Making Marijuana the Lowest Law Enforcement Priority

Last week, a legislative committee at the General Assembly rejected a bill that would have permitted medicinal use of marijuana. The News and Observer covered the story here, and the bill itself is here. There doesn’t appear to be any chance that the legislature will follow Colorado and Washington and make recreational marijuana legal under state law. So, for good or for ill, statewide marijuana reform appears to be off the table for now. (Note that marijuana is already treated differently than some other controlled substances. For example, G.S. 90-95(d)(4) prohibits active sentences for low-level marijuana possession crimes.) Advocates for reform of the marijuana laws may be coming home from the General Assembly empty-handed, but they have at least one tool in their toolbox that doesn’t depend on the state legislature. They may seek to have their cities or counties declare that marijuana offenses are the lowest law enforcement priority. I only recently became aware of so-called LLEP laws, but they appear to be a familiar tactic for organizations like the Marijuana Policy Project, which encourages citizens to “[w]ork to get your city council to pass an ordinance making marijuana offenses the city’s lowest law enforcement priority.” Likewise, the North Carolina website of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) says: [W]e start at the local level to coordinate city and campus campaigns to push ballot initiatives that will make marijuana the lowest priority for police. These Lowest Law Enforcement Priorities (LLEP) are largely symbolic as state law [...]