Fighting Non-Existent Crimes in Oklahoma

Oklahoma lawmakers have just passed a new law providing a maximum penalty of life in prison for the “felony” of making hashish from marijuana. That puts this “crime” on a par with murder in the first degree, forcible aggravated rape of a child, or committing violent acts of terror against the United States.

Think of it. An innocent socially productive weekend pot connoisseur, (there are many millions of them in the US), suffering the misfortune of residing in the state of Oklahoma, is considered almost as guilty as Osama bin Laden if he scrapes the resin off a few of his choice buds into the form of a brick. That’s all hashish is. It’s the sticky stuff concentrated on the crushed female flowers of cannabis plants made into a brick.

Making hashish is like turning wheat into flour to get at the part of the plant you want to eat. It’s similar to processing corn into cornstarch, or cabbage into coleslaw. Separating the resin from the plant does not increase potency; it merely eliminates all the bulky chaff. Consequently, hashish is nothing more than concentrated pot, much like concentrated orange juice, and arguably just as harmless for human consumption.

Oklahoma, it seems, has been plagued with about a dozen or less of these hash making cases over the past decade. So the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs thought it necessary to request this tough new law as a "preventative" move, according to one straight faced bureau spokesman, who also admitted that: "It may be two or three years before we see another”.

So we have to wonder what these lawmakers and agency hacks were thinking when they determined that making hash from pot plants alone in a basement is worse than rape, armed robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon combined. There are convicted murderers in Oklahoma that don’t get life in prison. You could gouge someone’s eyes out on purpose in that state and not get life in prison.

Oklahoma Drug War bureaucrats need to justify their existence; that’s what’s going on, and Oklahoma politicians don’t want to be seen by their rabidly social conservative constituents as soft on criminals. "It's just the mindset up here, and it’s been beaten into these new senators and representatives that you cannot be soft on crime," state Sen. Richard Lerblance, a Democrat, told The Associated Press. "It was the same way when Democrats were in control."

Yes, it is this stubbornly obtuse mindset on the part of the political collective, left and right, which puts Oklahoma's state incarceration rate perpetually in the top five among states nationally. The numbers of prisoners and prison budgets have increased exponentially during the last decade in Oklahoma. More than half of Oklahoma's prisoners are nonviolent “offenders.”

We’re talking about stuffing good people, innocent people, who otherwise contribute much to society while harming no one, into prison and throwing away the key.