Recently I have been following the media from many perspectives around the bill going through the NH legislator that would end criminal penalties for the possession and sale of Marijuana. New Hampshire's Legislature spent 3 hours in committee hearings over the bill last Wensday. Two of the men who spoke were from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Officer Bradley Jardis was originally scheduled to speak here at Franklin Pierce last semester. However LEAP Executive Director Jack Cole, also the second member of LEAP at the hearing last week, came to and spoke to a packed room.
New Hampshire papers have taken different spins on it, a Laconia paper featured an Editorial stating
"There is no substantive reason to tinker with the law against the sale and use of marijuana and we trust the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee will find the bill "inexpedient to legislate."

Then ofcoarse you could go with the World Health Organization who stated in their March 1998 report on Cannabis,
"there are good reasons for saying that [the risks from cannabis] would be unlikely to seriously [compare to] the public health risks of alcohol and tobacco even if as many people used cannabis as now drink alcohol or smoke tobacco."

So I guess we can call that a point in favor of legalization.

Then again our own government said that the social policy around marijuana wasn't working in a 1972 report commissioned by Richard Nixon.
""Marihuana's relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it. This judgment is based on prevalent use patterns, on behavior exhibited by the vast majority of users and on our interpretations of existing medical and scientific data. This position also is consistent with the estimate by law enforcement personnel that the elimination of use is unattainable."

Now 30 years after this report marijuana possession arrests made up 780,000 of the total 1.8 million drug arrests in the US in 2005

There are those papers out there that took it to the facts and quoted Officer Jardis well. Then you get opinion pieces out there that did not even feature the officers commentary to the hearing. Trying to force opinions on people that are based on propaganda doesn't help democracy prosper.

Rep. Charles Weed (D-Keane) is presenting a progressive piece of legislation that will do more good then harm. Every time a squad car is on patrol ,instead of driving marijuana smokers back to the station, the public will be that much safer.