Headache for Mass. Cops: How to Enforce New Marijuana Law

[WSJ_law_blog]

Gerry Leone, Middlesex District Attorney, speaks at a news conference, Sept. 17, 2008. Community leaders opposed Question 2, a proposal to decriminalize marijuana in the Commonwealth. (AP/Bizuayehu Tesafye)


Back in November, Massachusetts voters passed a ballot measure — called Question 2 — that, on Jan. 2, will turn possession of an ounce or less of marijuana into an offense on par with a traffic violation. Now police and prosecutors are wondering how the heck they’re going to enforce it. Here’s the story from the Boston Globe.

Among the questions enforcers are trying to answer:

• What should police do with people caught with several joints who refuse to identify themselves?
• Will state-run laboratories that test drugs seized in criminal cases continue to do so for small quantities of marijuana?
• Will police chiefs discipline officers who spark up a spliff after work?
• Can a judge summarily revoke the probation of a convicted offender on the basis of a citation for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana?

“I’m not suggesting that officers are doing it,” David F. Capeless, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, told the Globe. “But what you’re doing, whether it’s officers or other public employees - transportation workers, bus drivers, teachers - you’re removing a disincentive by saying: ‘We won’t be able to do anything to you. You won’t get disciplined for this. It won’t mean your job. It may mean a $100 fine.’”

Proponents of the change - including financier George Soros, who spent more than $400,000 in favor of decriminalizing marijuana - said it would ensure that those caught with small quantities would avoid the taint of a criminal record.

Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe said he believes that proponents of decriminalization cannily crafted a ballot measure with numerous loopholes in hope that it would be impossible to implement and quickly lead to de facto legalization. “They sold the public a pig in a poke, and the public bought it,” he told the Globe.

As for the hand wringing over enforcement problems, Thomas W. Nolan, a professor of criminal justice at Boston U. and a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Boston Police Department, disagreed. “The nuts and bolts of the implementation of this new law will be worked out incrementally as it’s rolled out,” he told the Globe, “and if there are obstacles, there’s nothing to preclude the state Legislature from fixing it. That’s what we pay state legislators to do.”