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Marijuana Prosecution Not a High Priority, Says Obama
Hugh Pickens writes "VOA reports that President Obama says it does not make sense for federal authorities to seek prosecution of recreational marijuana users in states where such use is legal. 'As it is, you know, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions,' said Obama during a television interview with ABC's Barbara Walters. 'It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that, under state law, that's legal.' When asked if he supported legalizing marijuana, the president said he was not endorsing that. 'I wouldn't go that far, but what I think is that, at this point, Washington and Colorado, you've seen the voters speak on this issue.'"
The government has never focused on recreational users. It's focused on the dealers. Recreational users are just targets of opportunity.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Is like trying to nail Jello to a wall.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
So after first de-prioritizing medical marijuana raids in places like California (where they are legal)... only to reprioritize them again... he now flips again about deferring to state based decisions? ...or this is one of his much touted 'evolutions'
One day I would love to know what he actually believes in... other than political expediency.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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Dear Mr. President,
Apparently you did your share of pot and other drugs in your youth. Somehow, you avoided getting a criminal record. Please explain to us why giving millions of Black men like yourself a criminal record might not be such a good thing. Please tell us if you think you'd be where you are today if you had gotten busted.
Sincerely,
A lot of us who are tired of wars on nouns.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The latest news story is the weapons were not bought by the killer. They belonged to his mother.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
to call it "interstate commerce" if a person smokes a plant that naturally grows in his backyard, never actually engaging in commerce or crossing interstate lines.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It wasn't an "assault rifle". Semi-automatic? Yes. Rifle? Yes. Assault rifle? No.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Without going into my position on this, let me simply put this thought on the floor:
Here's mom. A schoolteacher. She's buying what look like (but of course aren't, because they work approximately like a revolver that doesn't need reloads, not a machine gun) military weapons. How likely is that? Possible, I'll grant you, but it's really unusual.
My gut tells me it is more than slightly possible that mom was buying those weapons for her son, and that we may see, as we learn more, that son couldn't buy them himself. Or some variation on that theme.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Heard this declaration before, only to be followed by the highest amount of FBI raids on legal dispensaries since 1996.
...on same-sex marriage. If our press was as adversarial as it is in England, we might see questions like:
"Mister President, where do you think you would be in life if you had been convicted for felony drug possession when you were a young man?"
and
"Mister President, if your parents had been married when you were conceived, they could have been arrested in half the United States for violating interracial marriage laws. As a former professor of Constitutional Law you know this full well - so how can you, in good conscience, endorse a "states rights" position on same-sex marriage bans?"
One major effect of the war on drugs (it's not a war on pot) is to channel taxpayer money to the prison system, to law enforcement, and to the corporations that make the various tools that law enforcement uses. To the tune, so far, of about a trillion dollars. That is more than enough money to create a whole swath of lobbyists clamoring for more and harsher drug laws. A very large number of people in the prison system are there for something related to drug charges; that has a direct effect on the amount of money going in that direction.
Then there's the low-hanging candy for politicians to use to pander to the brow-beaten, paranoid parents at vote-collecting time. The whole shooting match is a very big deal, financially speaking, though it isn't exactly all about profit. It supports a lot of jobs, too; just about the entire DEA depends upon the drug war to provide for their paychecks, and that's true for a lot of city cops as well, though most rural shops don't actually have dedicated drug guys, or at least, I hope not. Then there's the prison system, the "rehab" pukes, several generations of psycho-babblers, and on the other side of the coin, the entire alcohol industry which really doesn't want to see a cheaper, more effective, safer high made freely available to the citizens.
So don't kid yourself about there not being a financial motive here. There is, and it's a significant one.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I heard what you heard, and I don't get the same takeaway.
He said they wouldn't go after users. Now look at California: Are they going after users there? No. They're going after dealers, growers, MM dispensaries. Now look at what he said. Did he say that they wouldn't go after dealers, growers, dispensaries? No.
So does it appear that he's changed position? No.
Should he change position? Of course. Would it be the right thing to do? Of course. Would it be the politically expedient thing to do, with over 90% of the country still holding on to "pot is teh badz, dur" laws and Washington awash in lobbyists throwing money at everyone in sight to keep drugs illegal? No.
I don't think this is going to be the big step forward people hope. There's a lot of money at stake here. Over a trillion dollars so far. That money has representation in Washington. So does the alcohol industry. Potheads really don't have any. And then there's the easy pickings of anti-drug rhetoric directed to gullible parents at election time. As with just about everything else in Washington, if you want to predict what they'll do, follow the money, and the power. I think you'll find that it doesn't lead to an end to the drug war, or even that part of it that surrounds marijuana.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Perhaps you should know that the shootings were accomplished using 2 perfectly ordinary pistols. The only rifle mentioned (not an assault rifle) was found in the killer's car unused.
Quick quiz for you: What characteristics make a weapon a rifle? What makes it an assault rifkle? What makes it semi-automatic? If you had to go look that up, why were you spouting off about them before you knew what you were talking about?
But he can say "after scientific review by the FDA, I am moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act" without any action from Congress. Existing law already allows Obama to stop persecuting marijuana users, growers and dealers.
Then where are the prosecutions for Bush's wars and torture (something REQUIRED by the U.N. Convention Against Torture, signed by that hippie Ronald Reagan) and fraud committed by the banks? Glennzilla:
Obama constantly makes a mockery of the rule of law. If he's going to ignore it, he could at least do it for non-violent non-criminals as opposed to banks that have stolen millions of homes and government officials that tortured over 100 people to death.
The ONLY reason that the feds won't be going after recreational users is that they simply don't have the resources to do so.
That's just a restatement of what Obama himself said.
...are far more significant than whatever pretty words are coming out of his mouth on any given morning. He also promised to back off state-based medical marijuana, only to prosecute more than 10 dimes the number of medical pot facilities in four years than Bush did in 8.
Obama is a hypocritical pot smoking, "a little blow" using jackass who has no problem ending the careers of future Obama's by throwing their asses in prison for the same offenses that he committed with gusto when he was a young man.
And before someone uses the "but he's gotta enforce the laaaaw" excuse, where are the prosecutions of Bush officials that ordered torture and bankers that stole people's homes? Finally, the Controlled Substances Act allows Obama to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III without having to go through Congress, changing it from contraband to regulated drug overnight.
Thus showing that "mentally unstable" or "mentally stable" is useless nattering.
Please, please do not say this. Improving mental health in this country is preventative while removing guns is mitigating. Both have an equally important role to play in responding to these tragic events. And while mental health gets tossed around by some in the gun debate, it's a different issue, and it should be addressed with as much importance as any gun control debate. This is not an either-or situation. We can take action on both fronts because they are not mutually exclusive. Please don't let EITHER side of this debate use mental health as a dismissive or derogatory tool of their argument, nor let anyone be dismissive of the role it played.
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You are, you know, promoting a second Civil War. I can assure you that the redder parts of these United States would indeed go to war over an attempt to take away their weapons. And given that the military is composed primarily of people who come from those areas, I wouldn't count on them backing the Union this time.
One major effect of the war on drugs (it's not a war on pot) is to channel taxpayer money to the prison system,
Two words: private prisons
That should never have been allowed anywhere under any circumstances. A for-profit prison!
They sign contracts where state guarantees a certain percentage occupation (90%), so it is no surprise when the state works hard to meet that promise
And now these private prisons are selling prisoner labor at under-$1 an hour rates to make more money. How and why is anyone allowed to profit from prisoner labor?
Oh, and some phone company makes a killing at 24c/minute phone calls for prisoners...
That explains why you're second.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
As has been pointed out, the 2nd isn't about protecting your home from your neighbor, it's about protecting your country from your government.
It's not the guns that kill people, it's people that kill people. IIRC in Switzerland people got to take home their assault rifles after their (mandatory) military service. I think they abolished that practice, but I cannot really remember Switzerland turning into a ghetto state with gang wars being the issue du jour. Which is odd, by the logic an assault rifle in the hands of every single citizen should ensure a lot of shooting going on.
NEITHER is the right way, neither forbidding guns entirely nor handing them out like we have a "guns for toys" program running. Owning a gun entails the responsibility to wield and especially store it safely. Your right is to have it. Your obligation is to keep everyone safe from it. If you cannot uphold the latter, either by choice or by being too stupid or "psychologically unstable", you do not earn the former.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You do that so that you don't make laws based on emotional outbursts. When you start legislating for each tragedy, you can do some pretty stupid shit. That's incidentally why there are pot laws to begin with. They just assumed it was bad for you and made it illegal because they were afraid the country would break down into some massive drug den where no one would work and crime would run rampant. The studies being done were perfunctory and not very many in number at the time. It was all fear. At least for pot anyway. Unless you smoke that shit, in which case, you're smoking and smoking really is bad for you.
No one believes that the gun laws are necessarily there to make us safer individually, they're there to maintain liberty. That is why you can keep and bear arms, to maintain a militia that can fight back, if necessary, against a centralized power that has encroached too far into your liberties. History has shown us that discourse does not always remove those sorts of threats.
Here's what really happened. Some nutjob killed a bunch of kids and adults in one school in the US. It was a tragedy. In some other place, someone is poisoning their husband or wife, or stabbing someone with a knife. In another place, a serial killer is slowly killing off more people who died on this day, only it will take him a few years because he wants to savor every one.
This incident is notable precisely because it is not common. It's not even a statistical blip on the violent crime rate. Yet now, we're going to legislate removal of a guaranteed liberty to deal with it, just like blowing up 3,000 people was turned into two wars and even more people dead than from the initial incident.
It's amusing that we are here now asking, "Why won't someone think of the children," when that line gets ridiculed time and time again in other situations.
Personally, I don't even own a gun and never have felt the need to, but even still, you don't want to be making this sort of thing the reason you make laws.
If you want that, get after a constitutional amendment that makes it possible. That's the only clear path. Make it say that no one but the military (and perhaps the cops, if you believe that's a good idea... but I suggest looking at the events of the last few decades before you go that far) gets to have weapons. Make it unambiguous and clear. Then I, and every other law abiding type, will turn in our weapons. The rest, you can arrest, I suppose, and good luck with that, they're likely to be very, very unhappy, but at least it'd be properly legal, which almost no gun law is at this point.
Having said that, it won't help. The problem isn't guns. The problem is crazy people. See here and here and here? That's what happens when guns are made illegal. Make knives illegal, did I hear you say? Sharpened broomsticks. Motor vehicles. Hammers. Screwdrivers. Chainsaws. Gasoline. Copper Sulphate. Fertilizer. Etc.
No, for certain the problem isn't firearms, or banning them. The problem is we have crazy people. Outright crazy fucktards. Raving loonies. Who we simply can't detect.
So at this point, since we really don't have the tools to detect crazy people, what we need to do is protect vulnerable groups. Armed guards and scanners at school entrances; if you're not student or staff, you don't get in. No one gets in with a weapon. Perhaps bring home all those military types and put them to work actually guarding us from danger, instead of serving as cannon fodder for no more benefit than to keep the arms industry spinning. They can be posted at McDonald's, at stadiums, etc. Everywhere. Make themselves actually useful.
Give us fifty years and I bet we'll have this solved -- we'll either be able to pick you right off the street when you're so fucked up you're actually considering mayhem, or we'll be able to genetically weed out whatever the fuck is wrong with these people, or perhaps even both. There's a really good chance for all of that.
But right now, we have no idea who is nuts and who is not, and we don't have any effective way of telling, even if we gave up every right and liberty we have, much less just regulated firearms.
Of course what's going to happen here is exactly the wrong thing, if anything. And these pointless slaughters of innocents will continue unabated.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No, but ignoring the local decisions isn't a good idea either.
I'm a firm believer in the federal character of the US, the choice of every state to make their own decisions and their own laws at the very least in regards that do not affect other states. Of course this cannot reach towards foreign policy and defense, but if ANY kind of decision has only local effects without affecting other states, it's the question whether some kind of drug should be legal or not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Again, as has been overly proven in the middle east. They are most definitely not needed.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Constitution: 13th amendment. Read it. There's your answer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There is no justifiable reason for anyone to carry around enough firepower to mow down dozens of people within seconds - certainly not self-defense. You don't see civilians driving tanks or carrying rocket launchers either.
Not seconds, moroon, minutes. Any .22 caliber semi auto pistol could have done that sort of damage. What you are trying to justify is making muzzle loading black powder guns the only legal firearm.
Nice try. Next time work on the real issues.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Breaking The Taboo - Film
Narrated by Oscar winning actor Morgan Freeman, "Breaking the Taboo" is produced by Sam Branson's indie Sundog Pictures and Brazilian co-production partner Spray Filmes and was directed by Cosmo Feilding Mellen and Fernando Grostein Andrade. Featuring interviews with several current or former presidents from around the world, such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, the film follows The Global Commission on Drug Policy on a mission to break the political taboo over the United States led War on Drugs and expose what it calls the biggest failure of global policy in the last 40 years
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I value my brain enough not to feel the need to alter it with chemicals natural or synthetic. I do however fully support your desire to alter your own in any way you see fit. At the end of the day it simply makes me more competitive not only at work but in life as well. "Smoke it if you got it"
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From Wikipedia:
Historically, selective enforcement is recognized as a sign of tyranny, and an abuse of power, because it violates rule of law, allowing men to apply justice only when they choose. Aside from this being inherently unjust, it almost inevitably must lead to favoritism and extortion, with those empowered to choose being able to help their friends, take bribes, and threaten those from they desire favors.
Do you think the jails, court costs, and police work are free?
We cannot afford to jail and arrest such a great amount of the population.
How much of you tax money do you want invested in a losing, pointless, discriminatory war?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
And there are still multiple states with statutes that say atheists cannot serve in various political offices.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. A great deal of state and federal law (and court decisions) are really, really wrongheaded. Some of it is straight up unauthorized. There are ex post facto laws. The constitution has been relegated to the "who cares" zone. And very little of it will ever get straightened out. That's not what congress or scotus or the executive wants to do, and we have almost zero control over any of them. And the public not only doesn't care, they don't even faintly grasp the problem.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yeah.... yeah... unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, and that's a problem we've been completely ineffective in resolving.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The unanswered question is whether the federal government will use its resources (DEA etc) to target those producing and selling Marijuana when its being legally produced according to Washington and Colorado law.
Given that the DEA has carried out raids against those dispensing marijuana for medical use in states where such use is legal and given the hardline stance taken by the DEA against marijuana in general, I wouldn't be surprised if they did carry out raids in Washington and Colorado.
No, it's not. According to the revised Waffengesetz of Dec 12 2008, you can only buy ammunition for weapons you own rightfully. But you don't own the Ordonanzwaffe, your personal army weapon. It is forbidden to own Serieschusswaffen (full automatic weapons) at all. Until 2007, you got Taschenmunition (pocket ammunition) to be stored at home, a packet of ammunition, that was sealed, and which had to be brought unopened back to the army everytime you returned there. Basicly, it was nearly impossible to use the army weapon for personal usage. After leaving the army, you could actually buy your Ordonanzwaffe, but it had to be rebuild to a semi-automatic first. (Actually, those are the only converted weapons you are allowed to own in Switzerland).
This is the closest I've ever heard a sitting president come to endorsing pot. He's basically saying that it's a State issue and unless you're pushing huge amounts the Feds are going to leave you alone. You know what...he's right. How many people out there are now saddled with criminal records for possessing small amounts of weed for personal use? It's ridiculous. I've always felt that alcohol is much, much more harmful than pot.
I don't think people should be driving a car or operating heavy machinery or sitting across the desk from you at an office meeting if they are stoned...basically the same rules as alcohol...but if someone wants to light up on their own time, in their own home I say have at it. If the government wants to do something useful here they should narrow the war on drugs to things like cocaine and heroin and meth and stop wasting our time and money on recreational drug use.
Note quite.
Running out of heroin in an environment where heroin is difficult and expensive to obtain will cause acts of desperation.
Running out of it in an environment where it costs what it's worth, which is about a penny a hit, won't cause anything but reaching into a pocket and taking another hit.
The problems with these drugs are caused by the drug war. They're not inherent to the drug.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
the public won't ask for prosecution until enough people die for marijuana legalization to be rescinded until it's seen as a crisis.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.