Baraka on Expungement: ‘The Onus Should not be on Individuals but Should be put on the State Itself’
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Assembly Appropriations Chairman John Burzichelli (D-3) summoned Newark Mayor Ras Baraka to the microphone to testify on bills impacting the recreational legalization of marijuana.
Baraka went forward in the statehouse committee room.
“I’m not here to discuss pro or con around this bill,” Baraka said.
He just wants the bill to superceed what is happening in California and Montana.
In essence, the mayor wants to lessen the burden of those seeking expungement.
It’s an expensive and large undertaking, he noted.
“The onus should not be on individuals but should be put on the state itself,” Baraka said. “It is highly hypocritical to say we are going to legalize marijuana and ‘you have to stay in jail.'”
The mayor described individuals incarcerated for marijuana possession or distribution as “victimized.”
“Anything related to marijuana in a nonviolent way should be removed,” he told the appropriations committee.
Marijuana consumers deserve and demand equal rights and protections under our laws that are currently afforded to the drinkers of far more dangerous and deadly, yet perfectly legal, widely accepted, endlessly advertised and even glorified as an All-American pastime, alcohol.
Plain and simple!
Legalize Nationwide!
It’s time for us, the majority of The People to take back control of our national marijuana policy. By voting OUT of office any and all politicians who very publicly and vocally admit to having an anti-marijuana, prohibitionist agenda! Time to vote’em all OUT of office. Period. Plain and simple.
Politicians who continue to demonize Marijuana, Corrupt Law Enforcement Officials who prefer to ruin peoples lives over Marijuana possession rather than solve real crimes who fund their departments toys and salaries with monies acquired through Marijuana home raids, seizures and forfeitures, and so-called “Addiction Specialists” who make their income off of the judicial misfortunes of our citizens who choose marijuana, – Your actions go against The Will of The People and Your Days In Office Are Numbered! Find new careers before you don’t have one.
The People have spoken! Get on-board with Marijuana Legalization Nationwide, or be left behind and find new careers. Your choice.
Marijuana Consumers Are Not Criminals!
End the systematically failed both state and federal policies of criminalizing consumers of a natural, relatively benign plant proven to be far safer than perfectly legal, widely accepted alcohol and tobacco.
End The Federal Prohibition of Marijuana Now!
Legalize Nationwide! State by state if need be!
It’s time our country wakes up and learns from our history.
Prohibition does not prevent people from consuming marijuana. The demand will be there always and therefore marijuana will always be served up to the public regardless of marijuana prohibition laws. The alcohol prohibition era criminal organizations and gangsters such as Al Capone of yesteryear are the Pablo Escobar, El Chapo and drug cartels of today.
Moral socialism and The Temperance Movement didn’t catch on and last in part because it was a dead horse from the start.
Prohibition only serves to further fuel the vast wealth and corruption, violence and death attributed to the criminal organizations which flourish under it by providing marijuana to meet the continual demand at inflated prices. Just like with alcohol, marijuana prohibition doesn’t work, makes no sense, and costs the tax payers a fortune yearly.
Legalization creates jobs, improves the economy and let’s us as a nation focus the wasted resources currently used to criminalize citizens over marijuana towards things much more needed and useful.
This is how freedoms get taken away from The People. First, a small moral socialist minority doesn’t personally approve of marijuana. Tomorrow, it’s R-Rated movies, certain books and literature and eventually that minority aspires to make every citizen conform to their personal sense of morality through laws which criminalize everything that they personally don’t approve of.
Tell us something prohibitionists:
Why do you feel justified in endlessly wasting billions upon billions of our yearly tax dollars continuing to arrest, criminalize, incarcerate, and hand out life long permanent criminal records to otherwise hard-working, tax-paying, adult citizens for choosing to consume marijuana although it is far safer than perfectly legal, widely accepted alcohol?
Shouldn’t their first and foremost priority be protesting the legality of alcohol if they really aren’t just biased and truly so cornered about other people on what those whom oppose marijuana legalization deem to be a “dangerous drug”?
Why do the anti-marijuana folk apply such a blatantly obvious unfair double standard to far less dangerous marijuana that they obviously don’t apply equally to far more deadly, dangerous and harmful yet perfectly legal, widely accepted alcohol?
Legalize Nationwide!