Colorado Democratic Party supports Amendment 64

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by: ColoRabble

(Color me pleasantly surprised. (It’s a kind of periwinkle, with shades of orchid.) – promoted by ProgressiveCowgirl)

POLS UPDATE: As clarified by Westword’s Michael Roberts, this has become a bit of a semantic quibble between supporters of Amendment 64 and the Colorado Democrats:

Just received a call from Matt Inzeo, communications director for the Colorado Democratic Party, and he says the claim that the CDP has endorsed Amendment 64 is technically inaccurate despite the actions in Pueblo this weekend.

According to Inzeo, a formal endorsement can only come from the state central committee, not the state convention and assembly. As such, the votes that took place over the weekend “indicate support, but not an endorsement,” he says.

In other words, this is a matter of semantics. With that in mind, variations on the word “endorse” that appeared in this item’s headline and text have been changed to “support.”

We’ve edited this user diary’s title to reflect this clarification, and it’s probably worth restating that the word “endorsement” has a precise and formal meaning.

—–

(Disclosure: I am a proponent of Amendment 64.)

The Colorado Democratic Party adopted a platform at its state convention and assembly on Saturday that includes an endorsement of Amendment 64, the initiative to regulate marijuana like alcohol.

Michael Roberts at Westword reports:

Last month, a majority of attendees at the Denver Republican Assembly backed Amendment 64, the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act. And enthusiasm is even more widespread among Democrats. Saturday’s Dem state convention and assembly in Pueblo formally endorsed Amendment 64 — an action that proves to proponent Mason Tvert that the measure has growing appeal across party lines.

“While there may be more support among Democrats and independents, this is quickly becoming a popular position,” Tvert says. “Supporting an end to marijuana prohibition and regulating marijuana like alcohol is a position that spans the political and ideological spectrum.”

This view is echoed by Cindy Lowery-Graber, chair of the Denver Democratic Party. In a statement, she argues that “this is a mainstream issue. Polls show that more than 60 percent of Democrats and a solid majority of independents believe marijuana should be treated like alcohol. A broad coalition is forming in support of Amendment 64 and I am proud to say that it now includes the Colorado Democratic Party.”

The endorsement is in part the product of a strong grassroots effort that resulted in hundreds of precincts and more than a dozen counties adopting resolutions in support of the endorsement.

Indeed, fifteen counties, including eight of the ten largest, have adopted resolutions supporting the regulation of marijuana like alcohol. They are: El Paso, Denver, Jefferson, Larimer, Boulder, Douglas, Weld, Pueblo, Garfield, Eagle, La Plata, Delta, Routt, Elbert and Pitkin.

7 thoughts on “Colorado Democratic Party supports Amendment 64”

allyncooper says:

April 16, 2012 at 9:51 pm

Republicans, Democrats, independents and even Pat Robertson have now endorsed Amendment 64. Rumor has it an endorsement by the Pope may be just a matter of time.

Remember, you heard it here first on Pols.

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1. ProgressiveCowgirl says:
  
  April 16, 2012 at 10:22 pm
  
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ProgressiveCowgirl says:

April 16, 2012 at 10:25 pm

I watched from my little seat in the back row as the CDP attempted to keep a candidate off the ballot at assembly, employing several tricks that struck even my wee-cowgirl self as dirty, solely because that candidate supported marijuana legalization. Around the same time, I waved a sign at a protest when a local woman was tried for contempt of court because she had not disclosed during jury selection for a marijuana related trial that she was a marijuana user and in possession of cannabis during the screening. (Yep — charged with a crime for not voluntarily incriminating herself.)

It’s a damned shame that it’s taken so long for the party to come around to this point, and frankly I’m shocked–in a good way–that they’ve done so now. Praise be.

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Sir Robin says:

April 16, 2012 at 10:48 pm

Astounded! Obama!

. From the LA Times:

Facing calls at a regional summit to consider decriminalization, Obama said he is open to a debate about drug policy, but he believes that legalization could lead to greater problems in countries hardest hit by drug-fueled violence.

“Legalization is not the answer,” Obama told other hemispheric leaders at the two-day Summit of the Americas.

“The capacity of a large-scale drug trade to dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint could be just as corrupting, if not more corrupting, than the status quo,” he said.

This is simply an absurd defense of prohibition. If drugs were legalized and regulated like any other product, the business running them would be operate like any other legal business such as beer breweries, pharmaceutical makers, car manufacturers, alcohol distillers, dairies, etc. While corporations can and sometimes do have a corrupting influence over a nation’s politics, the idea that the level of corruption and violence from a legal business would ever be on the scale that we see with the cartels in the illicit drug trade doesn’t pass the laugh test.

I’ve never seen stories about Grupo Medelo, the brewer of Corona, offering local politicians the choice of the “silver or the lead.” Legal breweries simply don’t assassinate dozens of local politicians, police officers and reporters to get their way. Rival Tequila distillers compete with each other for market share using advertising and sometimes lobbying to get a tax or regulatory advantage, but they don’t use armed gangs to fight for market control in a bloody war that cost 50,000 Mexicans their lives. Legal car manufacturers don’t employ criminals to dissolve hundreds of their enemies in acid.

Just as the end of alcohol prohibition in America caused legal and law abiding businesses to replace the deeply corrupt and violent mafia in the American alcohol trade, ending the prohibition against other drugs, like marijuana, would result in law abiding businesses replacing the cartels.

If this pathetic defense is the best President Obama can offer to justify the continuation of a policy that is literally killing thousand of people a year, that is truly sad.

The one positive note is that the growing push for ending the failed “war on . . .” approach, both domestically and internationally, is forcing the federal government to continue to confront and address calls for reform.

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1. ProgressiveCowgirl says:
  
  April 16, 2012 at 11:20 pm
  
  But President Obama has two responsibilities that Senator Obama never had:
  
  1) Keeping the piece with allied nations that don’t want legalization
  
  2) Maintaining national security operations in Latin America, which seem to be largely dependent on the illicit drug trade
  
  Editorial is kind of bogus, too. You can treat marijuana like beer, but not heroin. Heroin is so addictive that people in Russia who can’t afford H are busily injecting a corrosive substitute that causes you to decay while still alive and kills you in less than a year. Cars and beer are not so powerfully lethal and powerfully addictive that someone with no car and no beer will cheerfully inject poison just because it feels similar.
  
  Not all drugs are pot. I personally think something close to full decriminalization of everything is really a necessity, but that’s hardly an easy stance to take when American demand is already blamed for drug-related violence throughout the rest of the world. American demand for drugs like heroin and cocaine won’t decrease with legalization, and even the black market wouldn’t be eliminated if illegal drug trading could result in prices that undercut legal, regulated manufacture and sale.
  
  That said, I do think he’s wrong: For one thing, even if the black market persisted initially, eventually legalization would lead to development of much cheaper products, to the point that even very heavy taxation could not deflate prices enough to give illegal dealers a competitive edge. The only thing they could (and likely would) do is to get into the legal business and attempt to use it as a money-laundering outlet for their continued criminal operations — nobody with as much power as the cartels have gives it up just because their industry changes.
  
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ColoRabble says:

April 17, 2012 at 12:40 am

Just came on-line to add it and lo and behold it was already here.

On behalf of the campaign I apologize for any confusion. It had been our understanding that the adoption of an “essential plank”of the 2012 platform expressly supporting Amendment 64 constituted an endorsement of the initiative. We were not aware of the party’s policy for official “endorsements.” It is worth noting that, while the state party plank uses the phrase, “We support Amendment 64,” many of the counties that adopted similar planks used the phrase, “We endorse Amendment 64.”

Regardless, the campaign is very pleased to have the support of the Colorado Democratic Party.

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1. Phoenix Rising says:
  
  April 17, 2012 at 5:06 am
  
  with no audible dissent that I could detect.
  
  (For those with a history attending CDP state conventions, this is probably a first.)
  
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