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Martin O`Malley on DrugsDemocrat |
O'MALLEY: I'm opposed to it for a number of reasons. In our state, I actually have signed legislation that allows police officers to issue citations instead of arrests. We've made a mandatory stay and a right of appeal to anybody that's subjected to any sort of incarceration. So I think there is something to be said for the proportionality. And I do think that all of that is important. There are fewer people incarcerated in Maryland today than when I was elected. But for a number of reasons--one of them is purely economic. In our state, a lot of the new opportunities that are opening up for our kids in security and cyber security and other things, they require a background check and they require that kids have clean records--
Q: But if you legalized it, there wouldn't be a record.
O'MALLEY: Yes, but we can't do that as a state. That would be something only the nation could do.
O'MALLEY: We can't do that as a state. That would be something only the nation could do.
Q: Well, Colorado has legalized--
O'MALLEY: Yes, Colorado has. And for Colorado perhaps that's a good choice and perhaps there's things we can learn from their experiment as a laboratory in democracy. From Maryland's standpoint, I spend a lot of time in middle schools telling kids to keep a clean record so that they can get a good job and help their families.
O'Malley told a crowd of close to 1,000 party activists here that the city he sought to lead had succumbed to a "culture of failure," with open-air drug markets, a soaring murder count and citizens "wallowing in a sense that nothing would work."
"Like in Baltimore in 1999, we as Americans are going through a cynical time of disbelief, a time with more excuses and ideology than cooperation or action," O'Malley said in his keynote address at the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner. "We seem to have lost the shared conviction we once had that we actually have the ability to make things better together. There is a big difference between the America we carry in our hearts, and the America we see in our headlines."