This is a really great read by Russ Belville containing some great statistics! Great writing, Radical Russ, keep up the good work!

Read it at http://networkedblogs.com/p27683622

FYI, Here in Texas, the Texas Narcotics Officers' Association maintains a stance against marijuana legalization and does actively lobby Texas lawmakers against ending marijuana prohibition in Texas and in favor of increased budgets to fight the War on Marijuana.

Excerpted:

If “cops don’t make laws, they just enforce them”, why are police opposing marijuana legalization?
February 12th, 2010 By: Russ Belville, NORML Outreach Coordinator

Since fourteen states have legalized the use of cannabis for sick and disabled people we here at NORML have reported on numerous stories of medical users harassed, arrested, and jailed by police. We have also reported on healthy adults in all fifty states whose lives are turned upside down by an arrest, sometimes losing student loans, jobs, children, pets, dignity, property, and freedom over a single joint, seed, or even a cannabis stem. When we and others bring up these insane injustices to the police who are making these arrests, we often hear the platitude that “cops don’t make the laws, we just enforce the laws.”

So why do we consistently see representatives of law enforcement opposing medical marijuana, marijuana decriminalization, and marijuana legalization efforts in state legislatures?

...

When asked why, specifically, those police who opposed re-legalization felt that way, eight in ten said that marijuana is a “gateway drug”, there was the danger of “people driving high”, and seven in ten cited the “harm to user and society”. Longtime NORML readers know that the gateway drug theory has been debunked by the Institutes of Medicine in 1999 and every reputable study over the past ten years. While everybody, especially NORML, discourages driving under the influence of cannabis, we understand that there are people behaving irresponsibly now and re-legalization would not encourage less responsibility, but more. Under re-legalization, money raised from taxes could sponsor anti-stoned-driving campaigns like the ones that have successfully reduced drunk driving.