The ACLU of Colorado has joined the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, a coalition in support of a 2012 ballot initiative to end marijuana prohibition in Colorado. The initiative would make marijuana legal for adults, take marijuana out of the black market, and establish a system in which it is regulated and taxed similar to alcohol.

Want to help out? Visit the campaign website -- www.RegulateMarijuana.org – to join the fight, read the full text of the initiative, and find out how to get involved. The campaign is in the process of collecting the 140,000+ signatures needed to ensure the measure qualifies for the ballot. We have more than 50,000 signatures now, and we are looking for more volunteers to help us get this initiative on the ballot. To get involved, go to www.regulatemarijuana.org/s/petition-drive-central

In Colorado we believe our laws should be practical and they should be fair. Yet we are wasting scarce public resources in our criminal justice system by having police, prosecutors and the courts treat marijuana users like violent criminals. It is unconscionable for our state to spend tax dollars to arrest, prosecute and crowd the courts, and jail people for possession of a small amount of marijuana, especially when those being arrested and jailed are disproportionately people of color.

The war on drugs has failed. Prohibition is not a sensible way to deal with marijuana. The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol will move us toward a more rational approach to drug laws.

• Colorado authorities made 17,000 arrests for drug offenses last year. Every dollar spent policing low-level adult marijuana wastes scarce public safety resources that could be used to prevent and solve serious violent crimes.

• One in five people in Colorado’s prisons are serving time for a drug offense. Every person we lock up for a non-violent drug offense uses a scare and expensive resource—a prison bed—that could otherwise be reserved for violent criminals who pose a real threat to the public.

• This initiative is a significant step toward dismantling the failed War on Drugs, and one of its defining injustices. Across the country, people of color, particularly youth of color, are far more likely than whites to be arrested for low-level marijuana possession, despite the fact that usage rates are at least as high among whites.

• Colorado has the authority and the autonomy to craft its own drug laws and to decide what conduct to criminalize, or not, under state law. When we look at the federal Controlled Substances Act, we see that Congress has purposely created a vigorous and independent role for states to enact and enforce their own drug laws.

• Colorado currently allows people to possess, cultivate and distribute marijuana for medical purposes. The federal government has never challenged this law as being an affront to federal authority.

Today the ACLU of Colorado filed an amicus brief in the Colorado Supreme Court case of Ward Churchill, who according to a jury verdict, was fired from his job as a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder for exercising his First Amendment right to free expression.

Read the brief, as well as more information about the case

more on this case

By Rehan K. Hasan and Rosemary Harris Lytle

This week, the country reflects on the 10-year anniversary of the four tragic and devastating attacks of September 11, 2001. All told, nearly 3,000 people died. What happened can never be diminished. We all lost something that day – loved ones, innocence, trust, freedoms. Our world changed.

But was it 9/11 that changed our lives or our reaction to it?

Because of what happened on September 11, 2001, Muslims and others in this country have been branded terrorists; guilty by ethnicity or appearance, profiled at every airport, detained on meaningless and unlawful charges, violated by official government intrusion and surveillance; an entire community ostracized and demonized by law enforcement, by Homeland Security, by the Transportation Security Administration, which didn’t even exist until shortly after those twin towers went down.

So many lives – and liberties – infringed upon.

According to a Pew Research Center survey released last month, 43 percent of the Muslim American respondents said they had personally experienced harassment in the past year. The survey also said that 52 percent complained that their community is singled out by government for surveillance every single day. That doesn’t even include the intrusions the rest of us have faced: privacy violations, whole body imaging as we walk into federal, state buildings, being intimidated by cops in riot gear at any politically charged public event. Our police became militarized, our privacy shredded, and our appearances- from our clothes to our very pigment-subject to suspicion.

Looking back in our history, we see other sad examples of our reaction to tragedies and change and the violations of civil rights and civil liberties that resulted. We look at the change brought about by the end of slavery and see the reaction: rampant lynching and Jim Crow laws designed to turn back the freedom that the end of slavery had insured. We look at the tragedy of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and see our reaction: more than one hundred thousand guiltless Japanese Americans legally held captive by our government at West Coast camps.

It’s a horrible history.

What has happened to Muslim Americans seems just as sinister, just as inhumane, just as intrusive of our rights and freedoms –even without burning crosses and barbed wire fences -- because in the name of defending the U.S. and all that we stand for, democracy, love of country, etc., we have used the 9/11 attacks to dehumanize and place in peril again the rights of an entire group of people. We seem to have forgotten that we must always – especially in times of national challenge and change – vigilantly uphold our core values. We seem to have forgotten that when we violate the freedoms of one group, the freedoms of all groups are at risk.

We seem to have forgotten that discriminating against Muslim Americans, those who are Middle Eastern or South Asian and are citizens and residents of this country is unconstitutional, unfair, and a violation of all the things we as Americans say we hold most dear. Tragedy isn’t new to America; it’s as old as America herself. But our fear of terrorism has created new tragedy – more fear. Fear of the hijab, the burka, the abaya, and the taqiyah doesn’t make us safer or move us forward. All it has done is cement what some have called “the turban effect.” In our Western world, the turban has come to symbolize terrorism. Woe be unto that person who shows up at the airport wearing a turban – though it happens all the time with discrimination shortly following.

As we pause to remember all those who lost their lives on 9/11, all those whose lives and livelihoods were forever changed, it bears repeating that we should remember something else, too.

We must not today repeat the mistakes of our past. Our history shows that when the government targets people based on race, ethnicity, belief, political activity and association instead of focusing on violence or violations of law, disastrous consequences for our democratic ideals follow. In the past, there was Jim Crow, Sedition Acts, McCarthy “blacklisting.” All of this betrayed American laws and values but did not make us any safer, not for a nanosecond.

So, this week we remember those who were lost. But let’s also remember that our laws and policies must not only keep our nation safe but must also treat people fairly – regardless of the color of their skin, their religion or the garment they choose to wear on their head.

Rehan K. Hasan is Chair of the Board of the ACLU of Colorado

Rosemary Harris Lytle is ACLU of Colorado Communications Director