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June 02, 2007
Parsing the Rosenthal Verdict (political/logical)
There are several ways to understand that marijuana prohibition is an ongoing fraud; one is by comparing the absurdity of the government’s most recent effort to harass a reform icon with the quiet efficiency with which it has been able to blight the lives of other medical pot growers who didn’t enjoy similarly favored status and were thus tried without as much public scrutiny.
The details of the second Rosenthal trial are even more farcical than the first, but still amount to a federal victory which, although ugly, represents a ‘W’ in their eyes because it produced a conviction. Ditto the sentence imposed by a federal judge in Fresno on a man of similar age charged with growing a similar number of plants in the even more unjust context of the double jeopardy enabled by Raich.
Ed Rosenthal’s second conviction by a Bay Area federal jury not only dashes hopes raised by the first trial; it also summarizes reform’s continuing failure to learn from the ten year opportunity provided by Proposition 215. The biggest reason for that failure has been its leaders’ stubborn adherence to a cherished ten-year-old belief that an informed public would, like Wm. F. Buckley Jr., reject drug prohibition once they became aware of its failures. However, a 2001 Pew Research poll disclosed that the public was already aware of those failures and inclined to accept them. This week’s continuing meek acceptance of the glaring discrepancy between the Costa and Rosenthal verdicts is just further confirmation of the most reasonable interpretation of that six-year-old report.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at June 2, 2007 04:03 AM