December 31, 2012 07:55 PM UTC

Top Ten Stories of 2012 #3: Legalizing Marijuana in Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado Pols is recapping the top ten stories in Colorado politics from the 2012 election year.

A multitude of factors, owing their existence to both liberal and conservative political philosophy as well as Colorado’s longstanding values of individual freedom and respect for privacy, led to our state taking what the Denver paper called a “brave, messy path” to legalizing the personal recreational possession, cultivation, and eventual commercial sale of marijuana in 2012.

Although the vote to pass Amendment 64 reflects a changing, more open-minded and liberal electorate in our state, it’s worth noting that the proponents of marijuana legalization in Colorado have traditionally been conservative-libertarians–such as attorney Robert Corry, long associated with the Independence Institute. On paper, championing marijuana legalization as a segue into recruitment of young voters to libertarian-right politics makes a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, most of the voters who are persuadable on this issue will not be attracted to what is generally perceived to be an intolerant Republican Party. The GOP itself was no proponent of marijuana legalization, either this year or in years past. Therefore the political benefit of the campaign to legalize marijuana principally went to Democrats, who won races across the state at the same time marijuana was legalized–even though elected Democrats in Colorado kept Amendment 64 at arm’s length almost as much as Republicans did.

If that wasn’t complicated enough, Amendment 64’s passage puts Colorado in conflict not just with a Democratic administration, but with the underlying philosophy of the primacy of federal law that Democrats take for granted in so many of their greatest victories: Brown vs. Board of Education. The Voting Rights Act. Even “Obamacare” itself.

At the same time, this isn’t about desegregating schools, or ensuring everyone has equal rights to vote, or even reforming health care via mandates on every consumer. In the last ten years in Colorado alone, over 100,000 people have been arrested for marijuana possession. There’s a compelling argument that the simple fact of such a mild narcotic like marijuana being illegal breeds contempt for other, necessary prohibitions of “harder” drugs, and undermines the law with each new generation. Although the fines for simple possession of small amounts of marijuana were quite low here in Colorado, convictions still can have major impacts on a person’s future career, and eligibility for assistance programs like federal student aid.

Bottom line: Coloradans considered in Amendment 64 the value of enforcement of the law regarding marijuana versus the harm caused by that enforcement, and decided it isn’t worth it anymore. A progressive, compassionate policy goal of harm reduction challenges federal primacy in a way that cannot be considered all that different from Southern states attempting to defy federal law on segregation–for reasons now condemned by history.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Our tendency is, as we have said repeatedly, to defend the will of the voters, and to not fear the distinction between this challenge of federal primacy and others in history–because that distinction justifies any superficial contradiction. This is a challenge from the states to federal law that, unlike segregation, is on the right side of history.

And that’s what made libertarians out of so many liberals this year in Colorado.