In honor of Throwback Thursday, we’re taking a look today at how two top cops in Washington, D.C. have had starkly differing views on marijuana laws.

In 1998, District of Columbia voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to legalize medical cannabis. They did so in the face of strenuous objections from Charles H. Ramsey, then chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, who called the measure “extremely risky public policy that threatens both public health and public safety.”

In a statement to the press released less than two weeks before Election Day, Ramsey said that allowing physicians to recommend medical marijuana to seriously ill patients would “seriously hamstring the efforts of police and communities to rid our neighborhoods of this dangerous drug and the serious crime problems associated with it.”

Ramsey wrote that approving the measure would be “a sure-fire prescription for more marijuana, more illegal use and more marijuana-related violence in our neighborhoods.”

Giving people suffering from cancer and AIDS legal access to medical cannabis would “weaken our efforts to remove illegal marijuana from the streets of our city and stem the crime and violence that are all too often associated with this dangerous drug,” he said.

In contrast, current D.C. police chief Cathy L. Lanier said that the city’s more recently enacted law legalizing marijuana possession for all adults over 21 makes police officer’s jobs “a little bit easier.”

Legalization “saves us from having to charge someone for small amounts of marijuana now, because it really never was productive to begin with,” she said, calling such arrests “a waste of time.”

“Marijuana smokers are not going to attack and kill a cop,” she said. “All those arrests do is make people hate us.”

While the rest of the country — including many other members of …read more

Source:: Weed Feed