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| Stafstrom |
Connecticut Democrats, who dominate the state’s General Assembly, have passed a nearly 300 page pot bill.
Some Republicans thought the bill might easily have been
reduced to a single sentence, something of this sort: “All laws in the state
illegalizing the sale and use of pot in small quantities are now repealed.” The
repeal of such laws would improve crime statistics in the state and reduce
incarceration rates as well. If you decriminalize the use of pot, you may no
longer arrest and incarcerate those who cannot then break a repealed law.
Here is Bridgeport Representative Steven Stafstrom, who
helped to shepherd the preference laden bill through the state House,
celebrating the imminent demise of the war on drugs: “Connecticut’s time has
finally come. We take the next step in recognizing the war on drugs has failed
us, and the criminalization of cannabis was the wrong course of action for our
state and for our nation.”
Actually, Stafstrom may not favor ending the war on some
drug dealers – those who deal in heroine, opium, cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD,
phencyclidine, Psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, Rohypnol (date rape drug), fentanyl,
opioids and, of course, flavored cigarettes aimed at school kids. But why
quibble with one so passionately convinced that the future holds promise for
former criminals who wish to turn their lives around as soon as they can
procure from the state a license to sell pot.
New Haven Democrat Juan Candelaria also celebrated the
passage of the pot bill, which contained, Candelaria said, one of the nation’s
strongest “social equity provisions.”
That provision became a bone of contention in the state
House among progressive Democrats. Initially the House pot bill gave licensing
preferences to those living in cities, including former felons who managed to
stay on the right side of the law years after the completion of their sentences.
In giving licensing preference to former felons who resided in cities, the
initial bill was inequitable by design.
In its course through the legislative sausage machine, some
pixie broadened the licensing preference to include any former felon who met
the strictures of the new pot bill – even a millionaire’s son or daughter in
Greenwich who once had been nabbed for drug possession.
This, said Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont and other
Democrat legislators, violated the spirit of the bill backed by the governor
and majority of Democrats in the General Assembly who could be relied upon to
push the bill forward over the objections of minority party Republicans in the
state legislature. The extension of the equity provision beyond city limits was
destroying a prearranged legislative deal among majority House Democrats.
Lamont then announced he would not sign a bill that awarded preference
in licensing to non-urban geographic areas. Any expansion of equity to the
children of millionaires, or even middle class drudges who had been nabbed under the now discarded “war on
drugs” regimen, Lamont’s Chief of Staff, Paul Mounds, huffed, would result in “equity in name only” and open “the floodgates for tens of thousands of
previously ineligible [petitioning] applicants to enter the adult-use cannabis
industry.”
By adding an amendment that had expanded equity provisions
to non-city dwellers, the amenders had thoughtlessly destroyed an inequitable
provision designed to give licensing preferences to former urban lawbreakers. By
enlarging equity, Lamont’s mouthpiece said, the amenders might have opened the
door for a person from a wealthy community who was once caught with a single
joint to become an “equity applicant.”
“Equity,” we should all understand going forward, is not “equality
under the law.” Equality under the law means that no one is above or below the
law, that the protections provided by law should apply equally to all. Equity
is a political attempt that should be resisted by any court in the nation that
has built its house on the firm foundational principle of law itself as
enshrined in both statutory and constitutional law. To put it in other words,
equality under the law is non-discriminatory; and equity is discriminatory,
usually in an arbitrary manner. The drug law that had in the past treated both the
millionaire’s son and the non-millionaire’s son in an equal manner assured both
that the law would apply equally to everyone.
Now that pot laws in Connecticut have been effectively repealed,
a licensing law that applies equally to a millionaire’s son and to the son of a
non-millionaire in an urban area, architects of equity tell us, is no assurance of equity. And indeed since equity relies in this instance upon invidious discrimination, equality under the law must be given the boot.
The pot bill is nearly 300 pages long because the bill
attempts to enforce equity rather than legal equality. And in so doing the new
pot bill must turn the law, the market place, sociological structures and the
human conscience upside down. That the General Assembly may with impunity turn
the world on its head in this fashion means – if it means anything at all –
that we have bid goodbye to liberty, justice, democratic government, and
equality under the law.
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