prohibition is over

[TomAz]

the reason i say they will let these systems set-up and be tracked for awhile is because after they seize the money and bank accounts they will use the money to pay for the added enforcement expenses.

This is what is being powerpointed at a Dept of Justice meeting right now.

Anybody who doesn't see the truth in this is, umm, high.

[Trick Loves The Kids]

The feds have always had the ability to crack down as hard as they want to on weed but have chosen not to do so in nearly 20 states over the last 2 decades. However, now that weed is legal in CO and WA they're absolutely going crack down on a massive scale because ______________________.

Please fill in the blank, bonus points if you don't mention "online poker" once.

[TomAz]

Because they can.

[Trick Loves The Kids]

No you idiots, they can't. They can and will go after the big fish (as I've said probably 12 times by now) but the DEA literally does not have the manpower to crack down on 50% of the nation in the way you're describing.

[Trick Loves The Kids]

For reference, the DEA has ~5,000 special agents. Denver PD has 1,500 officers.

[Coachella Bound]

not to mention the amount of money that will be wasted once the cases go to court.... the fact is the ball is rolling in the right direction. And if you wanna talk about fed 'crackdowns', well living in Santa Ana has showed that they arnt making a fuss everywhere. Only major cities.

[Tubesock Shakur]

We have well over 250 Marjuana stores in Denver alone. No problems yet. The patriot act has opened so many avenues for the Feds to go over to the actual problems while spying on those that don't cause problems.(I don't agree with it) If they legalize it and take a back seat approach they can catch those that slip up and are invested in criminal activities instead of treating everyone as a criminal.

I think they have only raided one store here in Colorado and it was because they were linked to the Triads and had been watching them for months.

The people have been heard!

[Tubesock Shakur]

The Latin American domino is about to fall.....

Colorado, Washington Marijuana Legalization: Latin American Leaders Ask For A Review Of Drug Policies
By E. EDUARDO CASTILLO and MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN 11/12/12 05:11 PM ET EST
MEXICO CITY — A group of Latin American leaders declared Monday that votes by two U.S. states to legalize marijuana have important implications for efforts to quash drug smuggling, offering the first government reaction from a region increasingly frustrated with the U.S.-backed war on drugs.

The declaration by the leaders of Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Costa Rica did not explicitly say they were considering weakening their governments' efforts against marijuana smuggling, but it strongly implied the votes last week in Colorado and Washington would make enforcement of marijuana bans more difficult.

The four called for the Organization of American States to study the impact of the Colorado and Washington votes and said the United Nations' General Assembly should hold a special session on the prohibition of drugs by 2015 at the latest.

Last week, the most influential adviser to Mexico's president-elect, who takes office Dec. 1, questioned how the country will enforce a ban on growing and smuggling a drug that is now legal under some U.S. state laws. The Obama administration has yet to make clear how strongly it will enforce a federal ban on marijuana that is not affected by the Colorado and Washington votes.

"It has become necessary to analyze in depth the implications for public policy and health in our nations emerging from the state and local moves to allow the legal production, consumption and distribution of marijuana in some countries of our continent," Mexican President Felipe Calderon said after a meeting with Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla and Prime Minister Dean Barrow of Belize.

Marijuana legalization by U.S. states is "a paradigm change on the part of those entities in respect to the current international system," Calderon said.

Mexico has seen tens of thousands of people killed over the last six years during a militarized government campaign against the country's drug cartels.

President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto has promised to shift Mexico's focus to preventing violence against ordinary citizens, although he says he intends to keep battling cartels and is opposed to drug legalization. Guatemala's president has advocated the international legalization of drugs.

Monday's statement by the four leaders "is an important indicator of the desire to engage in a more robust discussion of policy," said Eric Olson, associate director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

The call by the four presidents was welcomed by marijuana activists in the U.S. Forcing international review of drug policies was a stated goal of the campaigns for legalization in Colorado and Washington.

"Marijuana prohibition in this country has been detrimental – but it's been absolutely catastrophic to our southern neighbors," said Dan Riffle, an analyst and lobbying for the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that largely financed the two campaigns.

Mexico is one of the primary suppliers of marijuana to the U.S., while Honduras and Belize are important stops on the northward passage of cocaine from South America. Costa Rica is seeing increasing use of its territory by drug traffickers.

Luis Videgaray, head of Pena Nieto's transition team, told Radio Formula on Wednesday that the votes in the two states complicated his country's commitment to stopping the growing and smuggling of marijuana.

"Obviously we can't handle a product that is illegal in Mexico, trying to stop its transfer to the United States, when in the United States, at least in part of the United States, it now has a different status," Videgaray said.

Videgaray stopped short of threatening to curtail Mexican enforcement of marijuana laws, but his comments appeared likely to increase pressure on the Obama administration to strictly enforce U.S. federal law, which still forbids recreational pot use.

___

Associated Press writer Kristen Wyatt in Denver, Colorado, contributed to this report.

[RotationSlimWang]

Really? So Bug thinks the Fed is going to swoop in and lock everybody up, everyone else is tossing around some similarly dim theories... has it not occurred to anyone yet that the rich white men who run this country would love to start making all that weed money instead of a bunch of stoners and brown-skinned folks?

They're going to study the effects for a while, which will turn out to be quite good and profitable, it's going to be bumped down the Controlled Substances Act to a Schedule II, III, or IV for a while so that all the states with medical marijuana will no longer be in non-compliance with federal law, and then eventually they'll let it be legal and Pfizer shares will go through the roof.

Every single state that has passed a medical marijuana policy is, in fact, in violation of the Controlled Substances Act as it stands right now. Why hasn't the Fed cracked down on them?

[TomAz]

the rich white men who run this country would love to start making all that weed money instead of a bunch of stoners and brown-skinned folks

Then why aren't they already?

[wmgaretjax]

there is a big difference between the feds cracking down on medical marijuana practices that have obviously overstepped the scope of their authorization... and the feds actually arresting folks acting within a broad public mandate.

there are going to be a lot of elected reps foaming at the mouth to muzzle the executive branch if that actually happens.

if CO and/or WA are smart, they will carefully coordinate their distribution mechanisms... and they'll put it off as long as possible in order to cultivate popular support in other jurisdictions. if the feds do decide to step in, it'll get a lot more difficult as these things gain support on other ballots.

[RotationSlimWang]

Then why aren't they already?

Because they went down a path of suppressing the threat of marijuana to their alcohol industries a long time ago and built up a massive wall of propaganda around it. If you're the authority and you've been lying to your people telling them something is terrible for them when it really isn't this whole time, you can't just about face. The people have to show that they want it enough. Then the old rich white fucks can play the card of, "oh well, we tried to tell them this stuff is no good... but now that they've FORCED us to legalize it, Jim, pull out those spreadsheets we've had prepared for decades."

[RotationSlimWang]

there is a big difference between the feds cracking down on medical marijuana practices that have obviously overstepped the scope of their authorization... and the feds actually arresting folks acting within a broad public mandate.

Technically speaking, the instant that medical marijuana started being distributed it was in violation of federal law. If you have 20 states all stating that there is an accepted medical use for this plant, how much longer do you guys think they can keep it deemed a Schedule I on the federal level? Schedule I substances are specifically termed to have no accepted medical use.

[stinkbutt]

Wouldn't it be more profitable for these rich white men to keep the cartels in power thus making Mexico shitty and labor cheap?

[RotationSlimWang]

I don't think you really need cartels to make Mexican labor cheap.

[Tubesock Shakur]

McDonald's, Starbucks, Papa johns needs some new turf. Mexico and Latin America is ripe.

[Trick Loves The Kids]

Ehh. You can easily about-face as authority, it just takes a bit of PR work. Also, at this point, most of the country is in favor of legalized weed so coming out in favor as a politician wouldn't be the suicide it would be if you came out against, say, the military or the financial industry.

I also don't buy that the pharmaceutical industry is going to shut this down. It's a plant that anybody can grow pretty easily, and it doesn't come in a form that is easy to prescribe. Well, it does, but marinol is a failure in every way unless you're a DEA agent speaking in public. I mean, maybe if weed was just discovered yesterday it'd be easy to regulate in a profitable sense but it's so ubiquitous that the cat's out of the bag and there's pretty much no way to make money from it in the terrible American for-profit medical system. As a big company trying to make bank from weed, what do you sell? Prescription eighths at a markup? Marinol?

[bmack86]

If you have 20 states all stating that there is an accepted medical use for this plant, how much longer do you guys think they can keep it deemed a Schedule I on the federal level?

2-6 years would be my guess. I think it'd make the most sense for someone in the Executive Branch to do it sooner rather than later, when the economy would encourage larger support for something like this than they'd likely find in more economically friendly times.

[TomAz]

there is a big difference between the feds cracking down on medical marijuana practices that have obviously overstepped the scope of their authorization... and the feds actually arresting folks acting within a broad public mandate.
.

Maybe. But there certainly have been instances of the federal authorities cracking down on 'broad public mandates' in the states.

[Drewbles]

Props to Colorado!! Will there be weed bars, tastings, grow-tours, etc.? Colorado is a cool place. Worked in Durango and visited the Denver area.. Very beautiful state and I would enjoy living there. We need to legalize everywhere it and tax it..

[Miroir Noir]

So now that I have had a chance to think through the implications of the Washington and Colorado legalization referenda, I have come to the conclusion that the Administration needs to swiftly and aggressively file suit in federal court in order to invalidate these measures. I don't come to this conclusion lightly; I think that the war on drugs has been a cataclysmic failure of social and legal policy, and I believe that the best evidence suggests that marijuana ought to be declassified as schedule 1 controlled substance at the federal level and legalized and regulated for recreational use at the state level in the same way that alcohol is.

The first reason that the DOJ needs to file suit is so that the courts can bring some clarity to the myriad issues that a federal prohibition/state legalization regime would entail. It makes far more sense to adjudicate these issues ahead of time than to have a private grower bring suit against the DOJ for enforcement activities years down the road, or for the states and the feds to end up in an epic battle over federal seizure of tax revenue.

Second, on an ideological level, the state legalization efforts are troubling to me because they present a challenge to federal regulatory authority that I find wrong under the constitution, and unduly disruptive for our settled expectations about federalism. The Supremacy Clause and preemption doctrine suggest to me that states cannot conflict with federal drug enforcement policy in such a direct fashion. Much in the same way that large parts of Arizona SB1070 were unconstitutional for intruding into a policy field controlled by Congress -- immigration in that case -- and for conflicting with federal regulatory prerogatives within that field, it seems to me that similar state intrusions into federal drug enforcement policy are also constitutionally deficient. Again, I don't say this because I think continued federal criminalization of marijuana is a good policy choice. I don't. I say this because I think our system of government works best when the federal government maintains a robust regulatory system in matters of national importance, a system that applies uniformly among the states.

[RotationSlimWang]

The Controlled Substances Act itself is unconstitutional. Our system works well when the federal government regulates shit that actually affects the nation as a whole, not when the fed goes out of its way to impose an unwanted restriction of rights on citizens who are doing nothing wrong. The fed needs to step in, you're right, and finally admit that what they've been doing is total bullshit and take it completely off the schedule.

[the walrus]

plz explain before i say anything further

well it obviously wont happen, but industries that are soon to be replaced are, textile industry, lumber industry, fuel industry... hemp can more than replace all of these industries! you know it can certanly out perform them. once the public relizes that, and they will, they will be replaced

[Tubesock Shakur]

Loopholes that will take effect January 1st...... $50 cup of coffee get a free 1/8th.

[TomAz]

The Controlled Substances Act itself is unconstitutional.

Applicability of the Commerce Clause is not restricted only to goods sold across state lines. I mean you don't have to be a lawyer to understand that basic fact.

I think Mitch's analysis seems pretty reasonable, but I am not sure I agree that the feds "should" file suit immediately. But it explains why they will: Washington and Colorado have essentially made a unilateral declaration that a portion of federal law does not apply to citizens of those states. The federal government has a history of not responding kindly to challenges to its authority by the states.

There are tempting parallels to the civil rights movement -- states deciding that federal law does not apply to them. Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock schools, etc. (edit: or even AZ HB1070). Still trying to think through how applicable they are here.

[RotationSlimWang]

Methinks it will require some Supreme Courting before they can just go in there and overturn the law.

[TomAz]

Not sure how the order of events will play out, but yes I imagine this will eventually wind up in Antonin Scalia's pudgy little hands. And that could be really interesting.. not sure how this plays out left vs. right.

[RotationSlimWang]

It would be quite hilarious to see the right hoisted on its own "states rights" petard.

[TomAz]

that cuts both ways though... imagine Ginsburg or Kagan writing a states rights opinion..

[RotationSlimWang]

Maybe they'll decide that drugs are people.