Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkin (D) has said that there needs to be a nationwide evaluation of marijuana legislation.
“We need to have a real evaluation nationwide,” said Durkin to Hill.TV during an interview that aired on Wednesday.
“We need to make sure we do it in a way that decriminalizes people, doesn’t have a criminal justice intervention when its not appropriate and focus those criminal justice resources on those things that are real threats to communities,” she added.
According to Durkin, states need to have a “unifying force” when it comes to cannabis legalization to ensure consistency in laws from state to state.
“I think it was the right thing to have states that were the laboratories get it right,” said the Mayor, citing states like Denver and New Jersey who have legalized marijuana in some form.
“But now you need a unifying force,” she also said. “First of all you need it because activity that is legal in one state shouldn’t be criminal in another state and subject people to prison terms.”
“I think the way the regulation was done at the outset — we’ve seen that it is working, not perfectly,” she remarked. “We still need focuses in certain areas like youth use and controlling kind of the growth of marijuana to make sure that there aren’t things like pesticides used and the like.”
