legally were allowed to smoke pot rather than down a six-pack of beer. College campuses, too, would be safer, he said, if joints replaced kegs at parties.
City officials reacted angrily to such tactics, warning that pot is a "gateway" to more dangerous drugs.
A more traditional campaign in Telluride, Colo., failed as voters rejected an effort to make pot the town's lowest law enforcement priority.
Activists expect Tvert's approach to be taken up around the country -- particularly in Nevada, where pro-pot forces are preparing a statewide initiative to tax and regulate marijuana much like beer or cigarettes.
Another issue on Tuesday's ballot also had national significance: The statewide vote to suspend the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, which was considered the strictest cap on government spending in the country.
Voters agreed 52 percent to 48 percent to lift the cap and to relinquish their claim to an estimated $3.7 billion in tax refunds. The vote frees Colorado to spend millions more on higher education, health care and transportation.
But it infuriates fiscal conservatives who are pushing spending caps similar to Colorado's in several states, including California, Nevada and Arizona.
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