The ACLU of Maine joins our colleagues around the country who support marijuana legalization, and we are proud to announce our support for Question 1. 

The ACLU’s support for marijuana legalization is grounded in our concerns over the civil liberties impact of the failed war on drugs.

Over the last four decades this war has cost Americans roughly a trillion dollars. It has produced little to no effect on the supply of or demand for drugs in the United States. And it has helped make America the world’s leading jailer. This is not something to be proud of.

We now have more people in prison and jail – in total and per capita – than any other country in the world. There are 2.3 million people behind bars in this country, and 25 percent of them are locked up for drug offenses.

Maine spends $8.8 million on marijuana possession enforcement annually. Meanwhile, like the rest of the country, we face a budget crisis.  Each year, our legislature struggles with drastic cuts to education and health and human services. Meanwhile, budgets for prisons and jails are growing and our leaders in Augusta are pushing to add more prosecutors to the payroll.   

The human cost of incarcerating non-violent drug offenders is even higher.  An arrest or citation for even a small amount of marijuana can make it harder to secure student loans, housing, or a job.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, marijuana laws are enforced along racial lines. Studies show Black and white people use marijuana at the same rates. Yet Black people are twice as likely statewide to be cited or arrested for marijuana.

Further, all these costs don’t add up to any benefit. After all this time, the war on drugs has done little to nothing to curb the demand for drugs. It’s time to face the fact that we cannot arrest our way out of this problem.

This money and valuable police time could better be spent on measures that keep communities safe and on public health programs, including drug treatment.

Jailing individuals who use marijuana does not make sense from a civil liberties perspective, from a civil rights perspective, or from a fiscal perspective. 

Treating marijuana use as a crime has failed. Now we have a better path forward. That is why the ACLU of Maine supports Yes on 1.

The following was orginally posted at aclu.org 

Last month, Maine’s Gov. LePage once again got our attention when he claimed to be keeping a binder of “every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state,” 90 percent of whom, he said, are Black or Hispanic.

We couldn’t believe that was true, so wefiled a public records request for the binder. On Monday, we got in line at the state house to receive our copy on CD.

What we received could best be described as a scrapbook: a random, incomplete collection of newspaper clippings and press releases from the Maine Department of Public Safety. Some press releases don’t include photos of the arrested. Some contain handwritten notes from the governor himself: “get photo for my album;” “please be sure we get all mugs with release;” “file pictures in my binder for historical value.”

While the binder paints an incomplete picture of the demographics of drug arrests in Maine, it very clearly does not support the governor’s assertions that over 90 percent of the people in his scrapbook are Black or Hispanic. While it is impossible to tell the race of all arrestees included in the binder, at least 50 of the 90 people pictured appear to be white. In other words, the governor greatly exaggerated the role people of color play in Maine’s drug trade.

The governor — the top official in our state — has agencies at his disposal that collect arrest data. Yet he pointed to a scrapbook that he compiled on his own as evidence that people of color are responsible for Maine’s drug problem. And even that scrapbook doesn’t back up his claims.

Worse still, the governor used those false claims as the basis for calling people of color the enemy. At a press conference following the binder claims, he actually said, "When you go to war… you shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”

These words cannot be brushed off as a careless misstatement. In 2015,Black people were killed by police at twice the rate of non-Black people. The last message our governor should be sending is that we should shoot at the enemy and that the enemy is people of color.

Sadly, Gov. LePage has a history of making racist statements, so much so that Maine’s largest paper felt compelled to apologize to the rest of the nation for him, while The Washington Post called for his resignation.

The governor’s statements do nothing to address Maine’s very real drug crisis. Instead, they divide our state into “us” and “them” and make people of color feel like they are under siege. Such disunity can only end in tragedy.