Town Meeting season has not been good to marijuana reform advocates, who are watching as the victory of last fall's Question 2 is being chipped away by community after community.
Question 2—approved by 65 percent of voters on last November's ballot—decriminalized minor pot possession, creating a $100 fine for possession of one ounce or less. But the law also opened the door for municipalities to create their own bylaws adding local fines for public pot-smoking—something Attorney General Martha Coakley urged towns and cities to do. The AG even went so far as to draft a sample bylaw that communities could adopt.
MassCann—the state chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML—has been tracking those local laws closely. According to the organization, 42 communities have passed their own bylaws since the new state law went into effect in January. While that's a relatively small percentage of Massachusetts' 351 towns and cities, there has been a disheartening flurry of new bylaws created in recent weeks as many communities hold their town meetings. In recent weeks, TM members in Ludlow, Hadley and Belchertown all approved local fines ranging from $100 to $300. The Springfield City Council already approved a system of escalating fines (from $100 for a first offense to $300 for third and subsequent offenses) in March.
While the local bylaws are perfectly legal under Question 2, pot-law reformers argue that they fly in the face of voters, who approved the $100 state fine by a strong majority. As Hadley resident Andy Morris-Friedman pointed out in a recent letter to the Advocate, Question 2 passed by a margin of about 2,000 to 1,000 in Hadley, only to see the will of those 2,000 voters subverted by a Town Meeting of fewer than 200 members.
At the very least, local discussion of the bylaws has prompted some interesting, and impressively frank, debate. In Belchertown, for instance—where Town Meeting members last week approved a $300 local fine—Selectman James Barry, who opposed the bylaw, dismissed the common argument that pot is a "gateway drug" that leads to harder substances. As reported in the Belchertown News (www.belchertown-news.com), a local news website published by Michael Seward, Barry told the crowd, "If marijuana was a gateway drug, most of us in this room would be on heroin."
