Congressmen: San Francisco is retroactively applying marijuana legalization to prior convictions dating to 1975, which means that thousands of felonies and misdemeanors will be re-sentenced or dismissed. This is how we begin to end the failed “war on drugs.”

 

San Francisco will retroactively apply California’s new marijuana legalization laws to prior convictions, expunging or reducing misdemeanors and felonies dating to 1975, the district attorney’s office announced Wednesday.

Nearly 5,000 felony marijuana convictions will be reviewed, recalled and resentenced, and more than 3,000 misdemeanors that were sentenced prior to Proposition 64’s passage will be dismissed and sealed, Dist. Atty. George Gascón said. The move will clear people’s records of crimes that can be barriers to employment and housing.
San Francisco’s move could be the beginning of a larger movement to address old pot convictions, though it’s still far from clear how many other counties will follow the famously liberal city’s lead.

Proposition 64 legalizes, among other things, the possession and purchase of up to an ounce of marijuana and allows individuals to grow up to six plants for personal use. The measure also allows people convicted of marijuana possession crimes eliminated by Proposition 64 to petition the courts to have those convictions expunged from their records as long as the person does not pose a risk to public safety.

Marijuana is slowly being legalized in more and more states in America and that is great, but one step that states besides California have yet to take is to go ahead and begin applying legalization to people that have past convictions for marijuana.
San Francisco is going to start striking marijuana misdemeanors and felonies from people’s records because that is the logical next step after this prohibition is reversed.
Does anyone know if people with convictions for bootlegging alcohol during Prohibition had it held against them for the rest of their lives, even after Prohibition was rescinded?
In any case, it’s great that California is doing this, and hopefully other states that have legalized marijuana will follow California’s example.
 
 
h/t User_Name13

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11 thoughts on “Congressmen: San Francisco is retroactively applying marijuana legalization to prior convictions dating to 1975, which means that thousands of felonies and misdemeanors will be re-sentenced or dismissed. This is how we begin to end the failed “war on drugs.””

      • That sounds web-botty to me as you did not address my point, rather, you redirected from. You bots are getting easier & easier to pick out. It only took one short sentence from you.

        Reply
        • Well I’m not a computer program.
          The reason cannabis is illegal is for multiple reasons:
          1) The main reason: The US government itself is the largest drug runner in the nation, and they don’t want competition in order to keep prices up. That’s why the US is in Afghanistan – it went from producing 3% of the world’s illegal opium supply in 2001 and now produces about 85% – under US occupation and just coincidentally the US has an opium/heroin epidemic right now. Think it’s a coincidence?
          2) The alcohol and tobacco lobbies don’t want this legalized, because they perceive it as competition.
          3) Legalization of it will reduce prison populations, and investors and owners of privatized prisons don’t want to see that happen because it will decrease profits. Government is heavily invested in these.
          They don’t give a crap about somebody rotting away in prison for life, for, nothing. The US has the largest per capita prison population in the world, because it makes money – well, they are slightly behind Seychelles, a tiny nation in Africa.
          Your government is hopelessly, irredeemably corrupt. How can you not see that yet? Find that weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq yet? I’m certain people were fired for that “mistake”, right? How blatant does it have to get?

          Reply
    • You need to speak with Reefer Madman Sessions about that. KUDOS to San Francisco! Making Non-Violent People WHOLE CITIZENS AGAIN. Now about ALL the Homeless People…..MAGA!

      Reply
  1. It should be completely obvious to our governments, after more than 40 years of dismal failure to suppress illegal drug use, that their policies in this area do not work and will never work. It should be completely obvious, a simple logical step, to realize that by decriminalizing drug use, and making the supply of all drugs available to those adults who wish to use them through legal and properly regulated channels, we could, at a stroke, put out of business the vast criminal enterprise that presently flourishes on the supply of illegal drugs. It ought to be obvious, but somehow it is not. It appears to be a natural human urge, as deep-rooted as our urges for food, sex, and nurturing relationships, to seek out and explore such “altered states of consciousness.” Instead the powers that be continue to pursue the same harsh and cruel policies that they have been wedded to from the outset, ever seeking to strengthen and reinforce them rather than to replace them with something better. Indeed the only “change” that the large, armed bureaucracies that enforce these policies has ever sought since the “War on Drugs” began has, year on year, been to demand even more money, even more arms, and even more draconian legislative powers to break into homes, to confiscate property, and to deprive otherwise law-abiding citizens of liberty and wreck their lives. In the process we have seen our once free and upstanding societies— which used to respect individual choice and freedom of conscience above all else—slide remorselessly down the slippery slope that leads to the police state. And all this is being done in our name, with our money, by our own governments, to “save us from ourselves”! Winners and Losers Who benefits from this colossal stupidity and systematic wickedness? And who loses? The beneficiaries are easy to spot. First, the large and ever-expanding armed bureaucracies, funded with large and ever-growing sums of public money to suppress the use of drugs, have benefited enormously. Everyone who works for them, including the PR people and spin merchants who concoct the propaganda used to sell their policies to us, including their subcontractors both public and private, and including the (often privately run) prisons stuffed to bursting point with their victims, are the beneficiaries of this catastrophic failure on the part of our governments to think laterally, generously, and creatively. Whether you are a Drug Enforcement Administration agent or a prison guard, you naturally have a deeply vested interest in maintaining the miserable status quo, justified by the “War on Drugs,” that keeps you in your job, that ensures your monthly paychecks continue to come in, and that continuously expands your budgets. The second main category of beneficiaries is—of course!—the criminal gangs and cartels that the present misguided official policies have empowered as the sole source of drugs in our societies. Over the past 40-plus years they have earned countless billions of dollars from the sale of illegal drugs which, had they only been legal, would not have earned them a single penny. Who are the losers? First and most directly those millions upon millions of good, nonviolent people in our societies who have been jailed or otherwise punished for the possession and use of drugs. And second (regardless of whether or not they use illegal drugs themselves), virtually everyone else in our societies as well. For the quality of life of all of us has been diminished by the growth of the police state and by the murderous activities of the criminal gangs enfranchised, and kept in business, by the blind and mindless perpetuation of this failed and bankrupt “War on Drugs.” So, in summary, the criminalization of drug use has brought no positive effects, only negative ones, and it has not stopped or even reduced the use of dangerous and harmful drugs. On the contrary, we have been so little “saved from ourselves” by this phony war that the use of almost all illegal drugs, far from decreasing, has dramatically increased during the past 40 years. The War on Consciousness Graham Hancock by Graham Hancock

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