I’m a private practice psychiatrist in southern Ohio for over 22 years. As a physician, it’s become intolerable to see the abuse of power our state pushes on its population because supposedly “mainstream medicine” has an opinion that marijuana is deadly. It’s a shame our legislature doesn’t listen to their constituents, nor to the specialists that they quote. Marijuana is not a dangerous compound. Even so, our state is keeping increasingly more people incarcerated and disabled due to possessing marijuana, which is simply despicable and dangerous.

Our legal system, reliant on busting far too many level blacks and Latinos for marijuana offenses, is unjustifiable. Not only can race alone raise economic barriers, an arrest translates into a criminal record that squelches economic opportunity and places required licenses and certifications off limits. Even with probation, it’s exquisitely difficult to escape the web of an un-recalcitrant legal system.

Four decades after Richard Nixon declared the “war on drugs” in 1971 and $1 trillion spent since then, what do we have to show for it? Even though America is at “war,” we have been fighting drug abuse for almost a century. Four Presidents have personally waged war on drugs. Unfortunately, it is a war that we are losing. Drug abusers continue to fill our courts, hospitals and prisons. The drug trade causes violent crime that ravages our neighborhoods. Children of drug abusers are neglected, abused, and even abandoned. The only beneficiaries of this war are organized crime members and drug dealers.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world, with about 2.3 million behind bars. More than half a million of those people are incarcerated for a drug law violation. What a waste of young lives.

Our country has been through prohibition before, but let’s get real. This approach won’t work.
The tragic events surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have scarred the conscience of America and moved the debate toward our position: we want legal marijuana.

Hundreds, if not thousands of physicians, like me believe that drugs themselves, regardless of their very real potential for abuse, are not moral agents – inherently good or evil.
We do not take this position lightly, for many of us have witnessed the ravages of drug abuse on individuals and their families. But we take seriously the inalienable right of the individual to use the mood-altering chemical of their choice when there are no deleterious effects, and in cases of abuse, we are joined by a growing number of community and medical leaders who consider drug abuse not a sign of criminal immorality, but a personal mental health issue to be confronted by religious leaders, addiction specialists, social workers, family and friends.

I just got back from a visit to Washington State. What a wonderful experience. Cannabis aficionados can purchase marijuana in clean stores, in good parts of town, without prescription or concern for personal safety. No major crime. One unexpected benefit of medical marijuana legislation appears to be a decrease in painkiller overdoses, perhaps because some chronic pain patients are turning to cannabis instead of powerful opioid drugs. As a consequence, accidental opiate overdose deaths are down by 30 percent.
It’s appalling that our “leaders” keep on saying marijuana's not safe, when even the doctors deny this allegation. But physicians are educating themselves on the emerging science and the versatility of marijuana. Minds are changing.

It's time to demand that our leaders follow the specialists (addictionologists and physicians) and their constituents who are declaring loud and clear, make marijuana legal! Stop spending the trillions of dollars on worthless prison-industrial complex expenditures, and start allowing society to enjoy the limited resources we have, rather than squander such limited financial resources on prisons, cops, judges and disability.

We need community leaders, the press and websites that encourage taking action. This state sponsored terrorism of society and demagoguery of dependency has to stop. We want legal marijuana, and nothing less will do.