2012

Marijuana Legalization Victories Are Already Ripping the Drug War Apart

by smorgan, November 14, 2012, 02:08pm

https://stopthedrugwar.org/files/marijuanaleaf1.jpg

Of all the fascinating reactions I've seen to Colorado and Washington's successful marijuana legalization initiatives, this is by far the most extraordinary.

MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Felipe Calderon says the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in two U.S. states limits that country’s “moral authority” to ask other nations to combat or restrict illegal drug trafficking.
Calderon says the legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado represents a fundamental change that requires the rethinking of public policy in the entire Western Hemisphere. [Washington Post]

One gets the feeling that Mexican leaders have been desperate for any excuse to begin drawing back from the bloody drug war clusterf$%k we've sucked them into. After all, it's pretty damn ridiculous for Mexicans to die in a failed effort to keep marijuana out of the hands of Americans who actually want marijuana.

Imagine that you're Felipe Calderon, a long-serving and faithful puppet of the American drug war juggernaut, and you look up and see something like this unfolding even as your own people are dying in the streets. To say that we've lost our "moral authority" here is an understatement. We never had any to begin with.

Listen closely and you might make out the whispers of the drug war's dumbfounded defenders as they continue struggling to form a response. The moral authority in American drug policy is being reclaimed bravely by the American people themselves, and the message they've sent is now echoing around the world.

WA Governor Meets with DOJ on Marijuana Legalization

by psmith, November 13, 2012, 05:12pm, (Issue #759)

Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) met Tuesday with Deputy Attorney General James Cole to discuss her state's passage last week of an initiative that legalizes and taxes the sale of marijuana for adults 21 and over. Federal law continues to consider marijuana possession, cultivation, and distribution to be criminal offenses.

Gov. Christine Gregoire (governor.wa.gov)

Gregoire spokesman Cory Curtis told the Associated Press Monday that Gregoire had added the meeting to a previously scheduled trip to Washington, DC, to seek clarity from the Justice Department.

"We want direction from them," said Curtis. "Our goal is to respect the will of the voters, but give us some clarity."

They didn't get it Tuesday. Gregoire told the Associated Press the Justice Department had yet to make a decision on whether it would move to block the laws in Washington and Colorado. They needed to make a decision "sooner rather than later," she said.

"I told them, 'Make no mistake, that absent an injunction of some sort, it's our intent to implement decriminalization,'" Gregoire said. "I don't want to spend a lot of money implementing this if you are going to attempt to block it."

Under I-502, possession of up to an ounce of marijuana is legal beginning December 6, but the state has a year to come up with rules for a state-licensed cultivation, processing, and distribution scheme. Home grows remain illegal, except for medical marijuana patients.

Colorado also passed a legalization measure last week, Amendment 80. The state governor and attorney general spoke by phone with Attorney General Eric Holder last Friday, but got no clear indications of what the Justice Department will do.

Colorado also passed a measure legalizing the drug. Colorado's governor and attorney general spoke by phone Friday with US Attorney General Eric Holder, with no signal whether the US Justice Department would sue to block the marijuana measure.

Possession of up to an ounce and cultivation of up to six plants will be legal in Colorado by January 5 at the latest. That's the last day for the governor to add the amendment to the state constitution. Colorado legislators have about a year to write rules for state-regulated commercial cultivation, processing, and sales.

In both states, state officials worry that the federal government will sue to block them from implementing regulations.

Washington, DC

United States

See map: Google Maps

Citing Marijuana Legalization Vote, Latin Leaders Call for Policy Review

by psmith, November 13, 2012, 04:06pm, (Issue #759)

Five conservative Latin American heads of state said in a joint declaration Monday that the votes by two US states to legalize marijuana would have important ramifications on regional efforts to suppress the drug trade. While the declaration did not say the leaders were considering relaxing their efforts against marijuana, it suggested that the votes in Colorado and Washington could make their enforcement of laws against marijuana more difficult.

Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon was joined by Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla and Prime Minister Dean Barrow of Belize in Mexico City for a meeting before issuing the declaration. Guatemalan President Oscar Perez Molina, who also signed the declaration, was not present at the meeting because he was overseeing recovery efforts from last Wednesday's deadly earthquake there.

Mexico and Central America have in recent years seen unprecedented levels of prohibition-related violence, with more than 60,000 killed in Mexico during Calderon's tenure and with rising levels of violence in Central America as Mexican enforcement efforts push the so-called cartels into the isthmus.

In addition to several paragraphs of boilerplate language reiterating their country's continuing commitment to fighting criminal drug trafficking organizations, the declaration also "underlines that it is necessary to deeply analyze the social, political, and public health implications for our nations of the processes in action at the state and local level of some countries of our continent to permit the production, consumption, and legal distribution of marijuana, which constitutes a paradigmatic change in respect to the current international regime on the part of such entities."

The declaration asks the secretary general of the Organization of American States, who was mandated at the Summit of the Americas in April with completing a hemispheric study of drugs, "to incorporate an analysis of the impact of the new policies referred to [above] on our countries." It also calls on the UN General Assembly to hold a special session on drug policy no later than 2015.

The Mexico City declaration comes just days after a key advisor to incoming Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto questioned how Mexico will enforce marijuana prohibition there when it is legal in some US states. The Obama administration has yet to formally respond to the decision by voters in Colorado and Washington to legalize marijuana.

Last Tuesday's legalization votes are reverberating not just across the country, but across the hemisphere.

Mexico City

Mexico

Medical Marijuana Stock Prices Soar Following Legalization Votes

by borden, November 12, 2012, 03:58pm

The Medical Marijuana Business Daily reports that several publicly traded companies serving the medical cannabis industry have soared in the stock market since the election:

Investors pumped money into the sector after Colorado and Washington legalized cannabis for recreational use and Massachusetts passed medical marijuana legislation. In some cases, MMJ-related stocks hit new highs and saw record trading activity, with millions of shares changing hands vs. tens of thousands on a typical day. That’s particularly impressive given that the overall stock market plunged after the election.

Yahoo finance chart for one of the medical marijuana companies

The Daily notes the stocks have dropped somewhat since then, and that not every cannabis business saw its stocks rise with the election. Nevertheless, "the increased investor interest in cannabis bodes well for the future of the industry," they write, "which could grow by leaps and bounds over the next year."

Are the buyers who drove stock prices up last week right to be optimistic? Looking at the market to predict the future of drug policy is kind of like using Intrade to predict a presidential election -- only time will tell at this point. But investors are doubtless thinking about a lot of the same things that we are right now: Will the passage of initiatives to legalize marijuana create political pressure on federal officials to ease up on the medical marijuana industry, or on Congress? How will the feds respond to the legalization votes? They must also wonder, if legalization systems do get established in these states, how will that affect the people (many of them our friends) who've risked much to build a medical marijuana industry serving patients there -- will they be winners or losers in that new business environment?

In the long run, I believe the answer to the first question at least is "yes" -- states enacting marijuana legalization will ultimately put pressure on all the branches of government to do something to accommodate it, while giving an advantage to our allies in government in their efforts to change things. More states will certainly do this, given where public opinion seems headed -- the questions for investors in marijuana are how long that will take, and whether their businesses will survive until then. For advocates, the question is how many lives will be needlessly ruined (again, many of them of our friends) by prohibition in the meanwhile.

Washington DAs Begin Dropping Marijuana Possession Cases

by psmith, November 11, 2012, 04:44pm, (Issue #759)

Some Washington state prosecutors have begun dismissing pending marijuana possession cases in the wake of last week's vote to legalize marijuana in the state. King County (Seattle) prosecutors have dismissed 175 cases involving adults 21 or over, while Pierce County (Tacoma) prosecutors have dropped about 50 more.On Tuesday, Clark County (Vancouver) prosecutors announced they, too, were dropping possession cases.

King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg is no longer prosecuting small-time marijuana possession cases. (kingcounty.gov)

I-502 makes the possession of up to an ounce legal under state law and directs the state to come up with a system of state-owned marijuana stores. The possession provision doesn't come into effect until December 6, but some prosecutors have decided to apply the new law retroactively.

"Although the effective date of I-502 is not until December 6, there is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month," King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said in a statement last Friday.

Satterberg has jurisdiction over unincorporated King County, as well as cases on state highways and at the University of Washington. In Seattle itself, which has had a lowest law enforcement priority police in place for nearly a decade, City Attorney Pete Holmes has had a policy of refusing to prosecute simple possession cases.

Satterberg had 40 cases in which criminal charges had already been filed. Those charges will be dismissed. Another 135 cases awaiting charging decisions will be sent back to the arresting police agency.

Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist told the Seattle Times he was dropping "about four dozen" cases where pot possession was the only offense. "The people have spoken through this initiative," said Lindquist. "And as a practical matter, I don't think you could sell a simple marijuana case to a jury after this initiative passed."

In an interview with the Times, Satterberg said his office would continue to prosecute marijuana possession above one ounce, but would have "a buffer for those whose scales are less than accurate." His office will also charge felony possession for people holding more than 40 grams, but Satterberg said his office routinely allows such defendants to plead down to a misdemeanor.

More than 241,000 people have been arrested for small-time pot possession in Washington in the past 25 years, including more than 67,000 in the last five years. That will end as of December 6, but at least some Washington prosecutors aren't waiting.

United States

See map: Google Maps

Feds Unsure What to Do About State Legalization

by borden, November 11, 2012, 01:31pm

A Washington Post story by Sari Horwitz reports that federal officials don't know what they are going to do about marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington:

"I really don't know what we're going to do," said one high-ranking law enforcement official involved in the decision who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Dept. of Justice headquarters, Washington, DC (gsa.gov)

Attorney General Eric Holder had ignored a letter signed by all the past DEA chiefs last September urging him to speak out against the ballot initiatives. That may have been a political decision to avoid losing Democratic support in Colorado, the article suggests:

"It was a battleground state," said [another] administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly

.

Horwitz's otherwise good article repeated the same fallacy we have seen crop up in other news reports of late, the idea that states can't do this because of federal law, a fallacy that I predicted here and have already noted here. The article states:

The most likely outcome will be that the Justice Department will prevent the laws from going into effect by announcing that federal law preempts the state initiatives, which would make marijuana legal for recreational use, law enforcement sources said.

Perhaps it's just a typo, and I don't know what the sources told Mr. Horwitz, but no matter what the legal and practical outcome of all of this, it is not the case that DOJ can preempt a state's law by making an announcement about. They can ask a court to preempt the laws, and then the court will decide. Significant legal precedent indicates that Congress cannot force states to criminalize conduct they don't want to criminalize, anymore more than states can force Congress to lift such criminalization -- as I've pointed out, in 16 years of state medical marijuana laws, no federal prosecutor has ever tried to do so. Maybe they'll try now, and if so we'll see what the Supreme Court's inconsistent conservatives say and what the liberals say. But they've had plenty of incentive to go that route already, and for some reason haven't.

Not that the feds can't make a fight of things. As the medical marijuana battles show, they have ways to interfere. They can send vaguely threatening letters, implying without directly stating that state employees would be violating federal law by implementing regulations for marijuana, as US Attorneys in most medical marijuana jurisdictions have done. That could scare the governors, who could seek delays implementing the initiatives, which in turn would have to be addressed in court. The IRS could move against the new businesses, auditing and penalizing them under a tax rule that disallows most expense deductions for illegal enterprises. (The law bizarrely allows dispensaries to deduct the cost of marijuana itself, but not other things like payroll or rent.) They can make it hard for marijuana businesses to maintain relationships with banks. And of course they can raid any marijuana store that they choose to.

But none of that is the same as preempting the laws themselves. And none of it would stop people from possession marijuana whenever they want, legally under the states' laws, or in Colorado from growing it. This needs to be repeated as often as possible: Colorado and Washington's marijuana laws are different from federal marijuana law, but that doesn't mean they conflict with it; and not every conflict is legally impermissible. If federal law just preempted state law in that way, 18 states would not have medical marijuana today.

Colorado Dems to Seek Federal Exemption from Marijuana Prohibition

by borden, November 11, 2012, 12:43pm

All three Democratic members of Colorado's Congressional delegation are planning legislation for next year that would exempt states enacting legalization systems for marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act. According to the Colorado Independent:

Congressional staffers told the Independent that Colorado Reps Diana DeGette (CD1), Ed Perlmutter (CD7) and Jared Polis (CD2) are working independently and together on bills that would exempt states where pot has been legalized from the Controlled Substances Act.

DeGette Chief of Staff Lisa Cohen told the Independent that proposals the representatives are working on would alter section 903 of the act to allow states to establish their own marijuana laws free from federal preemption.

Winning has consequences. Of the three of them, it was only Polis from Colorado who had previously signed on to H.R. 2306, the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act. DeGette and Perlmutter did cosponsor legislation to protect medical marijuana dispensaries' ability to do banking. But now all three of them seem not only willing to take on prohibition, but eager.

H.R. 2306 has garnered 21 cosponsors, including 19 Democrats and two Republicans. Some of those are leaving Congress at the end of their current terms -- Ron Paul (R-TX) is retiring, as is the legislation's sponsor, Barney Frank (D-MA). Pete Stark (D-CA) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) lost their seats after redistricting forced them to run against other Democrats.

Paul and Frank in particular were particularly active champions of drug reform, but Stark and Kucinich were among our champions too. Polis is certainly eager to take the lead on these issues; another H.R. 2306, Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) posted on his Facebook page last Thursday, "We must be rational about its medical use, then move to legalize it." Hopefully we'll find enough support in the new Congress to move reform forward

A final note on H.R. 2306: One of the things we heard from activists was that they were too discouraged to work on passing the bill, because it wasn't going anywhere -- hardline Judiciary chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) wasn't going to allow hearings, and passing it after hearings didn't seem likely. I hope that people will reconsider that. Think about how long people worked before it became possible to pass these initiatives on the ballot. It just takes awhile to move legislation in Congress too, but that doesn't mean that progress isn't being made.

In fact it's the opposite -- when members of Congress see their constituents working for something, lobby them, building coalitions and so forth, and when they see other members of Congress supporting them, over time more of them become willing to sign on to bills or to expend political capital moving them forward. Eventually a bill moves, or more likely, its language or something like it gets included in a larger piece of legislation, when it's introduced or through an amendment. In the meanwhile, we have to do as much as we can to build that support and awareness on the part of members of Congress, so they'll think of us and our issues when there's a new chairman or some other window of opportunity is opened.

One small way to do that is to use our web site to email your representatives in Congress asking them to support H.R. 2306. Some of them will not be returning to Congress in January, when a new version of the bill will have to be offered, but many of them will be. Of course sending an email is just the bare beginning -- we will be organizing a second teleconference in the near future to talk about more.

Seattle Police Legal Marijuana Guide Features Gandalf and Bilbo

by borden, November 10, 2012, 10:58pm

Embedded video from "The Lord of the Rings," appearing on Seattle Police Blotter legal marijuana guide page.

The SPD Blotter yesterday published "Marijwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use in Seattle." It includes a guide for citizens as well as a heads-up on what police and the mayor are working on. Some highlights from the document, paraphrased:

You can legally carry up to an ounce of marijuana, as of December 6th, but not in public view.
Rules for marijuana stores will be developed over the next year, and won't be done until December 1st, which means no legal sales until then.
Growing is still illegal.
Marijuana smoking in public is ticketable in some places -- treated like cigarette smoking.
Driving under the influence of marijuana is illegal.
Police like the clarity of legalization more than the grey area of Seattle's previous "lowest priority" policy for marijuana enforcement.
Police are reviewing their hiring policies with regard to prospective officers' past marijuana use.
Police will not assist the federal government in any investigations into marijuana offenses that are legal under state law.
Police will not return marijuana they seized from you prior to the passage of the initiative.

The article was written with humor, and includes embedded video from The Lord of The Rings movie of Gandalf and Bilbo blowing smoke rings.

I almost forgot the main highlight from the bulletin: "You can certainly use marijuana in the privacy of your own home."

Hundreds of Marijuana Cases Were Dismissed in Washington This Week

by borden, November 09, 2012, 11:13pm

Two county prosecutors in Washington State have dismissed 220 pending marijuana possession cases, in response to the passage of I-502, according to the Seattle Times.

"Although the effective date of I-502 is not until December 6, there is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month," [King County Prosecutor Dan] Satterberg said in a statement.

Satterberg dismissed 175 possession cases involving persons age 21 or over possession one ounce or less. In neighboring Pierce County, Mark Lindquist said he was dismissing about four dozen marijuana cases, but was continuing to prosecute them if they were secondary to more serious offenses such as DUI.

"The people have spoken through this initiative," said Lindquist. "And as a practical matter, I don't think you could sell a simple marijuana case to a jury after this initiative passed."

As I noted Wednesday, Tuesday really happened.

These 220 people are lucky. Drug convictions including marijuana can trigger a range of collateral consequences, including loss of college aid, difficulty qualifying for public housing and other penalties, in Washington including the ability to trigger a firearm. According to marijuana-arrests.com:

Employers, landlords, credit agencies, licensing boards for nurses and beauticians, schools, and banks now routinely search these databases for background checks on applicants. A simple arrest for marijuana possession can show up on criminal databases as "a drug arrest" without specifying the substance, the charge, or even if the person was convicted. Employers and landlords, faced with an abundance of applicants, often eliminate those with criminal arrest records, especially for drugs. Nurses, security guards, and others licensed by the state can lose their licenses and their jobs from just one misdemeanor marijuana arrest.

What Legal Marijuana Will Look Like in Washington State

by borden, November 09, 2012, 05:32pm

Jacob Sullum has a detailed discussion in Reason's "Hit & Run" blog of "What Legal Pot in Washington Will Look Like." Jacob compares Washington's I-502 with Colorado's Amendment 64 and notes that while both initiatives legalize marijuana for adults 21 or over, and authorize state-licensed marijuana stories, in other (but not all) ways Washington's law is more restrictive than Colorado's.

The main differences are that Washington doesn't allow home growing; there is a Driving Under the Influence provision that is tied to a specific THC level (the provision that prompted some objections within reform circles); stores are more regulated; and the tax rate is higher.

Conversely, Washington's law does not allow local jurisdictions to ban marijuana stories within their borders, an option that cities in Colorado will have. If you've followed the Medical Marijuana Update series that Phil has been writing in our newsletter, you'll probably agree that that is a big benefit.

Unlike Colorado's law, which can only be changed by constitutional amendment, I-502 can be amended by the legislature at any time -- with a 2/3 vote for the next two years, or by majority vote after that. Our friend Roger Goodman, election this week for a fourth term in Washington's House of Representatives, told the Seattle Weekly last month that he and Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles hope to address the DUI issue, and improve the state's medical marijuana system, perhaps through requiring that impairment be determined by independent experts rather than the per se DUI standard or other means.

Hopefully other changes or expansions to the law will become possible over time too, as voters and legislatures become accustomed to marijuana being legal and are satisfied that things are working. Unlike with medical marijuana, non-patients (over 21) obtaining marijuana will not be an issue anymore in Washington or Colorado.