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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 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?
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.
It's still Federally illegal. Even in any state that it is "legal" it can still be prosecuted. It won't be under the current president, but that can change in 2 years.
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.
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"
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!
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."
Obama has stated that this issue is not of major concern to him and will not be seeking prosecution.
That's what he's stated, but not what he's done. They've raided several marijuana dispensaries and farms here in Colorado.
How do you know when a politician is lying? When their lips are moving.
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.
Also remember many jobs will drug test you.
This is already being tested in the courts. There's not yet (as far as I know) a test for marijuana intoxication, only detection that you've used marjuana at some point in the past few days/weeks, so there's little justification for testing for marijuana when it's already legal for recreational and/or medicinal use. It's particularly controversial when an employee uses marijuana medicinally -- cough medicine is going to affect employee performance much more than smoking pot over the weekend.
What they're really doing when you get forced to take a pre-employment piss test is asserting their power over you, even before they start paying you. You're a criminal/drug addict until you provide a bodily fluid to "prove" otherwise (as urine tests have varying degrees of accuracy). With marijuana especially, they're asserting control over your body (as you could smoke on the first of the month and spike a positive for pot at the end of the month) even during the hours you're not working for them (although, if you're an "exempt" employee, there are no hours that are truly yours; being an "exempt" employee means that you trade having to punch a clock for a fixed salary, no overtime, and the possibility of being required to work 120 hours a week, all legal).
It's time we stood up to our corporate masters and told them "It's none of your fucking business what's in my urine."
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Legalization motivations can't so easily be tied to one factor.
There are many and people weigh them differently. There are just as people that think it's stupid to put people in jail for something that's less dangerous than alcohol as there are those that seek the tax revenue. There are other people that think laws shouldn't be intruding on what consenting adults want to do to themselves. There's another group that sees police resources wasn't policing cannabis use, not just in cost but time and the problems it causes with people respecting the law. And of course there is a group of people that just want to be able to smoke it. You just can't boil it down like you did.
Very few people realize that the war on drugs costs $12 billion dollars a year in police and incarceration expenses (without including court and societal costs, particularly the damage civil forfeiture does to the economy). Stop that expenditure and collect tax revenue on the transaction along with bringing all production back stateside and the economic benefits are tremendous but almost no one realizes it or in the case of the "think of the children" people even care about the cost. The hope is the frontier states like Colorado will show that legalization is not only safe but sane.
The counter weight is the media is doing their damndest to convince everyone kids are going to die BTW. How many times were you told on TV that marijuana edibles could be given out at Halloween and poison all the kids? Even though edibles have been available medically in many states for years now it's NEVER happened. You could even argue someone putting their $50 bag of THC gummies into some kids halloween bag is beyond reason, but the Media is playing this up for all it's worth. Think of the children damnit, cannabis is dangerous to them and some kid's going to end up dieing because cannabis is legal so we better hurry and ban it. Otherwise they might not have scary things to report about.
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.
Humorous but true. Privileged members of society (such as members of Congress) don't need to worry about the legality of things such as recreational drugs. Whatever they were using before this law passed won't change because of it. No one is going to say, "Hey, marijuana is legal now, I'm gonna quit doing cocaine and smoke marijuana instead."
I know plenty of professionals (lawyers, surgeons, anaesthetists etc) that use recreational drugs. The chances of them getting charged with anything if caught in procession are pretty much nil. Drug laws aren't for the protection of society in general, the purpose is to establish control over people that are viewed as "trouble makers". Upper society members that use 'responsibly' need not worry. If they make a public scene, yeah, they'll be some kind of slap on the wrist, but in general if you are rich enough or respected enough certain laws don't apply. They are for the people beneath you.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Yeah... ...and there is overlap in the above numbers. My state, MN, is in the Medical and Decriminalized category. We've been tolerant (Decrim) for longer than most states but our recently passed Medical law is the most restrictive in the nation. For whatever reason straight up legalization didn't end up on the ballot this year but when it does, at least according to recent polls, it will pass by a landslide. We'd have it already if it weren't for the prick we currently (just reelected grr...) and most recently before him had in the governors office.
5 = Legalization.
23 = Medical
18 = Decriminalized