In the 1980s, Denver’s economy faltered. Its steel industry contracted, resulting in the loss of 30,000 jobs in the city alone, while the overall unemployment rate in Colorado rose to 8.5 percent. But the city has experienced an economic resurgence over the last two decades. Since 2000, the metro area’s GDP has almost doubled, while the population has grown 17 percent. Aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing took advantage of Denver’s unique location in America and paved the way for over 130 aerospace companies to exist there today, with some support from local universities like the University of Colorado Boulder. At the same time, recreational marijuana was legalized by Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2014, which brings $14 million in taxes to Denver every year, and, to date, $769 million to the state of Colorado. Despite these advances and the growing Denver economy, the city’s homeless population grew over 20 percent in 2017 alone, while the average price of a one-bedroom home surpassed $500,000. Watch the video above to see how Denver’s resurgence changed the trajectory of the Mile High City.
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#AmericaResurgent is a five-part series that elevates the changemakers, approaches and innovations that are driving urban revitalization across the nation. See the rest of the series here, and watch for the next three installments in the weeks to come.
Sure, everything’s bigger in Texas. Except, that is, jail sentences for casual stoners who get caught toking up. Houston’s newly elected district attorney, Kim Ogg, is issuing the lightest sentence the statute allows for in cases for minor marijuana possession. Instead of being tossed behind bars, most pot smokers can pay $150 fine and take a four-hour-long class on decision-making. Plus, the incident is kept off their record. Ogg, a Democrat, made the push for leniency the centerpiece of her 2016 campaign for district attorney. It was a bold gamble when running against a Republican incumbent in a red state known for being tough on crime, but Ogg managed to gain conservative votes by pledging to go after “violent criminals, burglars and white-collar thieves,” instead. She won byeight points. Criminal justice reformers did not see Ogg’s win as new freedom to light up a joint, but as an electoral strategy that could offer a roadmap for changing drug policy in traditionally strict counties across the country. Theoretically, they don’t need to write new laws; they can vote out incumbents that read laws as mandates to incarcerate drug users. During the campaign for Houston District Attorney, Kim Ogg was a vocal proponent of eliminating jail sentences for minor marijuana possession. The concept, of course, has its critics. Next door in Montgomery County, District Attorney Brett Ligon told theHouston Chronicle that Ogg was making Houston into a “sanctuary for dope smokers.” Additionally, it’s unclear if any of the money typically spent misdemeanor marijuana prosecutions will be saved. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner referred to the program as “cost efficient,” but several officials say that taxpayers likely won’t see a dime. Instead, resources will be spent on more dangerous threats to public safety. “Harris County has spent more than $200 million in the past decade on more than 100,000 cases of misdemeanor marijuana possession,” Ogg said. “The endeavor has had no tangible public safety benefit.” Rather, the marijuana crackdown “has deprived neighborhoods of officers’ time that could be spent patrolling communities, jail beds that could be used for violent criminals, crime lab resources needed for DNA testing and judicial court time that could be spent bringing serious criminals to justice.” Research shows that lenient drug policies such as this can result in lower recidivism rates. In Houston, it’s too early to tell. A person can retake the class repeatedly, so long as they are eligible. But prosecutors can also label someone a “serial offender” and argue to a judge for a stricter punishment. For now, the district attorney’s office is riding (ahem) high. Since the program launched on March 1, almost 900 people have avoided jail time and law enforcement is focusing its attention on break-ins and violence assaults instead. MORE:To Reduce Drug Use, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization Homepage photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.
A former undercover narc who busted drug dealers in Baltimore, Maj. Neill Franklin is an unlikely advocate for loosening America’s drug laws. Even more unexpected is the fact that he probably holds the most liberal views of all those lobbying Congress for reform. But Franklin, more than anyone, also has the credentials to back up his talking points. He says his 23 years with the Maryland State Police Department — spent confronting addicts, hauling in dealers, training cops to search and seize narcotics — convinced him that the War on Drugs has failed. He believes substance abuse must be treated as a public health issue, not a law enforcement operation.
“In simple terms, the War on Drugs is the criminalization of people who use and sell drugs,” says Franklin, now the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an educational nonprofit that has swelled to 160,000 members since its founding. “It is the policy we have chosen in managing this use of drugs which has become more problematic than drug use itself.”
Franklin got a first-hand look as one of the war’s foot soldiers trying to stop the flow of marijuana and heroin into Baltimore. “Initially, I thought they deserved [jail time],” Franklin says. “We used the lingo: We called them dirt-balls, anything you can think of — junkies, degenerates.” Franklin saw young kids, barely 10 years old, acting as lookouts for crews involved in the drug trade, and he saw bodies of rival gang members, killed in shootouts and drive-bys. Upset, he initially responded to the violence with crackdowns. After each arrest, “all we did was create job openings that others fought for,” he soon realized. Neill Franklin (right) in 1979, when he worked as a trooper.
He lost all hope in waging a punitive battle against narcotics in 2000, when his good friend Ed Toatley, a 37-year-old trooper with the Maryland State Police Department, was killed in an undercover drug buy. Sitting in an SUV, Toatley handed a 23-year-old dealer $3,000 in cash. Instead of delivering the drugs, the dealer shot the decorated officer in the head. Investigators say Toatley’s cover wasn’t blown; the dealer just planned to rip off his competitor.
Research, combined with some heavy thinking, convinced him to alter his views. Able to spout off statistics like he’s reading them from a book, Franklin points out that since the War on Drugs began, more than 39 million have been arrested for nonviolent drug offenses — many of them black and Hispanic — quadrupling the prison population and costing us a trillion-and-a-half dollars in criminal justice-related costs (cops, courts, prison cells). Community relations with police throughout the country are strained, Franklin speculates, because of negative interactions from drug searches and arrests. The drugs themselves, he adds, are cheaper, more available and stronger than four decades ago. To him, that appears to be a losing strategy.
Franklin, who is African-American, didn’t immediately know what to do with his change of heart. He discovered LEAP’s website in 2003, a couple years after it developed out of a conversation between two cops. One was Jack Cole, a retired detective with the New Jersey State Police who spent 14 of his 26-year career arresting users. (He came to believe that serving time turned these individuals into criminals.) The other was Peter Christ, a retired police captain from upstate New York who took a libertarian slant on the issue: thinking that people should have the freedom to choose what substances they wanted to use. Hearing from other officers who shared their views, they created LEAP and expanded its ranks to include representatives from every aspect of law enforcement that deals with drugs — cops, sheriff deputies, DEA and FBI agents, prosecutors, judges, prison wardens and probation officers — to share a unified message with voters. Franklin signed up in 2008.
Converted, Franklin advocates full legalization of drugs (from marijuana to heroin). This seems to mark a major shift from his work as a cop, where he would make an arrest for even a trace amount of an illegal substance. But in a way, Franklin’s position hasn’t changed that much. He doesn’t want it to be a free-for-all for hard drugs (which is pretty much what we have now, he believes), but he thinks they should be regulated so that their use can be monitored. That oversight reduces the likelihood of an overdose and gives professionals an opening to provide education and possibly, medical treatment for addiction. In essence, it’s the same as existing regulations for alcohol and cigarettes.
Franklin doesn’t expect an overnight shift in policy, but he does hope that the legalization of marijuana in some states will be an impetus for further change. “The linchpin is marijuana,” he says. “I think if we could take one drug — and marijuana is good because it’s so prevalent — and change the policy to legalize it, regulate and control it, people will see a number of things. Number one: they see, wow, the sky didn’t fall,” he says.
Nor does he believe there will be an uptick in abuse of pot or a rise in fatal car accidents in the four states and in the District of Columbia where marijuana is legal for recreational use; instead, he predicts, fewer costs in law enforcement resources in both time and tax dollars, more sales tax revenue, a boon for sluggish job markets, a decrease in alcohol abuse and a drop in painkiller overdoses. If he’s right, and legalization in Colorado, Washington and other early adopters is a success, Franklin says it will be much easier to broach the more radical topics of legalization, such as treatment centers where a person could receive methadone or heroin, changes in the law to require all cops to carry naloxone (which reverses opioid poisoning) and giving amnesty to good samaritans who report ODs.
These are far more radical proposals than most you’ll hear on Capitol Hill. Several groups — National Organizational for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Americans for Safe Access, the Marijuana Policy Project and Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access — focus explicitly on legalizing marijuana (not other illegal substances), sometimes only for medical purposes. Even the Drug Policy Alliance, perhaps the highest-profile advocacy group for reform, has limited its message to legalizing marijuana and a select group of psychedelics like MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly), LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. The group is pushing to pilot supervised injection facilities in San Francisco and New York, but it largely pushes off which other drugs should be legalized as an unsolved question, according to a platform on the group’s website. Neill Franklin at a Students for Sensible Drug Policy Conference, where he was a keynote speaker and panelist.
Although it’s become the face of some legalization campaigns, LEAP primarily operates as “a speakers bureau,” Franklin says. At first, they took their message to anyone that would listen: Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, college campuses. Today, they win audiences in the halls of Congress. Their persuasive power comes from their knowledge of the black market, similar to the way that Vietnam Veterans Against the War once spun their firsthand experience into a pacifist message. Notably, this allows LEAP to go toe-to-toe with other law enforcement groups, even as it delivers a stronger message than most drug advocacy groups, who are fearful of using the “L-word.” “We have always used the word [legalization]. We tend to be a few steps ahead of everyone else. We can do that. We’re cops, we’re judges. We can push the envelope.”
Still, the work is a constant uphill battle. Retired captains, for instance, are willing to be vocal, but it’s tough for LEAP to recruit active-duty cops as speakers. “Many who have signed on as members — not speakers — do it covertly because they face retribution,” Franklin says, listing several highly publicized examples of firings because those individuals shared LEAP’s views. One arose at the Mexican-American border in Deming, N.M., where a young Border Patrol agent, Bryan Gonzalez, expressed his frustration with how pot’s criminalization supported violent cartels across the fence to another agent. He mentioned LEAP and was soon fired for holding “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and espirit de corps.” Another, Joe Miller, was removed from his position as a probation officer in Mohave County in Arizona after signing a LEAP petition supporting California’s failed ballot measure to legalize weed in 2010. (Both went to court to appeal their cases.)
For too many years, police chiefs pressured their officers to handcuff and lock up nonviolent drug offenders; now, Franklin believes that education will eventually prompt those same departments into rethinking their response — prioritizing compassion and care over incarceration.
LEAP’s education work prompts Franklin to recall the lesson learned a century ago when this country placed a federal ban on alcohol. To overturn the 18th Amendment, reformers battled state-by-state until the movement could not be ignored. In a political process that took nearly 14 years, the law was repealed, taking back control from the Mob’s underground smugglers and instating strict government regulations on liquor. Now that several states have taken the first steps toward legalization, Franklin figures that another big change in drug policy will occur before 2026.
He can’t wait.
With great freedom comes even greater responsibility. Nowhere is that more relevant right now than in Colorado, where stores began legally selling recreational marijuana on January 1. But it’s not all high times and healthy Girl Scout Cookie sales, though. The Rocky Mountain state’s Department of Transportation (CDOT) is using humorous, thirty-second commercials to raise awareness and lower instances of smoking and driving.
“As Coloradans now have more access to marijuana, we want them to be aware that law enforcement is trained to identify impairment by all categories of drugs and alcohol,” Col. Scott Hernandez, Chief of the Colorado State Patrol, said in CDOT’s statement announcing the $1 million “Drive High, Get a DUI” campaign, which began today.
The campaign, which is funded by a federal grant from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, includes public service announcements intended for men aged 21 to 34 — the demographic with the highest number of DUIs. The commercials are simple, but effective. They show “average” Colorado males somewhat comically tripping up while doing mundane activities, like installing a TV or playing basketball while under the influence of marijuana. They’re designed to show that smoking and driving, often considered less dangerous than drinking and driving, is equally risky. A separate arm of the campaign will target the state’s tourism industry through brochures and posters at rental car companies and dispensaries.
The commercials are funny, but the statistics surrounding pot usage are not. Ever since Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize marijuana, public safety records show an uptick in reports of drivers under the influence in both states. A September CDOT survey of 770 Coloradans found 21 percent had operated a moving vehicle after consuming marijuana sometime within the past month.
Meanwhile, more than 1,300 drivers in Washington tested positive for marijuana last year. That number, a nearly 25 percent increase from 2012, could be a direct result of the new law. On the bright side, Washington officials told the Associated Press there’s been no corresponding jump in car accidents.
As one of the first states to the legalize recreational sale and use of marijuana, along with Washington, Colorado has set a proactive standard for safety, emphasizing the importance of sitting down while smoking up.
Watch all of the new PSA’s below.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul are making a surprising alliance to reform federal drug laws. Booker, a Democrat, has lived on food stamps to better empathize with their recipients, while Paul, a Republican, has proposed eliminating the aid program entirely. But the two Senators are in perfect alignment on the issue of mandatory minimum sentencing, under which certain drug convictions carry a set number of years in prison regardless of circumstance. MORE: Ranked: The Congressmembers Who Actually Get Stuff Done
Attorney General Eric Holder has already announced plans to go lighter on drug offenders, but Booker and Paul want to go further, including lightening federal restrictions on hemp and marijuana. We’re not sure what their plans are yet, but with popular support for drug reform soaring, and both Senators building impressive political resumes, theirs is an unlikely fellowship worth watching. MORE:A Homeless Man Inspires a U.S. Senator
