The problem with trying to reform anything in our country is that everything gets to be an industry. Everything attracts money, and those who profit from the flow of money will do anything to keep it from drying up. That’s what gives rise to what Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler describes in her book of the same name as “the submerged state” (“How Reforms Bog Down,” August 4, 2011).
Campaign spending gives rise to an industry, so the media gives lip service to public financing while hoping to holy hell it will just go away and leave tidal waves of cash to course through newspapers and TV stations during election season.
Even the part of the War on Drugs that involves pot becomes an industry. Consider the story detailed by Republic Report of the career of John Lovell, a California lobbyist who has made a lot of money battling the loudly expressed will of people in his state to get pot decriminalized.
It turns out that a lot of money can flow to police departments in the form of government grants for programs related to the War on Drugs. But a lot of it dries up if any drug, even pot, is legalized.
Example: In 2009 and 2010, police unions in California were courting some $7,500,000 in federal funding for a so-called “Campaign Against Marijuana Planting.” Part of this money—$550,000—was slated to go to a “North California Eradication Team” formed by police departments in Siskiyou, Shasta and Tehama counties. Among the budget items the money was allotted for were flight operations ($20,000), salary and benefits for a full-time deputy ($94,895), salary and benefits for an administrative assistant ($16,788), and more than 600 hours of overtime ($29, 983).
For his services in helping to win grants and to scuttle a proposed law that would have decriminalized marijuana in California—thereby stanching the flow of federal money into policing programs that depended on maintaining the criminal status of pot—Lovell was paid $386,350 in lobbying fees by police unions during 2009 and 2010. Lovell thus added to the profitability (for him) of pot prohibition by putting two sources of money into play: not only the federal dollars, but the police union money.
The point worth noticing: It’s not only dealers who make carloads of money from the contraband nature of marijuana under present law, but all those who’ve found their place along the gravy train created by government strictures on growing, selling and using the weed.
