<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lesk/614183558/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Alexodus</a>/Flickr
The lobbyist who helped kill California’s Proposition 19, the 2010 ballot measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana, has constructed an entire business model around keeping pot illegal. While fighting against the proposed law, lobbyist John Lovell accepted nearly $400,000 from a wide array of police unions, some of which he also represented in attempting to steer millions of federal dollars toward California’s marijuana suppression programs.
The revelation, reported yesterday by the Republic Report‘s Lee Fang, illustrates how Prop. 19 threatened the paychecks of some of its biggest foes. Police departments stood to lose lucrative federal grants like a $550,000 payment in 2010 to police departments in three Northern California counties that covered 666 hours of police overtime spent eradicating marijuana. And Lovell would have presumably lost a job as a guy who helped land those kinds of grants. Here’s a copy of a notice sent to a police department in Lassen County, California:
Police unions and their lobbyists weren’t the only economic interests with a stake in Prop. 19. The alcohol industry and prison guards also contributed money to fight the measure. And on the other side, the passage of Prop. 19 would have given thousands of “hempreneurs” behind the state’s $1.3 billion medical marijuana industry a stimulus stronger than a vaporized bowl of Hindu Kush. The likely side effects—a decline in budget-busting law-enforcement costs and millions of dollars in tax revenue for the state of California—don’t seem all that bad compared to what we got stuck with: A war on drugs that makes people like John Lovell even richer.
Also read: Tony D’Souza’s “The New Dealers,” a tale of recession-strapped Americans who turned to dope dealing to make ends meet.
