Posted on 09/27/2009 2:36:52 PM PDT by cakid1
Whether You Like it or Not - California Will Legalize Pot Next Year
(That seems to be the idea behind a new article out today)
According to a well known, and outspoken leader from the left it’s a good bet that the state will legalize Pot next year.
Part of the reason?
The state needs...
Certainly no evidence from the founding suggests that "commerce" included the mere possession of a good or some personal activity that did not involve trade or exchange for value. In the early days of the Republic, it would have been unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the local cultivation, possession, and consumption of marijuana."
"If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption (not because it is interstate commerce, but because it is inextricably bound up with interstate commerce), then Congress' Article I powers -- as expanded by the Necessary and Proper Clause -- have no meaningful limits. Whether Congress aims at the possession of drugs, guns , or any number of other items, it may continue to "appropria[te] state police powers under the guise of regulating commerce."
"If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States. This makes a mockery of Madison's assurance to the people of New York that the "powers delegated" to the Federal Government are "few and defined", while those of the States are "numerous and indefinite."
Scalia is a fair weather federalist on this issue:
[What about Justice Scalia? He did not join the majority opinion, resting his decision on the Necessary and Proper Clause, which he had previously described in Printz v. U.S. as "the last, best hope of those who defend ultra vires congressional action." In his concurring opinion in Raich, Justice Scalia appears to put his commitment to majoritarianism over his commitment to originalism. Yet this decision does run counter to his oft-expressed insistence that the people should act to protect their un-enumerated rights in state political processes rather than in federal court.
Here this is exactly what the citizens of California and ten other states have done, but Justice Scalia's new stance on the Necessary and Proper Clause leaves citizens little, if any, room to protect their liberty from federal encroachment in the future. It has always seemed significant that he never joined Justice Thomas's originalist concurrences in Lopez and Morrison. Nor does he explain why Justice Thomas's originalist dissent in Raich is historically inaccurate, which would be incumbent on him as an "originalist justice" to do. Instead, Justice Scalia now joins in expanding the reach of the Commerce Clause power beyond even that which the Court had endorsed in Wickard v. Filburn.]
Any grabby grabbing grabber grabboid logic the drug warriors dream up will be applied to guns. And vice versa.
I see you are unfamiliar with the writings of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, AKA the Father of History.
If you want to defend Western Culture, it helps to know something about it.
Correct, but I’m sure it’s only a pipe dream.
I have nothing against pot smokers. Smoked my fair share back in my youth. I have never understood the reason for making it illegal in the first place.
Yet I do know that Western Civilization is alcohol based and not Cannabis based like the Middle East, I doubt that your “source” has even written on the subject in the last couple of thousand years, that is just a wild guess.
Sure have seen it - on tv years ago.
New Deal era legislation certainly isn’t something we should be looking at as eternal truth. We aren’t talking gay marriage here.
I’ve also heard that hemp is a good plant, makes good paper, grows real fast, can make cellulosic ethanol from it, biodiesel, etc.
I just don’t think they should be making growing plants illegal.
Heroin was an OTC medication for a short time. Cocaine was in coca-cola.
If you can grow pot and opium poppies and not pay anyone, the pharma industry won’t be happy. Opium tea = bad, oxycontin = good.
I don’t know exactly about this “illegal cigar” thing, but maybe it might have to do with cubans?
Nobody knows about the specifics of this pot legalization, but the likely result is that whatever big money is involved in the sale of smuggled pot would dry up.
Most people would buy it in stores. Other people would grow it themselves. If the taxes are excessive, the people who are growing it (legally) might sell it. But since it’s so cheap to grow, and legal to grow, people who have it might just give it away.
We don’t know the specifics of the plan though.
What a curious argument. Are you suggesting that going from prohibition to legalization (albeit with some taxes and regulations) is an increase in government?
Suppose the government came out tomorrow and announced "We're cutting back automobile regulations to just one law: Absolutely no cars are allowed to exist in this country."
Since this would "remove" all the taxes and fees associated with automobile sales in this country, do you think this would represent an increase or a decrease in government power? If some group advocated legalization of automobile ownership, even knowing that it would lead to increased taxes and regulations, would you see them as advocating more or less government?
Why? Legalize marijuana (assuming it actually happens in California) may be an ineffective policy, but why should that prevent you from doing business in the state? It's not as if every single Californian is going to start smoking just because the state isn't criminalizing it anymore.
Or do you think it is fundamentally evil to not arrest people for possessing marijuana?
So, anyone who believes in the 9th and 10th Amendment are liars? What basis do you have, in the Constitution, for the criminalization of pot?
In light of the 9th Amendment, what rights are prohibited that take away the right to use pot?
In light of the 10th Amendment, what rights do the Feds have here vis-a-vis the States?
Instead of calling immature names, why don't you explain where you find this power to stop California from legalizing or to allow the Feds to have a say.
cool - maybe all the liberals that came north will move back there.
It was legal then. But thanks for the non sequitur.
Here's another of your heroes on the left regarding the issue.
"We need to rethink and decriminalize our nation's marijuana laws." -Barack Obama, January 2004
There are plenty of things that are unhealthy for a person's heart. Cheeseburgers, fried chicken, sitting on one's rear all day watching tv, etc. None of those things are the government's business.
Have you ever taken a single history class? Most of them require reading at least parts of Herodotus.
Your narrow worldview is ignorant of the relevant facts:
In Western civilizations, as in China, the durable material crafted from tough hemp stalks has been of immeasurable significance throughout history. The ancient Greeks called in kannabis. Greek sailors traded kannabis across the Aegean Sea as early as the sixth century BC, according to written records on hemp trade from that era. Twentieth-century archeologists found hemp fiber bundles in the cargo hold of a Carthaginian trade ship that had sunk near Sicily around 300 BC. In 450 BC, Herodotus, the great Greek historian, wrote of the fine quality of hemp clothing produced by the Greek-speaking Thracians.
Four hundred years later, Plutarch wrote that the Thracians made a habit of throwing the tops of the kannabis plant onto a fire, thereby becoming intoxicated by the smoke. It was a custom unfamiliar to the wine-loving children of Zeus. A minor reference to the use of kannabis as a remedy for backache is found in Greek literature from about 400 BC. That is the only known reference to the medical use of marijuana in ancient Greece, although it is known that both Arabic and Hebrew medical practices did use kannabis medications during that same period.
In 70 AD, a Greek physician named Discordes in the employ of conquering Roman legions collected a wealth of information on medicinal plants. Discordes’ text, entitled Materia Medica, contained the fruits of his world travels with the descriptions, local names, natural habitats, and indications for treatment of various symptoms. Among those 600 plants, Discordes identified Cannabis sativa L. (from the Greek kannabis) as being useful in manufacturing rope and as producing seeds whose juice was effective for treating earaches and for diminishing sexual desire. Discordes’ Materia Medica was hugely successful, translated into every language of the known world, and remained an indispensable reference manual of Western medicine for at least 1500 years.
The English word canvas is derived from the word cannabis, an etymological indication of the supreme importance of hemp fiber in European seafaring technology. Clearly, the colonial expansion of European empires into remote parts of the world could not have occurred without the development of cannabis-based technologies. In 1492, for example, each one of Columbus’ transatlantic vessels carried more than 80 tons of hemp rigging and sails, the product of untold thousands of man-hours. Many stately fortunes were built on the toil of peasants in tall fields of hemp, which eventually became the most important industrial crop in most emerging countries. At the same time, European knowledge of medical cannabis was limited to the short references of Discordes and various unrecorded folk remedies throughout medieval times.
As Western civilization moved from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance period, the developing medical since uncovered many substantial facts, including a remarkable number of benefits ascribed to medical marijuana.
http://www.cannabismd.net/history-of-medical-cannabis/
Fake quote. Leftists love 'em.
"The contention that Mr. Lincoln ever said what is attributed to him in the paragraph numbered (1) is absolutely without justification. The statement never came to light until a local option election in Atlanta, Ga., long after the war, when it was used to influence the Negro vote. Various liquor men of prominence, including Mr. Tom Gilmore of the National Model License League, have admitted that there is no record of Mr. Lincoln's having made this statement, and Nicolay and Hay, his great biographers, have pronounced it spurious."The Pocket Cyclopedia of Temperance, by Clarence True Wilson, Elbert Deets Pickett - Page 225 (1916)
The story behind the successes and failures of Western and Middle Eastern cultures is probably a bit more complex than how each one chose to get trashed.
In any case, what difference does it make to you if someone else wants to "embrace" aspects of some foreign culture, assuming that it doesn't involve picking your pocket or breaking your bones?
No. But leftists who lie about the 9th and 10th Amendment are liars.
Hate to pile on, but here this is anyway:
Last year, a disenchanted classics major named D.C.A. Hillman published a book called The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization. It was his revenge on the academic community that had censored his thesis, forcing him to remove the section dealing with recreational drug use in Greek and Roman times in order to graduate.
It’s a short but pithy book, aimed at the hypocrisy of the modern U.S. stance on (some) drugs as much as at the stuffy classicists who maintained, in the face of reams of textual evidence, according to Hillman, that “[the Romans] just wouldn’t do such a thing.” I’m not a classicist, but Hillman doesn’t have to work very hard to convince me that Rome’s pleasure-seekers didn’t just drink lots and lots of wine in those saturnalian romps of theirs.
The Chemical Muse is a brief overview of the evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans were both aware and tolerant of the use of psychoactive substances: opiates, cannabis and other plant-based drugs, while they simultaneously warned of the dangers of “poisoning” (what we would refer to as overdose) and prescribed precautionary remedies for it. In fact, according to Hillman, the only aspect of drug use that was criminal in these societies was the intentional poisoning of another person with a drug.
Hillman is mostly interested in presenting his case from a civil libertarian standpoint; since our own imperfect understanding of civil liberties is largely derived from Classical society via the Enlightenment, he wonders how we can have descended to a position so much less enlightened in this regard than our primitive forebears in the ancient world.
But in his defense of Greek and Roman recreational drug use, Hillman barely touches on what is to me, the heart of the matter: drugs may have stimulated the very visions and insights that gave early poets and philosophers levels of understanding that Western civilization has built on ever since, while systematically purging the parts of those understandings that didn’t gibe with any practice not useful to refining social control and/or increasing the production of profit. Hillman does make note of the pre-Socratics, chief among them Pythagoras and Empedocles, for whom mysticism and rigorous investigation of the natural world were no contradiction. He says: “the roots of Western philosophy reach deep into the fertile soil of the human imagination, where shamanism, divination, and narcotic experiences have held sway for thousands of years.” While this idea alone could easily be the subject of a book, Hillman is more interested in documenting classical references to drug use than to linking it to the production of important concepts and archetypes, from mathematics to theology.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/drugs-and-social-progress-since-the-greeks/comment-page-1/
You must be stoned.
Western Civilization is alcohol based not Cannabis based, it doesn’t seem that you are even trying to challenge that so I don’t see your point.
Backwards.
"Respondent's local cultivation and consumption of marijuana is not "Commerce ... among the several States."
Bovine scat. There was nothing in the case records demonstrating that the cultivation and consumption was solely local. Raich wouldn't even identify who the drug pushers were who were providing the dope.
Here this is exactly what the citizens of California and ten other states have done
Keep those invented facts coming. Proposition 215 did NOT legalize the sale of pot and the ballot presented to the citizens of California explicitly noted that the proposition did not nullify existing federal marijuana laws.
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