4/20 a day of celebration, education

The legalization bus is coming to town, and Albuquerque is getting ready to hop on.
Students for Sensible Drug Policy president, Marcus Lucero, is helping to host a protest/party at the Duck Pond today on 4/20 in honor of marijuana reform day.
Lucero said this is the first event the organization has held on April 20.

“The war on drugs disproportionately affects minorities than it does white people,” Lucero said. “And I know this isn’t a big problem in New Mexico but if you look at it, the crack versus cocaine disparity sentencing. If you get caught with a gram of coke it’s something like seven years and if you get caught with a gram of crack it’s something like 14 or 15 years.”

Lucero said SSDP isn’t just in favor of marijuana legalization — they also want to tell people how important education is when it comes to avoiding drug addiction.
Geoffrey St. John, SSDP member, said he has friends who lost their financial aid because they were caught with marijuana.

“Normally it takes a felony to take away federal financial aid from people, but for some reason drug possession qualifies as grounds to take away financial aid for a couple years,” St. John said. “And that’s really frustrating because it’s just continuing the cycle of people who can’t get educated.”

St. John said there will be a raffle, valued at about $300, during the event at the Duck Pond with items donated from local businesses in support of drug reform.
“I was kind of surprised at how much support we got for this,” he said. “I think especially in Albuquerque we’re just tapping into this mentality that people have, but haven’t been able to be very vocal about. We’re trying to get people to speak up about it now because I think there are a lot of people who are on our side with this.”

Lucero said everyone should be concerned about the war on drugs, and how much money is being spent on charging and pursuing marijuana users.
“We’re going to be letting people know how the drug war affects them even if they don’t smoke,” Lucero said. “If you pay taxes a lot of your money is going to fighting this failing war on drugs.

Prescription drugs use has skyrocketed, ecstasy use has skyrocketed and cocaine use has skyrocketed in certain parts of the country.”
Lucero said legalization would benefit college students because they are the largest sector of the population that consumes marijuana.

“I know a lot of people like to use it after a hard day of finals, or maybe if you had a hard day of classes and work,” he said. “And instead of coming home and cracking open a 12 pack, you just roll a joint and kind of relax. Society is geared toward achieving, and production and producing capital which is all fine and good, but at some point you don’t produce capital, and you just need to relax.”

Lucero said they want people with opposing views to visit the event too because there is a lot of misinformation about marijuana.
“I find the hardest argument to defend against, from our standpoint, is protecting the children, which is kind of a political cop-out,” he said. “I think that the way we argue against that is that when we call for legalization. We also call for strict regulation and enforcement.”