Would the “drug problem” be any “worse” if they stopped funding the DEA?
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“Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your frenemies closest of all.
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An obligatory “This American Life” link to the show about a California County Sheriff’s department that went from raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from responsible small scale, county-sanctioned growers to having to lay off deputies because of heavy-handed Federal DEA raids.
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One small point: this is the current policy of the current administration. When the winds shift, there’s nothing that prevents them from changing their minds. Effectively, nothing has changed because the actual law hasn’t changed. It’s only if Oklahoma or whichever state that was actually forbids the enforcement of federal laws regarding firearms AND wins the subsequent lawsuit at the Supreme Court level would there be any reason to believe that a marijuana grower/seller/buyer would be safe from federal-level prosecution (and even then, you still wouldn’t be safe from the prosecution, just reasonably assured that you wouldn’t end up in jail for the rest of your life, merely with lawyer-related debt for the rest of your life).
Here is my issue, too. When I was fresh out of college, I had a temp job for a couple of months in DC working on some small anti-smoking government project. I would say we had 15 people working on this. We were, for example, hand drawing posters that were targeted to Native Americans saying “Keep it sacred.” After about a week, every single day I’d walk into work and thing, “You know what work so much better than this farce of a project - not funding tobacco companies.” So, we spent to fund it and we spent to “fight” it (very tamely).
Same with marijuana. It’s a self-created drug war. We do have the means to regulate drugs through prescriptions and I think we have now proven that outlawing it has created a lot of jobs for law enforcement and inflated the price of this actual weed that is as easy to grow as tomatoes.
I’m not a fan of smoking mary jane - I had a wake and bake stoner boyfriend who cured me of any interest I had in it - but as a taxpayer I am so tired of paying for this policy that is harmful and a complete waste of tax money. Let’s go build some roads, schools, and create a Department of Peace instead.
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[quote=“weatherman667, post:19, topic:8611, full:true”]Also, none of the articles I’ve looked at actually mention what all 8 areas are, leaving a lot of room for bullshit.
[/quote]
I know, isn’t it ridiculous?
“The Justice department has published a memo. It includes a short list of points of equal importance; here are half of them. It’s online but we have a policy against linking to primary sources because that kind of thing can lead to fact-checking.”
And to top it off, half the articles about the memo are longer than the memo itself. Anyway, here it is: http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/3052013829132756857467.pdf
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So here’s what pisses me off (more than the half-assed gesture). The press release says “This reflects a balanced approach by the federal government that respects the states’ interests.” What does the federal government not respect? The will of the people. People in these states have spoken clearly via direct democracy. They have said they want pot to be legal. At no point does the federal government acknowledge this at all. It’s just horse trading between the states and the feds, and the people are caught in the middle.
The only good thing I can say about the Obama administration’s second term is that it’s not the Romney administration.
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Thank you.
“For example, the Department of Justice has not historically devoted resources to prosecuting individuals whose conduct is limited to possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use on private property. Instead, the Department has left lower-level or localized activity to state or local authorities and has stepped in to enforce the CSA only when the use, possession, cultivation, or distribution of marijuana has threatened to cause one of the harms listed above.”
They are explicitely stating that this changes nothing.
They also apparently consider cultivating Marijuana, which grows practically anywhere with minimal resources, (if you grow it outside), to cause significant environmental problems. As opposed to the ecological joy of industrial farming…
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Here are the eight areas. (quoted in the first news source I read on this)
- the distribution of marijuana to minors;
- revenue from the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs and cartels;
- the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal under state law in some form to other states;
- state-authorized marijuana activity from being used as a cover or pretext for the trafficking of other illegal drugs or other illegal activity;
- violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana
- drugged driving and the exacerbation of other adverse public health consequences associated with marijuana use;
- growing of marijuana on public lands and the attendant public safety and environmental dangers posed by marijuana production on public lands;
- preventing marijuana possession or use on federal property.
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Or, worse, the Administration gives a directive not to pursue, but rogue agencies and local federal departments decide to do raids anyways for nonstandard reasons or simply in plain defiance of the administration, for lack of law. It would be much better to resolve this with law than “new instructions”.
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Absolutely right. My interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is that the Federal government cannot regulate intrastate trade. Unfortunately the courts disagree with me.
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They seem to have left out smoking of marijuana by Federal employees while on duty. In N.J. it was common to see FEMA workers toking up.
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You put your Jackboots in,
You pull your Jackboots out,
You put your Jackboots in
And you stomp them all about…
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“Preventing violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana”
Thus ending the time-honored cultivation method of whacking the crops with tennis rackets, and distributing the product by balling it up and firing it out of a howitzer.
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Actually, the last bullet-point the Feds say they still plan on prosecuting is “preventing marijuana possession or use on federal property”. If you look closely at a map of Federal Lands in Colorado, that covers a surprisingly large percentage of the state. So, although weed tourism might very well take off big time, it is also quite possible that you could be enjoying some of Colorado’s finest in the privacy of your tent and end up in the custody of a BLM ranger.
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We’ve heard this before. Pardon the people convicted who would have been left alone under the new rules, and I’ll believe it.
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“breathing room”, eh?
If you don’t inhale.
Thank you, Mr. President/DOJ. Next.
I don’t even smoke the Whacky Tabaccy and I think that this is sort of a trap. The only people that are going to be given “breathing room” (please write/insert bong joke for me here) here are law enforcment–ie if they want to make your life shit, they’ll decide to randomly enforce on you.
It reminds me of the “no eating/drinking” signs on the NYC subway. Every AM and PM one can see hundreds of folks with their coffee/DunkinBreakfastCrap, feeding their kids, etc. However, I once saw it used to chase a bunch of rowdy teenagers out of a subway car by an irate cop–they had their McDs and the cop told them to get off at the next station and ditch it. Also saw it used once to get a drunk off a car–odd, the cop could have just asked him what was in his bag (a 40) or just nicked him on drunk n disorderly, but there you go.
Unequal enforcement of any law dilutes the law. Either legalize it or decriminalize it or GTFO; we don’t need any more selective enforcement of laws.
