Legal Highs: Marijuana Questions before Voters in Michigan, Nationwide

Voters in 10 Michigan communities will decide Tuesday whether to make it legal for adults to possess small amounts of marijuana on private property, and another will decide if police should be directed to assign a low priority to marijuana investigations.

Decriminalization measures are on the ballots in Huntington Woods, Berkley, Saginaw, Mount Pleasant, Clare, Harrison, Frankfurt, Onaway, Port Huron and Lapeer. In Pleasant Ridge, voters will weigh in on how police should direct their resources when marijuana crimes are reported

The votes in Michigan are among a handful nationwide that signal the war on drugs may be coming to an end. Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia have statewide ballot questions on recreational pot that are similar to proposals approved in 2012 by voters in Colorado and Washington state.

Florida has a statewide ballot question on medical marijuana, and local initiatives are on ballots not only in Michigan, but also Maine, New Mexico and Guam.

The Pew Research Center said in a report last month that support for marijuana legalization is slowly outpacing opposition.

In Michigan, Chuck Ream, director of the Safer Michigan Coalition that is backing a community-by-community approach to relax marijuana laws, says history supports approval of the ballot questions in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Pro-legalization groups have put measures on local ballots 16 times before without a single defeat, Ream told Michigan Public Radio.

In Ferndale last November, residents voted almost 2-to-1 to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana possessed by adults.

“We can’t do much campaigning because we don’t have much money,” Ream said. “But we expect them to win.”

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• Do you support or oppose marijuana legalization. Why or why not?

Pro-marijuana forces want to put the question of marijuana legalization before voters statewide. Tim Beck, 62, a retired health insurance advocate who backs a statewide proposal that treats pot smokers more like beer drinkers and less like criminals, told the Free Press earlier this year that a state law is preferable to going community by community, but it’s politically unrealistic.

Andrew Cissell, who helped push the Ferndale initiative, told WXYZ, Channel 7, the law has worked well there, and people are going to smoke pot whether or not it’s legal.

“As you can see the streets are the same, no one is going too crazy.” Cissell said. “... There’s no point in putting people in jail. Colorado’s doing very well, Ferndale’s doing very well. It’s not a disastrous thing to legalize this. It’s better for the community.”

Among those who disagree is Terry Jungel, director of the Michigan Sheriff’s Association. He told Michigan Public Radio that the campaigns for marijuana reform are “economically and emotionally driven, which are two really bad reasons to be making decisions on anything dealing with public safety issues.”

Local communities that vote to legalize small amounts of marijuana are co-conspirators in state and federal crimes, because despite votes at the local level, it’s still against Michigan and U.S. law to possess marijuana.

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