Posted on 01/23/2015 11:33:34 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
President Obama believes more states are likely to legalize marijuana following efforts in Colorado and Washington state.
"My suspicion is that you're going to see other states look at this," the president told YouTube blogger Hank Green.
Obama said that the federal government was "not going to spend a lot of resources" enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that had decided to legalize the drug. He also noted that the Department of Justice was examining how to shift policies for nonviolent drug offenders.
In an interview with The New Yorker last year, Obama appeared to tacitly endorse a Colorado referendum that legalized marijuana in the state.
The president said that it was “important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."
In the same interview, Obama said he did not think pot was more dangerous than alcohol, although said he still saw use as “a bad habit and a vice.”
Last December, the White House said Congress should not interfere with local District of Columbia law that would legalize marijuana in the capital city as part of the so-called cromnibus. But Obama did sign the budget bill including those restrictions.
Legalization arguments aside, here’s another example of picking and choosing which laws this administration decides to enforce.
So the pro-legalization folks will cheer, the anti-legalization will boo...yet the main point is missed completely.
Malfeasance.
“Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana was a bad idea, the state’s governor said Friday. “
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3249878/posts
Thanks for noticing that which is really important here.
It must be recognized that too many people take their personal moral signals from what government declares to be legal or illegal.
Government should have never declared the ingestion of herbs to be an illegal activity. It is a basic aspect of liberty that we each own our own bodies. It would be far better for the headline of this article to say that more states are expected to remove themselves from their futile attempt to regulate this sphere of private life.
Libertarianism would work in a world where everyone is born 30 years old with the life experience of decision making of that age. But we start out as children in a cultural toilet made more sullied buy the “libertine”.
I was in Hawaii at the time. Pot was so widely used and readily available it might as well have been legal.
Oregon and Alaska followed Washington in November.
I know libertarians are very righteous about this issue (at least some of them)...and I understand that position.
States ought to have a right to define this, as states ought to have a right to define marriage--without federal interference.
The left are hypocrites. They are banking on a philosophy of "no right or wrong" to help them gain more power. When you have a population that worships sex (whatever kind of sex they desire at the moment), and that is able to use chemicals to alter their brain into an abnormal high, then you can manipulate the citizenry any way you like--just keep giving them their addictions.
On one occasion, so it was narrated, Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a handful of grain to the bird, and it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on them they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”
Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God, (Word Publ., Dallas: 1994), pp. 26-27
And it makes girl's knees fat. Or was that mini skirts?
Choom Gang lives.
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Regulations and signing statements are not laws passed by Congress. Can anyone supply an example of any president making his own decisions about which laws to enforce or not enforce? Even Andrew Jackson did not do that.
I was searching for a way to put my thoughts into words and then you posted exactly what I was thinking. Thank you.
These pot head threads get rough. I hope your ready. They want their drugs and they want it legal.
WooHoo! More Tax Revenue!
Yes, I have seen the fur fly in other threads, even those about legalizing all drugs, so I know exactly what you mean. Though I believe steadfastly in freedom, I also understand the law of unintended consequences and know that it is a fine line we walk between what is healthy for society as a whole and what is driven by self indulgence. We must tread carefully because we’ll pay a heavy price for irresponsibility
If the problem is that too many people are “libertine”, then we have a problem that is entirely outside of the role of government to address.
You will recall that the federal constitution was not written to control citizens, it was written with the presumption that the citizen has liberty and that government must be restrained. To that end, citizens delegated some power to government. But where government exactly lacks the power is in telling a citizen what he can and cannot do in the privacy of his own home and with his own person.
Moreover, if the problem we have is that too many people are libertine with respect to how the treat themselves, they will certain be libertine in how they vote and how they treat their fellow man. Libertine people will not be restrained in what they allow government to do, as long as government doesn’t touch the most important aspects of their lives, like how much they support same sex marriage, or how much they want to punish the rich with property confiscation.
The only way to roll back a libertine mindset is through massive public support of a philosophy of personal responsibility and personal development. I am willing to put up with more pot heads if it means that those pot heads cannot vote to give government more power over us.
We have a libertine population in part because we have given government the job of educating our youth. When government cannot have a spiritual basis for its laws and regulations because the First Amendment forbids it, then government schools will be devoid of spiritual values as well, especially since educators are overwhelmingly hostile to Christian values.
It took well over a century and a half to get here and it will take many decades to dig ourselves out. One place to start is to get government out of the education business and give parents vouchers to enable their children to be educated where parents see fit. Notice the rise in homeschooling and in private schools. Notice that homeschooled children are far more conservative than their public schooled peers.
My sex drive could have been a lot higher than it has been? That's a scary thought!
Personally I don’t care if people grow or smoke dope, as long as I don’t have to support them when they fail at life.
Do you support that decision being made at the state level, rather than federal, per the 10th Amendment?
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