A group of local mothers who believe legalizing marijuana will help end the war on drugs rallied outside San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis' office on Tuesday to encourage her to support Prop 19.
"Prohibition has failed, and the war on drugs is really a war waged against individuals and their families, so mothers are leading the charge once again to end drug prohibition -- marijuana prohibition -- just as a group of mothers did in the 1930s to end alcohol prohibition, not because they loved drugs and alcohol but because we love our children," said Gretchen Burns Bergman, a co-Founder and executive director of A New PATH (Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing).
Regulating marijuana would mean that children would not have as much access to the drug and that police would be able to focus on other criminal matters, according to A New PATH.
"Marijuana prohibition has utterly failed," Bergman said. "Tens of thousands of Californians are arrested every year, too many of them young men of color, but marijuana remains widely available to young people."
Reverend Canon Mary Moreno Richardson, with St. Paul's Cathedral in Banker's Hill, supports the New Path and rallied with them. Richardson says she works with undocumented youth and they tell her they run from their villages because of all the corruption and power the drug cartels hold over their towns.
"So much of this power is coming from the money they are making with guns and with marijuana," Richardon said.
The Reverend believes people of faith cannot ignore their human family.
"We cannot continue to stand by while increasingly violent criminal syndicates make huge profits off of illegal marijuana sales on this side of the border and wreak havoc in Mexico," Richardson said. "Prop. 19 will help begin to take those profits away and undermine those cartels - before the violence spills over to San Diego."
New path's campaign is called Moms United to End the War on Drugs.
