Free Republic

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) signed a bill legalizing recreational marijuana on Tuesday, making the North Star state the 23rd in the nation to fully legalize the substance. “We’ve known for too long that prohibiting the use of cannabis hasn’t worked,” Walz said in a statement. “By legalizing adult-use cannabis, we’re expanding our economy, creating jobs, and regulating the industry to keep Minnesotans safe.”

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) has dropped his opposition to legalizing marijuana in the state, putting forward a pathway for a legalization bill to be approved. In a Medium post Friday, Sununu said that he felt other states “rushed to legalize marijuana” with “little guardrails,” leading to the turning of “the culture and fabric of their state,” and that, “in the past, I said now is not the time to legalize marijuana.” But with New Hampshire being “the only state in New England” not to allow recreational marijuana use — and with a majority of its citizens supporting legalization...

New York State legalized marijuana for recreational use on Wednesday, making it the 15th state in the country to do so. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) signed the legislation on Wednesday, which creates “automatic expungement of previous marijuana convictions that would now be legal.” The Democrat governor described it as a “historic day.”

The dynamics of the farm labor population have changed since César Chávez and others began organizing workers in California's fields. In the early 1960s, a guest-worker program that had imported workers from Mexico since the days of World War II was drawing to a close. Those who were left picking crops were largely legal residents or U.S. citizens of Mexican and Filipino descent, along with working-class white and black Americans. “Back then, probably 80 percent were documented, and about 20 percent were undocumented. Today it would be just the reverse,” said Arturo Rodriguez, president of United Farm Workers, the nation's...

There are two fairly well-defined positions that have emerged regarding the issue, under consideration by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, of whether the use of marijuana should be legalized for the treatment of certain medical conditions. The first of these sees marijuana's limited legalization as, in almost all cases, the effort of so-called "stoners" (in contemporary parlance people who pretty much can't live without getting high on marijuana on a daily basis) to find a way to circumvent existing laws that criminalize the use of wacky weed so that they (the stoners), with the consent of...

Smoking marijuana, the federal government constantly reminds us, is dangerous in every way. It impairs cognitive functioning, makes you high, and, because it’s smoked, is a demon in a bong hit—and so on. A counterargument is that pot has helped thousands of cancer and AIDS patients, for example, contend with side effects of their illnesses and treatments. There is also evidence that marijuana works for some psychiatric disorders as well, principally depression and bipolar disorder. Among some people, pot is jokingly referred to as “green Prozac.” The problem is you can’t legally take a toke for psychiatric diagnoses. “I think...