By Tom O’Connell, MD
Proposition 46, which made this year’s California ballot seems to be one of those ambitious initiatives that simply tries to solve problems beyond its sponsors’ expertise; primarily because It addresses them without an understanding of how they were generated. Here’s a handy explanation of its origins and the fierce dedication of the couple behind it.
What follows is my take on other well intentioned initiatives that have had adverse social consequences
Heads up on Prop46, another ill-conceived attempt to fix the wrong problem.
A little over 21 years ago, the knife-point abduction of an appealing 12-year-old junior high school student named Polly Klaas from mother’s home in suburban California generated the kind of headlines that unsettle parents everywhere. The man responsible would eventually be identified as Richard Allen Davis, a career criminal with an extensive record. It would also turn out that a series of failures by local police may have kept them from apprehending Davis shortly after the abduction. In any event, he eventually confessed to strangling Klaas and led police to her shallow grave in early December.
Davis was eventually convicted of murder and sentenced to death in June 1996, after a long “tumultuous” trial after which his defiantly obnoxious behavior prompted Mark Klass, Polly’s father to predict hopefully that he’d be murdered in prison; however, 18 years later, Davis is still alive on San Quentin’s death row.
In the aftermath of his trial, California was moved to pass its ill-conceived “3 strikes and you’re out” law which only added to its huge prison population without making streets any safer in ways that can be convincingly demonstrated. The cherished American notion that prison rehabilitates and long sentences are good for society has simply not been borne out in any way would justify the enormous expense and human suffering they entail.
Another example of how incarceration reality differs from belief is the Controlled Substances Act, a terribly ill-conceived law that has created more problems than it has solved in the 44 years since it became both American and global policy. It too has played a major role in expanding our prison population which has increased fourfold since the CSA was passed 197O.
Unfortunately, proposition 46 will probably add to our current problems because it is burdened with many of the same questionable assumptions plaguing our drug policy, particularly the idea that drug testing works. in fact, because it relies so heavily on testing, it will strengthen support for the Controlled Substances Act which is particularly unfortunate because cannabis, which can be detected so readily, is far more than a safe “recreational drug.” Rather, it’s an amazingly versatile medicine. Yet people are punished for a positive drug test.
Although there is no doubt that modern intolerance of drunken driving has had commendable effect on highway accidents and related deaths there is no evidence that drug testing for cannabis, in the absence of evidence of impaired performance, either reduces accidents or is cost-effective. In fact, quite the opposite. The reason is quite simple: the controlled substances act simply assumes (mistakenly) that testing positive is evidence of impairment, which is the opposite of the truth.
There are other reasons to dislike Prop 46; I’ll get to them in another post.
