Missouri Police Chief Addresses Ballot Measure 2

Author: KSRM News Desk |

Missouri Police Chief Larry Kirk spoke to the Soldotna Rotary Club today as to why states should legalize marijuana.

 

Kirk is part of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and said he feels like social norms are changing and soon most states will see this on their ballots in the future.

 

Although he said he would not use marijuana, he outlined why he speaks in favor of decriminalization.

 

Kirk: “I think responsible parties should be able to consume tobacco, responsible person should be able to consume alcohol and its the same way with Cannabis. I think we should allow responsible adults to make responsible decisions.”

Kirk said that in his 10 years of being a police chief he feels that he has already seen the good impacts of decriminalization in his city.

 

Kirk: “We actually decriminalized cannabis to where now its just a citation, its the same as a city ordinance, so it doesn’t go on there criminal record, they don’t get booked into the jail its actually a citation they can mail in, so that was as decriminalized as we could make it in my city. I think that nation wide it would, because you look at states that spend 60-80% of their time on misdemeanor marijuana arrest plus all the federal grant money that comes into states that gets spent on misdemeanor marijuana, if you started putting that towards secual assualt task force, homicide task force, crimes truly against persons, we could probably make a really big dent in those crimes.”

He also said he thinks that decriminalization of marijuana decreases people’s use of the criminal underground as means to obtain it.

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