Getting caught with as much as 3.5 ounces of marijuana by Cincinnati police won’t result in legal ramifications, Cincinnati City Council decided today.
Council approved one of three dueling ordinances that sought to decriminalize either 100 grams or 1 ounce (28 grams) of marijuana.
Vice Mayor Christopher Smitherman, who is running for mayor, introduced with council member Jeff Pastor the 100-gram ordinance council approved today.
The ordinance doesn’t include provisions for expungement for those already convicted of possession of small amounts of marijuana — something several council members called for — but that could be coming eventually.
Smitherman says the ordinance is a matter of fairness, especially for people of color who have been disproportionately cited under both a strict city law in force between 2004 and 2010 and the Ohio Revised Code.
That can have big implications, Smitherman said.
“Now someone applies to get a loan to go to college, or they apply for a job in the construction industry, and they’re choosing between someone who doesn’t have a drug conviction and someone who does,” he said. “We’re creating a permanent underclass.”
Pastor and Smitherman have pointed to statistics showing that 86 percent of the more than 16,000 citations issued by the city for marijuana possession between 2004 and 2019 went to black residents, most of them black men. The vast majority of the citations issued took place under a harsher city anti-marijuana ordinance that was repealed in 2010.
But state laws against marijuana still exist, and almost 84 percent of those cited under the laws in Cincinnati over the past 15 years have been black.
“When we look at the statistics, we can’t just say this is institutional racism,” Smitherman said. “What we can say is that this is clearly a bias. I think everyone in this room would come to the conclusion that African-American men don’t smoke more marijuana than white men. But they are carrying the brunt of enforcement.”
Smitherman and Pastor’s ordinance does include a prohibition on smoking marijuana in public, but does not have an age limit.
That was one of the objections council member David Mann made to the legislation. Mann introduced the legislation decriminalizing one ounce.
“The issues to think about are the quantity, where possession and use would be permitted and the age of possession to be permitted,” Mann said. “My understanding is 100 grams is about 300 joints. That troubles me.”
“I remain very troubled by the blessing that this ordinance gives to possession by a minor,” he continued. “This says it’s OK, if you’re 12 years old in Cincinnati, to possess 100 grams of marijuana. Why on earth are we doing this?”
Council members Greg Landsman, Pastor, Chris Seelbach, Smitherman and Wendell Young voted for Smitherman and Pastor’s ordinance.
“We have for far too long put people away for something that I believe should be legal and I believe will be legal,” Landsman said. “I’m thrilled to be voting on this today.”
Council members Mann, Tamaya Dennard and Amy Murray voted against the ordinance. Council member P.G. Sittenfeld was absent today.
Murray has expressed a number of reservations about the decriminalization efforts, including questions about lack of an age limit, the discomfort with the effort expressed by Cincinnati Police Chief Eliot Isaac and other issues. Isaac said he’d rather keep the city’s current law, but that CPD officers will recognize the decriminalization ordinance and police accordingly.
Dennard said she supports decriminalization, but wanted to see legislation that would expunge past marijuana convictions as part of a package that decriminalizes the drug.
“I don’t really want to vote for either one until I know for sure that there is a path forward for expungement for people this has already destroyed — disproportionately people of color,” she said.
Deputy City Solicitor Luke Blocher said that may ultimately be the purview of the municipal court, not city council. He said the city’s law department is working on ways to structure an ordinance that would grant expungements.
“This at least stops the hemorrhaging,” Pastor said of today’s ordinance. “I think it would do injustice for us not to take some sort of action.”
This article appears in Jun 12-19, 2019.