Chicago’s pot dilemma: Should marijuana users just be ticketed?

Every pot smoker — the kid down the street, your neighbor with the nice house, the co-worker in the next cubicle — has a “guy.”

That guy has a guy, who has a guy, who has a guy.

The top marijuana guys — Mexico’s murderous drug cartels — are responsible for most of the pot sold on Chicago street corners. They’ve even started growing it in Wisconsin’s North Woods.

In recent years, another top “guy” has come to town: weed growers in Colorado and California licensed to supply the medical marijuana dispensaries operating in those states. They sell their surplus in Chicago and other places where the drug is illegal.

For those guys, Chicago is a dangerous place. They might wind up in prison, or even dead.

But their customers — dime-bag dealers and pot smokers — don’t have much to fear from the criminal justice system here. For them, weed has been essentially decriminalized, the Chicago Sun-Times has found.

Last year, Chicago Police officers arrested more than 23,000 people on misdemeanor marijuana charges, and most of those cases were dropped. From 2006 through 2010, cases for possession of less than 2.5 grams of marijuana were dismissed 97 percent of the time. Eighty-four percent of pot possession cases involving 2.5 grams to 10 grams were tossed out of court; and 57 percent involving 10 to 30 grams met the same end, according to the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court.

On Oct. 14, Cook County prosecutors did a spot check of marijuana cases at a branch court at Kedzie and Harrison. There were 15 new petty pot cases that came before the judge. Every case got dropped.

So far, there isn’t a politician proposing weaker penalties for the top marijuana guys. But local leaders and law-enforcement authorities are looking for a more practical punishment for the 100 to 150 people facing petty pot cases every day in Cook County.

Last week, several Chicago aldermen proposed an ordinance that would allow cops to write tickets to people caught with small amounts of pot. Behind the scenes, police and prosecutors have been quietly considering a similar solution.

Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug in the U.S. — with more than 17 million regular users in 2010, a 20 percent jump over just three years, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

With so many pot smokers out there, proposals to lessen criminal penalties for minor marijuana possession are “a step in the right direction,” said Dan Linn, a regular pot smoker and head of the Illinois chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

In Chicago the question remains: Is Mayor Rahm Emanuel willing to be the guy to take that step?