An American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)-sponsored forum on marijuana reform in Connecticut found a receptive audience in New London on Wednesday. The panel discussion, originally scheduled for February 2 at Harbour Towers on Bank Street, drew quite a crowd and many audience members responded to the ACLU’s call to join its lobby to legalize medical marijuana.

For the three panelists, however, this is merely the first skirmish in a long battle to change the way the United States deals with drugs and the problems of crime and addiction that go with it.

“We have fought the war on drugs for 40 years and it’s about time we started looking at doing something different,” said Joe Brooks, a retired police captain from Manchester, Connecticut, and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).  

LEAP doesn’t believe in halfway measures. This organization formed by law enforcement officers favors the legalization of all drugs, not just marijuana and not just for medical purposes. As Brooks sees it, “decriminalization is a waste of time.”

Reducing the penalty for possession to a $250 fine for a joint, he said, “doesn’t take the criminal out of the drug trade.”  Someone is still paying a dealer for the drugs, he says, making major suppliers into millionaires and giving gangs incentive to take over cities and create new addicts.

“We arrest approximately 2 million people a year in this country; $666 million a year is what Connecticut spends to run its Department of Corrections,” says Brooks, adding that he would rather see that money spent on education than on a “dismally failing war on drugs.”

As a high school student, panelist Jason Ortiz recalled, he received a 45-day school suspension after being caught off-campus with marijuana. The heavy penalty struck him as unjust considering that if he started a fight in school he’d have been suspended for a mere two days. Today this University of Connecticut student is campaigning for drug law reform as a member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and as a board member of the ACLU of Connecticut and a chapter representative of the University of Connecticut.

Currently, Ortiz says, a proposal to legalize marijuana for medical purposes has the most traction. The Connecticut Legislature voted in favor of such a bill only to have it vetoed by Gov. Jodi Rell but new bills are moving through the Legislature again and this time, Ortiz says, the idea has the support of Gov. Dan Malloy.

For the panelists, legalizing marijuana for medical purposes—to treat glaucoma or to counteract the nausea and loss of appetite associated with chemotherapy for cancer patients--is just the first step toward legalization. Legalizing medical marijuana would allow for additional research into the medical benefits of marijuana, says Ortiz, and it would create a legal distribution network for the drug. Most importantly to Ortiz, however, legalizing medical marijuana “breaks the myth that using marijuana is bad.”

“Medical marijuana is probably the way to go,” agrees panelist Cliff Thornton, executive director of Efficacy, a Connecticut-based drug reform organization. “It’s most likely to pass but it’s for a small majority. It will have no effect on decriminalization. If it’s not done correctly, we’ll have a bigger problem than we have right now.”

Thornton points to the success of drug decriminalization in other countries, specifically Portugal, as models the United States would do well to follow. Treaties and drug policies in place as far back as President Richard Nixon, he says, are big hurdles to overcome before the United States can begin to shift its 40-year-long drug war policies. “When you talk about legalizing drugs,” says Thornton, “you’re talking about the redistribution of wealth.”

Correction: The article originally described Ortiz as a "board member of the Southeastern Connecticut ACLU." Ortiz is actually a board member of the ACLU of Connecticut and a chapter representative of the University of Connecticut, according to Dionne Foster.