ustxtxb_obs_1968_12_27_50_00014-00000_000.pdf

at Southwest Texas State College in San Marcos, arresting students for pot. Five persons, four of them students, were arrested in a house a block from the Texas Tech campus in Lubbock because they were having a pot party. Fort Worth DA Frank Coffey says that five high school students arrested on pot charges will not be prosecuted if they cooperate with investigators. They’re no worse than some of the others involved, Coffey said, and besides, they “come from respectable homes.” Felony complaints on use of drugs, particularly marijuana, have doubled . this year in Austin, with most of the people arrested clear of any past police records.’ 8 Four young whites and a Negro student at Arlington State were having a party, smoking pot, in a Dallas apartment, when officers, who said they heard party sounds inside and smelled marijuana smoke, came in and arrested them. 19 The San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has become involved in charges that the marijuana statutes were used as a predicate for the suppression of the espousal of unpopular views at a public shop. 2 Thirty or so students were expelled from the San Benito high school on pot charges and told they could not come back or stay back unless they combed their hair as they were told to. 2′ Police, \(acting, a court later held, with no evidence and therefore an invalid near the Oklahoma University campus and confiscated marijuana and anti-war literature. “They also found,” said the UPI, “a girl nude in bed with a boy and another girl clad only in red panties,” but whether they confiscated them, too, is not clear. 22 Evidence suggests that grand juries are rebelling, even in Texas, against the prosecutions for marijuana. Recently in Austin a grand jury returned one indictment for possession of marijuana and 19 no-bills on the same charge. 23 A Harris County grand jury this fall said first offenders should not be prosecuted for possession.'” Austin police captain Harvey Gann admits, “It works pretty hard on your ulcer to see these young boys and girls get felonies slapped on them.” 25 The AMA Council on Mental Health says that “penalties for violations of the marijuana laws are often harsh and unrealistic.” 26 The Austin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union will soon be associated with a lawsuit challenging the Texas law on marijuana and sentencing under its terms. Marijuana should be classified under the Texas law regulating dangerous drugs, if there, or else under the law regulating alcoholic beverages, and not under the severely punitive laws against narcotics. The misclassification of marijuana under the Texas narcotics act is an objective error in the law made during and because of earlier periods of the state of the medical arts on the subject, and the prose 14 The Texas Observer cution of any citizen in connection with marijuana under the Texas narcotics law is therefore also an objective error. A lawsuit is necessary because previous ignorance has created a fierce public opinion that intimidates elected legislators who otherwise would correct the law on the basis of the current scientific information. The law cannot commit an objective error without violating the preamble of the Constitution saying that the Constitution was being established “in Order to . . . establish Justice,” and at least five other provisions of the Constitution are violated in enforcements of the Texas law. The obligation of contracts is impaired by the prohibition and interruption of contracts to sell marijuana under invalid provisions of law. \(These sales can be properly regulated under the dancutions based on this also do violence to the guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantees of due process of law and equal protection of the laws. For citizens who care about people rotting in prisons unjustly, there is another task: the release of all the people now imprisoned for convictions based only on the inclusion of marijuana within the terms of the Texas narcotics drugs act. The Texas legislature, too, must be confronted on the question. Politicians make their excuses, but for continuing such an injustice, they should not be forgiven. R.D. SOURCES 1.statement by the AMA’s committee on alcoholism and drug dependence, Journal of the American Medical Assn., Aug. 7, 1967. 2.Reader’s Digest, Dec., 1968, condensing an article from Sept., 1968, McCall’s. 3.Quoted in Houston Post, April 9, 1968. 4.Austin American, Dec. 14, 1968. 5.”Marijuana and Society,” AMA Council on Mental Health, Journal of the American Medical Assn., June 24, 1968. 6.See, on this general comparison, and for the materials cited in the discussion of it: “Mari Do Go On . . . I would … be willing to pay more than $6 for a subscription because I do believe the Observer must be encouraged. In the few months I’ve been a reader you have given me many hours of satisfaction, taught me much that I never knew about Texas politics and lessened my loneliness in being a liberal in Alamo Heights. You hon’t have to go so far afield as Lubbock or Midland to feel lonely as a liberal. I don’t know a single liberal who isn’t related to me, except for the members of my church, when I can get there As the wife of a career officer in the army I couldn’t disagree more with you on Vietnam, but I’d never cancel a sub juatia,” a paper presented by William G. Wilkerson, MD., July 24, 1968, in Austin; San Angelo Standard-Times, Oct. 20, 1968; Corpus Christi Caller, May 6, 1968; New York Times, Oct. 9, 1967; Script, AMA Drug Abuse Information Program; Los Angeles Times, Jan. 17, 1968; Austin American, Dec. 16, 1968. 7.The Uniform Narcotics Drug Act of Texas, Tit. 12, Art. 725b. See also Arts. 725c and 725d. Contrary to a misapprehension spawned in the Rag, the Austin underground paper, the terms of the Texas law do not define giving away marijuana as the same thing as selling it. The wide possible range of the penalties, two years to life, for any violation of the law, which does prohibit giving marijuana away, may be the source of this notion. 8.Convicted in 1958, she was paroled on April 1, 1963. She had to go to court to ‘be relieved of a restriction in her terms of parole that she not strip in public any more. 9.Dallas Times Herald, July 15, 1966. 0. Dallas Times Herald, April 20, 1966. 1.Austin American, April 15, 1966. 2.San Angelo Standard-Times, Nov. 11, 1965. 3.San Antonio Express, Nov. 9, 1965. 4.Corpus Christi Caller-Times, June 12, 1965. 5.Houston Chronicle, March 23, 1963. 6.Dallas Morning News, June 7, 1963. 7.Dallas Times Herald, June 10, 1966. 8.Austin American, Jan. 18, 1968; Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, April 4, 1967; Dallas Morning News. May 9. 1968; Austin American, Dec. 5, 1968. 19.Dallas Times Herald. Sept. 2, 1965, and Dallas Morning News, Nov. 3, 1965. 20.San Antonio Express, Nov. 12, 1968. 2h Corpus Christi Caller, Nov. 19, 1968, and other articles. 22.Dallas Times Herald, Jan. 10, 1966; Houston Chronicle, Jan. 12, 1966; Corpus Christi Caller, June 25, 1966. 23.Austin American, Dec. 6, 1968. 24.Houston Chronicle, Aug. 2, 1968. 25.26.”Marijuana and Society,” op. cit. Correction In the story last issue on the funeral of Arthur DeWitty, the repositioning of a parenthesis mark erroneously indicated that Gov. John Connally, Cong. Henry Gonzalez, Cong. Jake Pickle, and Mayor were present. They were not. Sen. Ralph Yarborough and Don Yarborough of Houston were present as stated. A sentence in the story, alluding to Jesus on the cross, should have read, “Some of the people wondered where were a lot of the people he had helped …” instead of as it was printed, without the word, “were.” scription just for that. The army badly needs to be kept in its place, and all wise men in or out of the military agree. I must be loyal, however, to the man I love and I cannot do anything that might lend encouragement to Uncle Ho … I know this divisive war will end, this issue will passbut the liberal spirit endures. Do go on. I need you.. , Patricia McManus’ Reber; ‘625 Shook -Ave., San Antonio, Tex. Observer Deteriorated It is gratifying to note that of the 3,079,406 Texans who voted for president on Nov. 5, that only 489 followed your advice and voted for Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Mayor John Lindsay, by the write-in route