Slashdot Mirror
Marijuana Legalized In Oregon, Alaska, and Washington DC
Robotron23 writes: Coinciding with the midterm elections yesterday were state ballots proposing the legalization of cannabis. All three territories where full legalization was tabled approved the measure, joining Washington state and Colorado. The narrowest vote was that of Alaska at a roughly 52% to 48% margin. Washington D.C. meanwhile saw the vote strongly tipped in favor of legalization, at about 69% to 31% opposed. Oregon passed its measure by a vote of 55% to 45%. Buoyed by the news, advocates of legal cannabis are already contemplating the next round of state ballots in 2016.
I believe that even though it passed in DC...that congress can put the kibosh on this pretty quick?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I never in my lifetime expected to see this. It's about time
Yesterday's election was a message to Washington that America wants conservatives to represent them! Also, they want legalized pot, increased minimum wage, the right to have an abortion, insurance-provided contraception, and required paid time off at work!
Wait, what?
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Yawn. Everytime a story on marijuana comes up on a US-centric site, someone suggests that hemp is a miracle material, and it had to be banned so other industries wouldn't be threatened. If hemp is so great, then why is interest in it so relatively low in the many other industrialized countries around the world where industrial hemp has always been legal and easy to grow, even state-subdizied?
This is true. Hearst demonized marijuana because hemp fiber threatened his tree based paper products.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Let me guess: did the very same voters in these states also send people from the prohibition parties, to represent them in the federal government yet again? Right hand, you need to meet left hand some day.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I always just assumed that most of the government there was already made up of stoners.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
As a life-long resident of Vermont, I'm embarrassed that these other states have passed these referendums ahead of us.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
I assume a large part of the increasing "tolerance"(pun intended) towards recreational Cannabis use is that people, business and governments are FINALLY understanding it is revenue generating.
People use it anyway, whether it is legal or not. They have for thousands of years. Why not make some legal money out of it instead of letting the cartels have all the fun!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If marijuana is such a threat to tree-based paper products, then why does paper continue to be so heavily used in many fields even in countries with hemp industries?
No, it's always been about racism and moralizing.
Du Pont really had nothing to do with it. And probably had more to gain from it if it were legalized because they had the capacity to grow vast fields of it. Same with Hearst. He only held minority stakes in paper mills. If hemp fiber could've out performed paper, moving his stock into hemp wouldn't have been hard.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Now that cannabis is legal in Washington, I think we can look forward to -
1. Much mellower politics
2. A massive increase in sales of snacks in the area around the Conress
I demand more intelligent trolls! Why does /. only have stupid trolls?
Washington, D.C.'s proposal, while scaled back compared to the Oregon proposal, allows for a person over 21 years old to posses up to two ounces of marijuana for personal use and grow up to six cannabis plants in their home. It also allows people to transfer up to one ounce of marijuana to another person, but not sell it.
(from cnn.com)
weinersmith
Yes, DC has voted to legalize recreational use. Also, earlier this year the DC council voted to decriminalize possession, so it was already just a $25 fine or somesuch.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
This. Not just this but this sort of moralizing and racism really goes well with jobs programs.
Lets not forget, when prohibition ended, it left a number of federal employees with budgets to burn and fuck all to do. They were not stupid, that is no recipe for job security. Harry Anslinger, one of the most vocal proponants of the marijuana laws of the day, was head of the FBN, the very people who were left with fuck all to do after prohibition ended.
Who better to justify law enforcement jobs than people who are seen as "immoral" or inferior and in need of being kept in their place? The thing about it is.... its a story so crazy you almost can't make shit like this up.
Good ole Harry spent years writting letters to police chiefs, asking them to keep their eye on "jazz musicians"....seriously.... claiming one day, they were going to have an operation to round them all up. One great quote of his that sums it all up:
This is from a man who testified before congress and was taken seriously.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
[crickets]
Paper from trees is produced by a well-established economy of scale.
And I am aroused by the fantasy that all those republican victories were a negative response to the NSA and is going to revive the civil rights movement.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If hemp is so great, then why is interest in it so relatively low in the many other industrialized countries around the world where industrial hemp has always been legal and easy to grow, even state-subdizied?
It's a chicken and egg problem.
There isn't much hemp cultivation, so nobody is designing purpose built harvesting machinery.
And since there isn't any purpose built harvesting machinery, it's much harder to grow hemp on a large scale.
There's also a reality that even though hemp can be used in just about everything, it's not always the best (or currently the cheapest) option.
This could change if hemp harvesting and processing ever catches up on the decades of R&D that synthetics and cotton have received.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And you think alcohol isn't already doing that?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
have an answer when someone says "I dunno what Congress is smoking..."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
No more so than any other major industrialized country.
Definitely more than some other major industrialized countries.
Some other constitutional nations actually standardize their processes for regional government too.
Like 60% of US states have unconstitutional provisions in their constitutions. It's not a maximally healthy legal environment when that happens.
I like the quote but it's pretty easy to prove that banning cannabis was race related when they gave it the Spanish name rather than the proper English term when referencing it in legal documents. See Marijuana is that scary stuff those dirty spics and negroes use, if they had called it by the proper English name, Cannabis, convincing the public would have been far harder because Cannabis was used to make hemp rope, the highest quality rope available at the time.
As we discussed last time marijuana came up on Slashdot, that particular Anslinger quotation is hard to substantiate. The first attestation comes from decades after he supposedly said it. There are already plenty of rigorously sourced statements on marijuana with similar hyperbole, and trotting out that weakly sourced one only undermines the legalization cause.
Read parent again. Nobody said paper would be discontinued.
But the claim is that it would be threatened. So... why doesn't hemp use threaten paper use where it's legal?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
No, actually, possession and manufacture (growing) of marijuana has been legal in Alaska since 1975. I've grown myself, and even had the attention of the authorities called to the matter, which worked out favorably. I've also had friends have growing equipment confiscated by the police, and subsequently returned with an apology. Nota bene: the legal protections applied (almost) exclusively in one's house or primary residence.
There are some cultural differences at work here; Alaskan marijuana was (semi-)legalized under a privacy clause, which mostly stems (ironically) from a far-right desire to be left the hell alone by everyone but especially the Government. Except in the form of pork barrel projects, which everyone knows are necessary in order to compensate for the state's underdeveloped "frontier" status.
Generally speaking, while it was legalized in the sense that cops were not going to bother one for private use, public consumption was strongly discouraged. This was not the first time full legalization has been on the ballot in Alaska, there were similar ballot measures in 2000 and 2004. It's a complicated situation; Alaska is almost ludicrously conservative compared to the other states which have legalized.
One must give credit where credit is due, I think it's significant that after years of effort and a long history of consumption in Alaska, this measure did not succeed until after Colorado and Washington. However, ultimately, I think that the most influential state in marijuana politics would be California: their medical marijuana dispensary system has paved the way for the de-demonization of cannabis. Now, the onus is on all of us to reverse the damage that the War on Drugs has caused, particularly in America's having pushed its drug laws on the entire rest of the world through the UN.
A side note on that: I suspect that this last part will involve the US pushing its drug laws on the rest of the world once more, but it would be nice if there were some process by which the international community could come to sane decisions about these drugs.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
As if anyone in Oregon, Alaska or DC has ever been given a ticket let alone arrested for blazing up. Unless you're moving shoeboxes of weed I doubt anyone's been bothered by the cops.
Or black, let's not forget that.
Winston Churchill said that America can be relied on to do the right thing, after exhausting all alternatives.
Is this an example of that? Perhaps once every state legallises it, it will end up being legal federally. Then hopefully my own country will stop ignoring all the evidence and legalise it too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
B) We now have fewer laws.
Umm ... It doesn't really work that way. We (here in Oregon) now move from the realm of criminal law to regulatory law.
Care to link to a study showing MJ smoke causes lung cancer? Because I'll link to one that shows it not only does not cause cancer, but in fact has been shown to inhibit lung cancer cell growth: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com....
Or, were you just regurgitating old "reefer madness" inaccuracies for some unknown reason, since other people's usage in no way affects you?
Disclaimer: I'm a non-smoker, but a champion of facts and exterminator of ignorance.
Better then quoting a coward.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Drug prosecution and arrest happen most often in poor communities. Joe Biden's son is an outlier, not proof of lack of class bias.
The Florida measure failed at 58% yes vs 45% no.
In 2006 a constitutional amendment was passed requiring 60% to pass a constitutional amendment...It passed with 57%.
60% was chosen because nothing EVER reaches that number, never once.
So Florida, even though the majority wants this passed, we don't get it. Yay democracy!
On another note, the congressional districts were re-drawn such that with an exit poll with 60% participation indicated a heavy loss for Rick Scott (like 30%), but because of the re-draw, he won by ~1%.
But no, tell me how this is legitimate and for our safety again.
So far, all states that legalized it also regulate it, though usually more in a manner similar to alcohol (with which it has more in common, anyway).
So what happens when my neighbor and his "friends" all start smoking weed and stinkin' up my home?
Same thing you would do today if they all start smoking tobacco and stinkin' up your home. You would tell them to stop, and if they don't, call the police and complain about public disturbance.
I'm still undecided whether now I'll have to contend with stoned people on the road
About as much as you would about drunk people on the road (and both would qualify as DUI, with all the legal penalties that entails). Having said that, stoned people are not as dangerous as drunk people - while both slow down reaction time, drunk people are not aware of that fact (and, in fact, often perceive it as improved), while stoned people are. In other words, a stoned guy is more likely to drive slowly and carefully to offset the influence of the drug, while a drunk guy is more likely to drive even more aggressively than usual.
If the federal government really wanted to stop the spread of or even regress the legalization of marijuana at the state level, all they have to do is cut federal funding for various things until the state in question made laws making it illegal again, similar to what they did with the National Minimum Drinking Age Act back in the '80s.
Joe Biden's son gets punished *because* he's Joe Biden's son and he serves as a proxy for punishing Joe Biden and Joe Biden is too high profile to fix it without a scandal.
If Joe Biden was John Brown instead and some kind of law partner instead of a national politician, the son would skate with minimal punishment.