Free Republic

On this day 500 years ago, an obscure Saxon monk launched a protest movement against the Catholic Church that would transform Europe. Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation changed not just the way Europeans lived, fought, worshipped, worked and created art but also how they ate and drank. For among the things it impacted was a drink beloved throughout the world and especially in Luther's native Germany: beer. The change in beer production was wrought by the pale green conical flower of a wildly prolific plant — hops. Every hip craft brewery today peddling expensive hoppy beers owes a debt of gratitude...

Executive Summary Government prohibition of marijuana is the subject of ongoing debate. One issue in this debate is the effect of marijuana prohibition on government budgets. Prohibition entails direct enforcement costs and prevents taxation of marijuana production and sale. This report examines the budgetary implications of legalizing marijuana – taxing and regulating it like other goods – in all fifty states and at the federal level. The report estimates that legalizing marijuana would save $7.7 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. $5.3 billion of this savings would accrue to state and local governments, while $2.4 billion...

AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE 12-05-04 To those who support our constitutionally limited “Republican Form of Government“, Raich v. Ashcroft is not about “medical Marijuana” but rather, the case presents a chance to correct a despotic decision made by the SCOTUS in 1942 concerning Congress’ power to regulate commerce in which the Court gave a new meaning to the word “commerce” in order to allow part of FDR’s NEW DEAL socialism [price controls] to pass as being constitutional, when it was not. The following article is worth reading, and can be found at findlaw.com.The Supreme Court Hears Oral Argument on a...

Alabama, which has some of the nation's toughest drug laws, has become an unlikely ally of California on medical marijuana use. In a legal brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments Monday on California's medical marijuana law, Alabama Attorney General Troy King said states, not the federal government, should have the right to decide drug-control policies. "I could not disagree more with the public policy that underlies the California law. I think it's flawed. I think it's bad public policy," King said in an interview. "But if somebody can go in and tell California you can't regulate...