— Photo by Biswarup Ganguly
VERNON, Conn.
Connecticut Democrats, who dominate the state’s General Assembly, have passed a nearly 300-page pot bill.
Some Republicans thought that the bill might easily have been reduced to a single sentence, something of this sort: “All laws in the state illegalizing the sale and use of pot in small quantities are now repealed.” The repeal of such laws would improve crime statistics in the state and reduce incarceration rates as well. If you decriminalize the use of pot, you may no longer arrest and incarcerate those who cannot then break a repealed law.
Here is Bridgeport Rep. Steven Stafstrom, who helped to shepherd the preference-laden bill through the state House, celebrating the imminent demise of the war on drugs: “Connecticut’s time has finally come. We take the next step in recognizing the war on drugs has failed us, and the criminalization of cannabis was the wrong course of action for our state and for our nation.”
Actually, Stafstrom may not favor ending the war on some drug dealers – those who deal in heroine, opium, cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD, phencyclidine, Psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, Rohypnol (date rape drug), fentanyl, opioids and, of course, flavored cigarettes aimed at school kids. But why quibble with one so passionately convinced that the future holds promise for former criminals who wish to turn their lives around as soon as they can procure from the state a license to sell pot.
New Haven Democrat Juan Candelaria also celebrated the passage of the pot bill, which contained, Candelaria said, one of the nation’s strongest “social equity provisions.”
That provision became a bone of contention in the state House among progressive Democrats. Initially the House pot bill gave licensing preferences to those living in cities, including former felons who managed to stay on the right side of the law years after the completion of their sentences. In giving licensing preference to former felons who resided in cities, the initial bill was inequitable by design.
In its course through the legislative sausage machine, some pixie broadened the licensing preference to include any former felon who met the strictures of the new pot bill – even a millionaire’s son or daughter in Greenwich who once had been nabbed for drug possession.
This, said other Democratic legislators, as well as Gov. Ned Lamont, violated the spirit of the bill backed by the governor and majority of Democrats in the General Assembly who could be relied upon to push the bill forward over the objections of minority party Republicans in the legislature. The extension of the equity provision beyond city limits was destroying a prearranged legislative deal among majority House Democrats.
Lamont then announced that he would not sign a bill that awarded preference in licensing to non-urban geographic areas. Any expansion of equity to the children of millionaires, or even middle-class drudges who had been nabbed under the now discarded “war on drugs” regimen, Lamont’s chief of staff, Paul Mounds, huffed, would result in “equity in name only” and open “the floodgates for tens of thousands of previously ineligible [petitioning] applicants to enter the adult-use cannabis industry.”
By adding an amendment that had expanded equity provisions to non-city dwellers, the amenders had thoughtlessly destroyed an inequitable provision designed to give licensing preferences to former urban lawbreakers. By enlarging equity, Lamont’s mouthpiece said, the amenders might have opened the door for a person from a wealthy community who was once caught with a single joint to become an “equity applicant.”
“Equity,” we should all understand going forward, is not “equality under the law.” Equality under the law means that no one is above or below the law, that the protections provided by law should apply equally to all. Equity is a political attempt that should be resisted by any court in the nation that has built its house on the firm foundational principle of law itself as enshrined in both statutory and constitutional law. To put it in other words, equality under the law is non-discriminatory; and equity is discriminatory, usually in an arbitrary manner. The drug law that had in the past treated both the millionaire’s son and the non-millionaire’s son in an equal manner assured both that the law would apply equally to everyone.
Now that pot laws in Connecticut are being effectively repealed, a licensing law that applies equally to a millionaire’s son and to the son of a non-millionaire in an urban area, architects of equity tell us, is no assurance of equity. And indeed, since equity relies in this instance upon invidious discrimination, equality under the law must be given the boot.
The pot bill is nearly 300 pages long because the bill attempts to enforce equity rather than legal equality. And in so doing the new pot bill must turn the law, the market place, sociological structures and the human conscience upside down. That the General Assembly may with impunity turn the world on its head in this fashion means – if it means anything at all – that we have bid goodbye to liberty, justice, democratic government, and equality under the law.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
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