If I were Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett, I just might tell Laura Kriho to shut up.
OK, she is good folk, and I know she means well. But it does seem a bit presumptuous to pen a letter to Garnett, basically telling him to dismiss charges against the dozen or so people ticketed during Tuesday’s 420 marijuana rally at the University of Colorado.
She is executive director of the Cannabis Therapy Institute, a marijuana education, research and advocacy group whose aim is its legalization.
Kriho, 45, says her letter to Garnett was an appeal to common sense, a part of what she calls “ending the decades-old war on cannabis. Yes, it was part of that movement.”
I asked her to help me better understand because I wasn’t getting it.
Some 8,000 people filed into the Norlin Quad on campus Tuesday to celebrate pretty much everything marijuana, the vast majority of those on hand doing so by lighting up a lot of it.
That only a dozen of them got tickets to me screams over-the-top police restraint. There were no dogs, plastic handcuffs or booking vans. People got high. They went home.
In the paper the next day, about half of the ticketed 12 complained they had been unfairly picked on.
“The thought never occurred to me to be discreet on 420,” one said. “There is a ‘Why me?’ factor to being one of 12 to get a ticket out of so many people.”
He was smoking pot in public. He got busted. In the old days, a guy more likely would have told the paper it was no big deal, that he took one for the team.
No, to Laura Kriho, what the 12 were doing wasn’t simply smoking weed. It was an act of civil disobedience.
“People decades ago knew it was against the law, too, to sit in the front of the bus, to sit at a lunch counter and to drink from a ‘Whites Only’ fountain,” she explained.
“What they did was their part in changing the law, to chip away at it however they could.”
That, I told her, was too much of a stretch. None of the 12 for a second had civil rights or Rosa Parks on their minds. And Parks went to jail. They were just getting high.
If you read Kriho’s letter, you can detect a whiff of a threat to the election dreams of Garnett, who is seeking to replace John Suthers as attorney general.
She writes that voters in Boulder “are very well educated, and don’t like to see their tax dollars wasted on pointless prosecution of otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
To his credit, Garnett shrugged off the whole matter, saying he would never make a prosecution decision with one eye on his race for attorney general.
So 12 people out of thousands get singled out for breaking the law. Stupid, outdated or otherwise, it is still the law. And discretion, believe it or not, is still required.
My guess is that Kriho and her group will one day end up on the right side of the legalization issue, if poll after poll are any indicators.
Telling Stan Garnett how to do his job, though, will not help that day arrive one moment sooner.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
