Posted on 09/29/2009 4:02:50 PM PDT by Bokababe
....This article is not another polemic about why it should or shouldn't be (legalized). Today, in any case, the pertinent question is whether it already has been -- at least on a local-option basis. We're referring to a cultural phenomenon that has been evolving for the past 15 years, topped off by a crucial policy reversal that was quietly instituted by President Barack Obama in February....
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Pot’s legal in Southern Oregon. My neighbor has a commercial pot farm, everyone knows it, and the local District Attorney has announced he doesn’t want to be brought any pot cases.
I suppose the Feds could get involved, but so far, we have a new cash crop.
Lived in 3 college towns in the past 2 years — Madison WI, Richmond VA and now Austin TX.
Can’t say as anyone in any of those towns gets busted for weed unless they’re foolish enough to deal in front of a cop, or unless they want them off of the streets for other reasons.
I think that this war against weed was lost when the Indians first smoked it, centuries before white settlers got here. Do I think that people should smoke weed? No, but they shouldn’t gamble, drink to excess, smoke tobacco, etc etc. And, those are all legal.
How is it that something the Creator gave us can lead to all this nonsense.
“Any of you people who think marijuana shouldn’t be legalized, well you’re all f*cked”
It ought to be completely legal.
Just as long as you assure me there is no connection between marijuana and mental illness.
Just as long as you show there is not cognitive degeneration.
Until then, it shouldn’t be legalized.
As for your comment, well it speaks volumes about you.
I think fraud had something to do with it here in Michigan.
Its an issue that has come again and again over the years and sometimes the numbers in favor have risen and sometimes they’ve fallen. In this last election it suddenly passed by wide margins in all 83 counties.
It would be one thing if the numbers had steadily grown in all counties over the years but all 83 at once? I’m not buying it.
Can’t say as anyone in any of those towns gets busted for weed unless they’re foolish enough to deal in front of a cop, or unless they want them off of the streets for other reasons.
Actually, one of the biggest prohibitions to many people smoking pot, even here in CA, is employer drug testing.
Someone can have a recommendation from a doctor to use marijuana for medical purposes, but that doesn't mean that an employer has to hire them and the employer can even fire them for such use.
There was a landmark case last year -- "Gary Ross vs RagingWire Telecommunications" that said that the State's medical marijuana laws, while protecting a person from State criminal prosecution, offered this person no additional rights under the State's employment laws.
As long as marijuana remains a Federal crime, employers have a right to fire employees who smoke marijuana even if California decides to legalize marijuana outright.
I put it in quotes because it was from Cheech and Chong many years ago. It is not my opinion, but at the time, it was pretty funny. Sorry if you were offended.
Everyone knows it eh? Does he have a problem keeping “poachers” off his land?
The do gooders again. It’s like those wascally guns bent on crime that go walking around in Chicago. Oh wait, the guns don’t walk. People bent on crime carrying them do.
Maybe someday, sanity will return and only certain uses of items will be banned rather than the items themselves.
bookmark
It’s OK, I didn’t get the cultural reference. I did wonder why it was in quotes.
Here’s one thing I have an issue with:
“the U.S. Justice Department treated state medical marijuana laws as nullities. Such laws were contradicted and therefore preempted by federal drug laws, the Justice Department reasoned, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that position in 2005.”
The constitution says that all powers not enumerated to the Federal government belong to either the states, or to the people. Where in the constitution does it enumerate that the Feds have the authority to regulate what plants a person consumes? Until someone can show me that clause, then I view the issue as something that can, at most, be legislated on the state and local level. Even then, I think it’s a bit of an overreach for the government to tell someone what they can or can’t ingest.
Now, since drugs obviously can have associated safety or health issues, then I guess governments can appeal to that to regulate their responsible use. The current federal position on marijuana though, is pretty much that there can’t ever be any responsible use of it at all, which I think is ludicrous given that at least 10% of the population continues to use it and their heads haven’t exploded yet.
Everybody knows their rights, real or perceived, but no one thinks about their responsibilities. If you want to legalize drugs, fine. As long as you sign a waiver and wear an ID bracelet that mandates you to receive no public money of any kind and allows the police to use whatever force necessary when you pose a danger to yourself or others when whacked out.
Somehow the same people that want legal drugs also want to suck on the public teat.
Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything, and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
Justice Thomas, dissenting in Raich
___________________________________
Justice Scalia put himself four-square on the side of the Wickard New Deal Commerce Clause:
"...the authority to enact laws necessary and proper for the regulation of interstate commerce is not limited to laws governing intrastate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce."
Justice Scalia, concurring in Raich
Nah. He lives there, it’s pretty secluded. The neighbors who know are all conservative types and are armed, so we’re not too concerned.
If he had good tequila, it might be a different story.
1. If the FDA or any other government agency were serious about discovering whether there were any "negative cognitive effects from marijuana", they've had forty+ years to come up with the clinical evidence. Instead, they've relied on prohibition based on nothing more than "because we said so". So it tells me that either they've got nothing, or they think that the public is just supposed to jump their their hoops out of fear.
2.I believe in the rights of citizens of States and municipalities to determine what's good for them, without excessive interference from the Federal government. If the State or municipality says "Yes or No" to the dispensaries, then it should be their choice.
I also think that it is better that there is small scale (State, municipal) experimentation with issues like this to see what works and what doesn't, rather than some grand genie of a federal mandate that once unleashed can't be put back into the bottle.
3. I think that the war on drugs is a waste of time and money, especially as it applies to marijuana. I don't smoke grass, but I did in college and never understood the hoopla surrounding it. Huge amounts of time and money have been spent on both sides of the issue, that could have been better invested elsewhere with greater benefit.
4. Government had often used marijuana laws to violate the rights of even non-users. I am sick of low-level helicopter flyovers that scare my dogs and aggravate me, just to inspect my home's acreage for what isn't there and never has been there. No one in this household has any kind of a criminal record, so what in the hell are they annoying us for? Because they can?
I could go on & on, but I mostly come out on the side of the idea that while I don't smoke marijuana and I don't recommend it, what right do I have to tell someone that they can't? I don't see anything in the Constitution that tells me that I have that right.
Double-edge sword here. I was watching a show on the History channel the other day about Chicago gangs. Unbelievable amount of violence ALL about protecting their illegal drug trade. I started thinking about how bummed out they'd be if drugs were legal. I guess they'd have to find something else to kill each over.
I think this bit about the “necessary and proper” clause is enlightening (from wikipedia):
“The clause provoked controversy during discussions of the proposed constitution. While Anti-Federalists expressed concern that the clause would grant the federal government boundless power, Federalists argued that the clause would only permit execution of power already granted by the Constitution.”
In light of history, can anyone honestly deny that the Anti-federalists were right in their predictions and the Federalists were being naive? Either way, it’s clear that the seemingly limitless uses of this clause weren’t intended by either camp of the writers of the Constitution, so I’m sticking to my convictions that examples like the federal drug bans are unconstitutional.
Someone has to say it:
The tree of the Knowledge of Good And Evil was in the garden, but God did not give it to Adam and Eve. They just partook. And look where we are now.
“As long as you sign a waiver and wear an ID bracelet that mandates you to receive no public money of any kind and allows the police to use whatever force necessary when you pose a danger to yourself or others when whacked out.”
Not sure where public money comes into the argument, but police already have the authority to use force against someone posing a threat to others (and apparently themselves, since they keep shooting people to prevent suicides). Your proposition seems a bit redundant to me.
You mean lately? It was legal for a very long time before. I think for millenia.
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Genesis 1:29
I know that doesn’t cover smoking it, but surely it implies that eating it is no sin?
I wonder if the animals are getting at the stuff. Have you seen any bears and chipmunks skipping around holding hands?
Keep reading, you will get to Genesis 2:15-17...which I paraphrased.
No, but the deer have been procreating like mad.
Sure, but unless you mean to say that marijuana is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, what does that have to do with anything? After all, God specifically prohibited Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of that tree, but gave his endorsement to eating the fruit of any other seed bearing plant. Marijuana seems to me to fit the definition of a seed-bearing herb pretty well.
Sounds like the “Summer of Love” all over again up in your neck of the woods!
Of course God does not prohibit us from using marijuana, but the law of the land does. Obeying the law is a patriotic thing to do, which scripture urges us to do as well. Both obeying God and the law of the land have benefits.
BTW I agree with Bokababe up in post # 22...
Who says it will "add more" if legal? According to fedgov numbers, addiction rates to opiates and cocaine were higher in 2000 than in 1900.
1. What is your evidence that drug prohibition has reduced addiction?
2. Do you think the Wickard decision is in keeping with the original understanding of the Commerce Clause... yes or no?
I think that this war against weed was lost when the Indians first smoked it, centuries before white settlers got here.
I’m pretty sure marijuana is from Africa.
I haven’t read all the replies but let me just stop the euivocation by saying that you aren’t necessarily intoxicated by using alcohol, but you are by using marijuana. Why people are in such a rush to legalize a substance that would enhance the welfare state is beyond me.
There are 3 strains of marijuana, all of them originate from Asia. Indians were notorious marijuana users in years past, but East Indians, not Native American Indians. They were smoking tobacco in their peace pipes, not weed.
So once the law changes, lots of currently productive people will become pot addicts and go on welfare? How did you arrive at that conclusion?
Pot should have never been made illegal.
Why should someone else's self-inflicted cognitive degeneration be a criminal matter? Alcohol causes cognitive degeneration too, but we only punish people for it when they do something criminally stupid.
Agreed
We pay for it too.
And there is always the rub -- we mostly fear the legalization of something when we think that WE are going to have to pay for it or be responsible for it. It's the same dilemma that employers faced some years back re their legal liability for employee behavior.
When I first got into the Human Resources field, as an employer, we didn't care if an employee went home and drank a quart of scotch every night or snorted an ounce of cocaine, as long as the employee came in and did his job to our satisfaction. His personal life, off the clock, was his own. (These jobs didn't involve transportation or safety issues) But if the employee failed to do his job, it didn't matter what his excuse was -- alcohol, drugs or just being a moron -- whatever his reasons for continually failing to do his job, he was fired.
Eventually, along came employment laws that forced employers to "retain employees who chose to go to rehab". If you caught them doing drugs, even on the job and they said the magic words, "I want to go to rehab", you couldn't fire them outright and had to accommodate them.
Bells went off in employers heads saying, "We've got to do drug tests on employees BEFORE we hire them, because once we do, we are stuck in murky legal waters with their drug habit." So, employers started drug testing.
And once employers started testing for illegal substances, they then went further and some started testing for even legal substances -- like tobacco -- even if the employee didn't smoke on the job. And some employers used that legal right to deny even some smokers employment. Misguided, perhaps -- but it was legal.
So now the employer had a right to decide what you did with your own body, even on your off-time, because the employer was forced to be financially responsible for your bad habits.
The point is that once you start forcing anyone to be responsible for another's behavior, the person responsible now feels that they have a right to tell you what to do.
There is NO clear relationship between smoking marijuana and getting on welfare. But the very fact that welfare even exists creates the idea that we need to prevent anything that we will be forced to pay for.
In other words we feel the right to legally deny another's liberty because our own liberty has already been compromised.
As long as we are forced to be our brother's keeper-- not just morally & spiritually, but also legally and financially -- we will never be free and we will never let anyone else be free either.
2. What is my evidence that drug prohibition has reduced addiction? How do you prove it hasn't? That is a question that beggers the imagination. But, make a product more available, cheaper, and highly addictive, and it stands to reason that you will have more addiction.
3.Oh, well this is silly. No, Wickard isn't in keeping with the original understanding of the Commerce Clause. But why deal with that? What about the Food and Drug act and Dotterweich? Isn't that closer to the topic?
Commerce was advanced enough in 1880 to supply 400,000 opium addicts. That is a much higher rate of addiction than today, so I don't think your commerce argument is valid. It was affordable, available and legal.
Side note: The high number was due to addicted Civil War veterans, according to the DOJ. As they gave up the habit or died, that number shrank to the levels seen in 1900.
No, Wickard isn't in keeping with the original understanding of the Commerce Clause.
The national prohibition of marijuana depends on Wickard, as J. Stevens noted in the Raich opinion. So do we at least agree that states, rather than fedgov, should be the ones to decide intrastate marijuana policies, and that national prohibition of mj is not in keeping with the Constitution?
As for your ‘surprise’ trick question on Wickard, using it as a pretext for the gotcha Raich, I am wondering of your admiration for Justice Stevens who can reliably be wrong on giving directions to the bathroom and whose opinions on the Constitution seem like they are influenced by smoking the very substance you so desperately want to legalize.
When in doubt, read Scalia.
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