Commentary –

Injustice In Marijuana Cases? You Don’t Need To Go To Russia

By Chris Powell

John Tobin, that 20-year-old college student and Fulbright scholar from Ridgefield who has been convicted and put in prison on marijuana charges in Russia, may be lucky that Jim Maloney is his US representative.

Believing Tobin’s contention that the charges against him were contrived as punishment for his refusing a solicitation to spy for Russia, Maloney has besieged the White House, the State Department, the Russian government and courts, and the Russian security agency with pleas for intervention. Maloney has even visited Tobin in jail in Russia.

All this seems to have gotten some results; a Russian appeals court has reduced Tobin’s sentence from 37 months to one year, and another appeal may have a chance of success.

All this also has given Maloney some insights into Russia. The Tobin case, he says, may reflect the country’s turbulent transformation from a police state to something more democratic and accountable. Maloney thinks the case is largely a power grab by the security agency, and he cites some Russian press criticism of the agency as cause for hope that democracy can win.

If Tobin has been lucky to live in Maloney’s district, Maloney may be almost as lucky that the Tobin case came along when it did. For it has thrust the congressman onto the world stage just when his political base is in danger of being cut out from under him, what with Connecticut’s having to consolidate its six congressional districts into five in time for next year’s election.

In the best circumstances for Maloney, the 5th District will get 20 percent larger and he will have to introduce himself to 140,000 more people. In the worst circumstances for him, his district will be divided among the remaining five and his hometown, Danbury, will end up in a district that houses another incumbent, who will be no pushover. (The Constitution doesn’t require US representatives to live in the districts that elect them, only in the states that do, but practical politics holds otherwise.)

In either event, if Tobin is freed by campaign time, he could make a great campaign commercial for Maloney.

Still, there’s a problem with the Tobin case, even if it’s unlikely to get much attention. It arises from the inability of anyone in the United States, including Maloney, to know whether Tobin is innocent. Certainly the Russian security agency’s repeatedly accusing him of espionage, even after his marijuana conviction, without ever formally bringing such charges in court is suspicious. But that a college student might use marijuana is no more implausible than the average Russian’s getting drunk on vodka once or twice a week.

While few people in Connecticut may think that anyone should have to spend a year in jail in Russia for possession of the tiny amount of marijuana Tobin was convicted of possessing – or even a larger amount – Maloney doesn’t want to get into that part of the issue. He says he is convinced that the Russians would not be hassling Tobin over marijuana if they hadn’t failed to recruit him as a spy. Maloney adds that he opposes legalizing marijuana.

But Tobin’s conviction is for marijuana, not espionage, and no one in Connecticut has to go all the way to Russia to find disproportionately long drug sentences for young people. No, anyone in Connecticut could stay home to do that.

For even some 17-year-olds caught selling marijuana in the state are getting sentenced to almost three years in prison. Meanwhile the US government acknowledges that though more than 500,000 deaths can be attributed each year to the legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol, none can be attributed to the illegal drug, marijuana, and fewer than 17,000 deaths can be attributed to all illegal drugs combined.

Amid the devastation related to alcohol abuse in Russia – Russia may be the only industrial country where average life spans are steadily declining – the country’s criminalization of marijuana may be a hallucination in itself, necessary to society’s overlooking the pervasive horror. So an American congressman’s determined efforts to undo a marijuana conviction in Russia can’t help but raise questions in this country, turnabout being fair play.

Of course the United States has a system of due process of law that is infinitely more developed than Russia’s. But justice is far more than process alone; it is also a matter of matching punishment to offense. If a Fulbright scholar fools around with marijuana in Russia or a 17-year-old from a poor family fools around with it in Connecticut, exactly whom have they hurt so much to merit a year or three in prison?

Indeed, in this respect it may not be so far-fetched to ask which is the police state. After all, only 10 years after the collapse of its totalitarian regime, Russia has many excuses for backwardness.

But in the United States, where the national charter has proclaimed the “pursuit of happiness” for 225 years and where a half million deaths each year result from two drugs that are legal and taxed and hugely profitable to the government, what is the excuse for the wildly different treatment of marijuana? Is the US government afraid that marijuana users might move on to the really damaging drugs – cigarettes and liquor?

Yes, it’s good that someone in authority in the United States came to John Tobin’s defense. But politically that has been no more of a challenge than it would be for a Russian politician to criticize American justice, American justice here being hardly distinguishable from the Russian kind.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)