New FL Polls Split on Legalization Initiative, Mexico Investigates Drug Kingpin's Delivery to US, More... (8/14/24

Long-time congressional drug warrior Chuck Grassley has concerns about marijuana rescheduling, Maine utilities regulators don't bite on an offer from the power company to rat out illegal marijuana grows, and more. 

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA). The nonagerian drug warrior is worried marijuana rescheduling is moving too fast. (senate.gov)

Marijuana Policy

Drug War Dinosaur GOP Senator Frets over Pace of Marijuana Rescheduling, Demands Answers from Agencies. Ninety-year-old Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley is concerned that marijuana rescheduling is moving too fast and is demanding explanations from the agencies involved. Grassley, who has been a drug war hardliner for decades, sent a pair of letters to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra on Monday demanding that they explain a "rushed and unconventional administrative process."

"Health policy should be based on sound scientific data, which is why I write raising concerns the Justice Department bypassed traditional safeguards in its haste to reschedule marijuana," he wrote to Garland, adding that he’d like clarification on why the proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) advanced without addressing Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) requests for additional information.

"In fact, the DEA requested additional scientific input to determine if marijuana has an accepted medical use, but Justice Department attorneys deemed the request ‘impermissibly narrow,'" Grassley said. "After apparently rejecting DEA’s concerns, you signed the [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] instead of the DEA Administrator. This is a break from tradition."

In his letter to HHS, Grassley complained the agency's recent report on risks and benefits of marijuana, as well as barriers to marijuana research, was submitted to congressional stakeholders too late and that it "seems at odds with its recommendation to reschedule marijuana." He cited potential mental health and cardiovascular risks of marijuana use in challenging HHS's conclusion that "risks to public health posed by marijuana are low."

Florida Polls Split on Marijuana Legalization Initiative's Prospects. Two new polls on the prospects for the state's Amendment 3 marijuana legalization initiative are split on the outcome. Under state law, constitutional amendments require 60 percent of the vote to pass. One poll has the measure under 60 percent; the other has it over. 

A poll from Florida Atlantic University has Amendment 3 at 56 percent—a majority but not enough of one to pass. The silver lining in this poll is that 15 percent of voters remain undecided, and the amendment only needs to about one out of three of those undecideds to reach the 60 percent threshold. 

A poll from USA Today/Suffolk University has better news for the Amendment 3 campaign, showing 63 percent support, with only about 3.2 percent of voters undecided. That suggests that the initiative would have to lose nearly every single currently undecided voter to fall short of 60 percent. 

Most earlier polls have shown Amendment 3 winning in November, and the initiative campaign has far exceeded any organized opposition in terms of funding. Still, this is going to be a nail-biter. 

Maine Regulators Reject Power Company's Bid to Use High Electric Bills to Help Cops Find Illegal Marijuana Grows. The state's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) voted unanimously on Tuesday that tracking high electricity bills is not the way for law enforcement to find illegal marijuana grows. Versant Power, the state's main electricity provider had proposed reporting to law enforcement if utility bills suggested an illegal grow operation. 

"We've seen some instances of people with large-scale, illegal growing operations and residential properties here in northern [and] eastern Maine," Judy Long, senior manager of communications at Versant Power, said. "We started to get a lot of requests from law enforcement for information regarding some of these suspected grow houses. The grow houses were using way more electricity in some cases than their residential wiring could accommodate without creating a real danger of fire," Long said. "We had a couple situations where meter readers went to these residences and found that the actual electric meter on the house was in excess of 500 degrees Fahrenheit."

Because of the potential danger, Long said, Versant made the reporting proposal. 

"This was a conversation strictly about people that were using marijuana growing operations in an unsafe way and were able to be identified through certain characteristics of that unsafe usage," Long said.

But the PUC wasn't buying it.

"We don't want utilities to be selling information or be sharing private customer information, whether that's usage or personally identifiable information about where they live and so forth," Phil Bartlett, chair of the Maine PUC, said.

Other concerns raised included the chance lawful growing operations would be reported or even just someone who has higher-than-normal power usage.

"Categories that they were providing seem that they were pretty broad," Bartlett said. "Our concern is that it's really not the role of the utility, at least as we historically have defined it, to be monitoring sort of behavior of customers, and then reporting suspicious activity."

International

Mexico Opens Criminal Investigation into Delivery of Sinaloa Cartel Leader "El Mayo" to the US. The Mexican attorney general's office said over the weekend that it had opened a criminal investigation into how Sinaloa Cartel Ishmael "El Mayo" Zambada was delivered to US authorities at an airstrip near El Paso last month after Zambada said he was deceived by the son of imprisoned cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, then ambushed, attacked, handcuffed, and forced into the plane taking both of them into the hands of US authorities.

The Mexican attorney general's office said in a statement on Sunday that the crimes committed along the way could include murder, kidnapping, and unlawful detainment of a person, illicit use of a flight, illicit use of aerospace facilities as well as immigration and customs violations. Mexican authorities have directly charged neither Guzman Jr. nor Zambada. 

The possible murder charge refers to the killing of newly elected federal lawmaker Hector Cuen, whom Sinaloa authorities had previously said was killed in a carjacking in Culiacan, the state capital, but whom Zambada charged was killed at a ranch belonging to state Gov. Ruben Rocha, where Zambada and Guzman Jr. were supposed to meet with the governor. Instead, Cuen was killed and Zambada was kidnapped, he charged. 

Federal prosecutors said they wanted to talk to Gov. Rocha about the events and that they would move to bring the state investigation into the killing under federal purview.