For a better justice system, Florida should legalize recreational marijuana. Here’s why.

The way Florida handles low-level marijuana possession is ineffective, destructive, racially biased and detached from modern sentiment. It’s a good thing voters have a chance to rectify all that in the Nov. 5 election. Legalizing adult-use recreational marijuana can’t get here soon enough. Our justice system snares too many otherwise law-abiding people for simply possessing a substance that in many ways is less dangerous than alcohol. The upsides of legalization overwhelm the downsides. Florida should join the two dozen other states that have made this important change.

Amendment 3 is on the ballot through a citizens initiative. If approved by 60% of the voters, the amendment would allow people over 21 years old to possess up to 3 ounces — or about 85 grams — of recreational marijuana. Currently, possession of 20 grams or less without a medical marijuana card is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year behind bars. Having more is a felony.

In 2016, Florida voters approved a medical marijuana system, which helped bolster acceptance of the drug. In recent years, some jurisdictions have issued civil citations to people caught with small amounts of marijuana instead of charging them with crimes. Both are positive steps, but they don’t go far enough. Last year, Florida prosecutors filed charges against about 16,000 people for small amounts of marijuana, a Times analysis found. That’s 16,000 too many.

States that legalize adult use usually see a massive drop in marijuana arrests. Colorado tallied 13,225 marijuana arrests in 2012, the year the state voted for legalization. By 2019, the number had plummeted to 4,290, according to a report from the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice. Other states have seen drops in the 50% to 70% range.

Ricky Dixon, secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, has said that none of the state’s 87,000 inmates are serving prison time exclusively for possessing 20 grams or less of marijuana. But people can end up in local jails and have their lives upended in so many other needless ways. Someone convicted of a marijuana charge can lose their job. A conviction can also make it harder to secure housing. It can make a person ineligible for certain government grants and contracts, and can open them up to further arrest and incarceration for probation violations. The arrest also saddles them with legal fees and fines. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime because possession of small amounts of marijuana shouldn’t be a crime.

More consequences

Arresting an otherwise law-abiding resident for behavior that polls show most people don’t think should be a crime undermines faith in the justice system. To be effective, police and prosecutors need to build trust. They need communities to support what they are doing. Each one of these low-level marijuana arrests chips away at that trust. Eventually, all those chips compromise the foundation. If police arrested thousands of Floridians for buying a bottle of wine or a couple of beers, how quickly would they distrust law enforcement? Low-level marijuana arrests have that same harmful effect.

So, too, does racial profiling — real or perceived. For decades, police have arrested Black and brown people for small amounts of marijuana at much higher rates than white people, despite research that shows the different groups use marijuana at about the same rate. That type of discrepancy raises all sorts of questions that undermine faith in the system, especially given that marijuana possession is not a violent crime. The insidious effect of these unneeded arrests on the relationship between the police and certain communities should not be underestimated. Legalizing adult-use marijuana won’t solve every racial issue, but it would be a move in the right direction.

Making so many low-level marijuana arrests also pulls police away from preventing or solving higher-level crimes. The paperwork takes time, as does transporting people to jail or showing up in court to testify against the defendant. That is time better spent on other crime-control measures.

Legalizing adult-use marijuana is also safer in many ways. Buying marijuana from a street-level drug dealer comes with far more inherent dangers than buying it from a regulated supplier. In a legal market, the transactions occur at legitimate businesses, not on the streets or in clandestine meetings. Florida would be better off with American businesses running the marijuana industry than criminal cartels. Businesses use the law to solve disputes. Cartels use violence. There is even evidence that the legalization of recreational marijuana in so many states has eroded the Mexican cartel’s cannabis profits.

Instead, a slice of those profits are ending up in state coffers. Colorado has collected nearly $2.8 billion in marijuana taxes and fees in the decade since legalization. Last year, Washington state collected nearly $469 million. The Florida Financial Impact Estimating Conference projected that legalizing recreational marijuana would generate $195 million to $432 million in annual state and county sales taxes. Those estimates don’t include the additional marijuana tax — called an excise tax — that many states like Colorado and Washington add to marijuana sales. With a similar excise tax, the estimated tally for Florida would be much higher. Less money for criminal cartels. More to spend on state programs — or to lower other taxes. That’s a win-win.

Mitigating the risks

Of course, legalizing recreational marijuana raises legitimate concerns. Many states that have taken the step have seen an increase in marijuana use, though the trend lines were often on the way up before legalization. Some studies found that adult use of marijuana in states that have not legalized recreational marijuana also has increased. Surveys also show that marijuana is seen far more favorably by a lot more people than 25 years ago. So, is rising marijuana use a consequence of legalization or the cause of it? More research is needed.

States that legalize recreational marijuana generally see an increase in marijuana-related hospitalizations, though the total numbers are relatively small — and the consequences generally less serious — than for other drugs, including alcohol. Some states have seen an uptick in marijuana-related traffic fatalities, but many of the studies point out that testing positive for marijuana does not mean that someone was intoxicated at the time of the crash. Some of the crash analyses also failed to look at whether the increase in marijuana-involved fatalities was offset by a decrease in alcohol or other drug-related traffic fatalities.

What the available data doesn’t support is the often-made claim that legalizing adult use will lead to significantly more use by teenagers. The study results are mixed, though the most-cited ones didn’t find a significant increase — or decrease — in middle and high school students using marijuana after a state legalized adult use. And the findings on whether legal marijuana is a gateway to using harder drugs are murky at best. The same goes for the talking points that legalizing marijuana leads to more violence or that marijuana users are significantly less productive than nonusers. As for “reefer madness,” the rates of psychosis-related diagnoses or prescribed antipsychotics in states with medical or recreational marijuana aren’t much different from states where marijuana remains illegal, some studies found.

Passing Amendment 3 won’t unleash a marijuana free-for-all, no matter how much opponents want you to believe it. Florida can set rules and regulations governing everything from who can sell legal marijuana to how much it is taxed. Don’t want people to smoke it in public? The Legislature can pass a law, just like with smoking cigarettes. Don’t want marijuana dispensaries near schools? Write that into the regulations. Want labels that detail what is in each marijuana blend? States have done that, too.

More than half of the country’s population lives in states with legal recreational marijuana. Those states encountered challenges, but they didn’t turn into modern-day Gomorrahs. Plenty of officials in those states thought recreational marijuana would be a scourge, only to soften their position once reality set in. For instance, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper campaigned against legalization in 2012 only to later concede that he was wrong on some of his predictions, including about increased use by teenagers. Florida can learn from the states that already set up regulations, incorporating what worked best while avoiding missteps.

Florida can also spend the additional tax money to bolster drug treatment or campaigns to keep people off drugs, programs that are often far more effective than criminalizing nonviolent drug use. Some jurisdictions have used the money to hire more police officers or build schools, both more beneficial to society than clogging up the court system with low-level marijuana-possession cases.

Florida already legalized medical marijuana, so we aren’t going to spend much time rehashing the health arguments. Marijuana is not a cure-all. Yes, it has some medical benefits, pain management and anxiety relief among them. It also has some health consequences, especially for chronic users. Eating sugary cereals daily is unhealthy, yet no one is getting arrested or jailed for possessing Froot Loops or Cap’n Crunch. That’s our main point. Too many Floridians end up on the wrong side of the law for engaging in the relatively benign behavior of possessing marijuana. People should have the right to be left alone absent a good reason, and the reasons for criminalizing marijuana possession aren’t good enough. In fact, they fall far short of meeting that standard. Thankfully, Floridians have a chance to make this right.

On Amendment 3, the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board recommends voting Yes.