U.S. To End Policy That Let Legal Pot Flourish | Hacker News Reader

U.S. To End Policy That Let Legal Pot Flourish

bloomberg.com

137 pointsdaegloe196 comments

I think weed should be legal. I also think Sessions should enforce every law, lest he pick and choose what is illegal and what is not, thus becoming the most powerful law-maker ( or unmaker ) in the land.

Passing a law is the act of the legislative, and repealing a law is too. If he does not enforce all the laws, he basically is seizing the power of congress and repealing those laws, for his term.

Imagine Sessions chose not to enforce every law. He could choose to stop enforcing tax laws to people from his home state. No. He has to enforce every law.

It is congress's job to repeal the stupid law, and I hope they do, especially if this creates more pressure for them.

That's nice in theory, but there are so many laws on the books and limited resources, any executive branch has to choose what laws to go after.

What's nice in theory is having net neutrality established through legislation rather than regulation. Same thing here.

I cringe a little every time something I might want gets implemented merely through the benevolence of those in power because those people change.

This should be decided through legislation, or possible through judicial neutering of the commerce clause. But the commerce clause knows no bounds thanks to the decisions made regarding the ACA, so here we are.

Why just marijuana? Why not every drug? In fact, why is possession of anything a crime?

We already have laws about improper storage of hazardous materials. Possession of anything should be legal. Now distribution and sale is a trickier subject but pretty easy as well. As long as you don't misrepresent what you're selling, it should be legal as well.

If we are for a small government, we have to walk the walk.

Unfortunately the loudest in this country are definitely not for small government. If it wasn't for the crooked party system, we might have a President right now that wants the government to take everything and make every decision for you. Those Trudeau wrong think laws are making their way into New York, it's just a matter of time.

> In fact, why is possession of anything a crime?

Child pornography. Do you want possession to not be a crime?

This is one of the most fascinating cases since it is one of the core limitations of free speech. Richard Stallman actually has some very interesting and very controversial arguments about this in regards to speech.

I think the government has gone way overboard on sentencing of having a video, as abhorrent as it may be. If you can take the morality out of it.

I'm fairly confident that the "anything" in GP refers to the concept of "any substance", as in flour, butter, chunks of metal, kilo of coke, some amount of olive oil, etc. Y'know, the usual stuff, not something like your example.

Should possession of 100 lbs of weapons grade uranium be a crime?

Nuclear weapons can hurt other people. Me using drugs can only hurt me.

> Me using drugs can only hurt me.

Only if you exist in isolation from the rest of the world, surely. Otherwise there's family, friends, anyone you might hurt whilst under the influence (verbally, physically, etc.), and that's ignoring the indirect effects of the drug trade.

I can hurt them being sober too.

If I'm willingly taking a mind-altering substance, then I'm 100% aware that I can be prosecuted if I were to hurt bystanders. Yet I don't see why I should be prosecuted merely for taking the substance if I take the necessary precautions to not hurt people.

> Should possession of 100 lbs of weapons grade uranium be a crime?

Not that I know much about these things but from a distance I don't think possession should be a crime even in this case. Of course, you need to follow proper procedure to store it.

I am more concerned with where they obtained the said material, who supplied it to them, who produced it and so on.

IMO that's the correct answer. The only reason it was flourishing was due to lack of enforcement of federal law. It needs to be addressed at the federal level or there needs to be a clear method for states to veto/nullify/ignore federal laws that they feel overreach.

I can't remember the procedure, but isn't there some method for a state to nullify a federal law that it disagrees with?

Uh, some states tried to use the concept of nullification to keep slavery around and failed. Not exactly a shining endorsement..

edit: It's important to learn about history.

As mentioned before, slavery was legal during the antebellum period, and Lincoln never publicly said he would abolish it (until he did). The political theory though is if new states are required to be slave-free, then the South would end up being suffocated by anti-slave votes over time.

It's an interesting time to try to understand.

There is a method for states to nullify federal laws they disagree with; the last time we tried it, though, the side effects were a bit undesirable.

Slavery was not against federal law when that happened. It only happened much later toward the end of the war with the 13th amendement.

As an aside, if you believe the Emancipation Proclamation to be legally binding, slavery was legal in the North longer than it was in the South.

That would be equivalent to an executive order, I’m not sure if you could call it a law, more like a regulation. But maybe things were a bit different back then.

It was, but the South had seceded, so they considered themselves a separate country with a separate (albeit hastily constructed) government, so executive orders don't apply to other countries. The legality of secession wasn't even decided until after the war, so it was a bunch of murky legal territory.

Executive orders as military directives definitely applied to the south specifically because it was a different country. The president is command and chief after all. If we considered the south a part of the USA, it would have been much murkier.

Was it ever decided?

Yes, sort of. After the end of the war, it was ruled unconstitutional (by SCOTUS), but only applied to 1869 onward. (perhaps meaning it was legal in 1861). The actual ruling is still being debated.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2056/was-the-sec...

That is a very interesting read

Yes, the 2nd Amendment, however that tends to not work so well.

No, outside of secession, there is no way for states to nullify federal law. This is why the federal government should be extremely limited in its dealings, the rest remaining with the state and local authorities.

You'll get an infinite number of snarky comments about the War of Northern Aggression back in the early 1860s but the more modern answer is yes states have taken cases to the Supreme Court with highly mixed results WRT nullification of laws. Its not really the kind of thing where historical batting averages have any influence on next weeks attempt, but historically I think individuals have scored slightly better with the Supreme Court than states have. Its also very fuzzy to categorize when the court case technically involves a private citizen who merely happens to be the states attorney general as his day job, is that a win for the state or just a win for some dude?

Unfortunately that's not how it works, at all. Especially when there are legal conflicts between the state and federal governments like this. There are so many laws on the books, many of them horribly outdated, and legislatures are overworked / grid locked. Often, the only way for us to have a working body of law that makes sense is for the government to simply stop enforcing the outdated ones.

In the case of the Obama era Pot rules, the federal government had basically said "Rather than enforce our unilateral law, we're going to allow individual states to decide how they feel and only enforce the prohibition in states that continue to request it." Which makes perfect sense. Once enough states had legalized it, it would create momentum to legalize it on the federal level. It made perfect sense for the federal government to get out of the way and let that process play out.

Enforcing the federal law in states that legalize it is just going to set up a battle between those states and the federal government, with a lot of very costly court cases and headaches for the various agencies tasked with enforcement.

Yes, the government has some prosecutorial discretion, the legal limits of which are uncertain. But there is no legal ambiguity or conflict as to federal government's authority to enforce drug laws (as I originally read your post to suggest, though perhaps you have edited it?). Federal law is supreme and the Supreme Court has already ruled on this particular issue, going so far as to allow the punishment of someone who was growing marijuana in his backyard for personal use in compliance with the state medical marijuana law. The feds could legally walk into a recreational pot shop and arrest all the employees and customers, and legal arguments to the contrary wouldn’t really go anywhere.

But it’s worth noting that they can no longer do the same thing to medical marijuana dispensaries and patients because of the relatively recent Rohrabacher–Farr amendment in the federal budget that prohibits spending money on enforcing federal drug laws against medical marijuana programs that are compliant with state laws.

Correct, and in specific, the supremacy clause of the constitution guarantees that federal law overrules state law. I don't see any state AG's having much luck suing the DoJ against this as it is clear as mud:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause

> against this as it is clear as mud:

Mud is opaque. The phrase "clear as mud" means "not clear at all", or "baffling".

(I only point this out because there are peoplereading HN with English as a second language, and some of them are interested in idiom. I don't care how you use language, and I'm not trying to "correct" you.)

Unless sarcasm is intended

Yep, though I do disagree with the logic of the Supreme Court case I mentioned. The federal government argued it was a legitimate exercise of Congress’s constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. But growing weed in your backyard for personal use is clearly neither interstate, nor commerce. Alas, the commerce clause has been widely abused in many similar ways with the Supreme Court’s blessing.

That's only half the picture. There's also the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not delegated to the feds belong to the states or the people. Federal drug laws rely on the interstate commerce power, even though they also regulate conduct that is sometimes purely intrastate and/or purely non-commercial. The most natural reading of the Constitution is that the feds have no authority here. The Supreme Court disagreed in Wickard and Raich, but Wickard was poorly reasoned rationalization for political purposes and Raich does not stand except by relying on Wickard.
I mean, for all practical purposes, the feds will do what they want. But if you're going to cite the text of the Constitution, the feds are breaking the law here. It takes case law to justify what they're doing, not just the text.
Just a thought: Why did alcohol prohibition require a constitutional amendment but drug prohibition didn't?

I'm all for a faithful reading of the Constitution, and I agree that the federal government has overstepped the intended bounds, but it's ultimately irrelevant. For legal purposes, the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is. If you want them to be more faithful to the original meaning, appoint judges who feel the same way.

> Just a thought: Why did alcohol prohibition require a constitutional amendment but drug prohibition didn't?
Prohibitionists wanted an amendment because at that point in time, no amendment had ever been overturned.

A properly-ratified amendment cannot be overturned, unless it decreases a state's share of the votes in the Senate without its consent. There are at least two reasons prohibitionists sought an amendment:
1) The Supreme Court at the time did not take the expansive view of the Commerce Clause that it has today, so it may very well have declared a federal prohibition law unconstitutional.
2) The amendment didn't give Congress the power to ban alcohol, it banned alcohol. That meant that legalizing alcohol required another amendment. This was a huge win for the prohibitionists.

> A properly-ratified amendment cannot be overturned
GP probably meant “repealed” rather than “overturned”.

> Just a thought: Why did alcohol prohibition require a constitutional amendment but drug prohibition didn't?
It probably didn't; the Wartime Prohibition Act was passed before the 18th Amendment was ratified and generally viewed not to require the amendment; this was never tested because by the time it went into effect, the amendment had been ratified.
The Amendment made prohibition a permanent policy as long as it wasn't repealed—which at that point was unprecedented—and was considered valuable for that reason.

Yes, but constitutionally, does the federal government have the power to make pot illegal. They certainly didn't in the early 1900s when they first tried, thus their stamp act work around.

The fist portion of parent's post is perhaps controversial, but it's not necessarily mistaken. The scope of the executive's power to purposefully under-enforce laws is a bit of a constitutional conundrum. Even among the cases on this topic that have made it to SCOTUS, the opinions were pretty well split and no clear doctrines were handed down. Also, most historical examples of this use of executive power were not tested by the judiciary. So, the issue is murky at best.
The second portion of the parent's post is categorically not mistaken. If you've ever lived in a deep red state, you know that AGs are more than willing to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a hope and a prayer to try and defend blatantly incorrect legal theories. Just because there's no hope of winning a court case doesn't mean that state AGs won't waste millions trying.

Yes, the limits of prosecutorial discretion are legally murky. What I'm referring to is the legality of enforcing a valid federal law that conflicts with a state law; there is no question whatsoever that the federal law is supreme and may be enforced.
As for grand-standing state AGs, that's not just a red state thing. A few examples come to mind from recent months alone. Look at the Washington State AG, filing all sorts of clearly losing political lawsuits, e.g. suing a motel for sharing guest-list information with the federal government, on the theory that it violates state consumer protection law. Or look at the various state AG's who are hopelessly suing over the net neutrality repeal. These are losing cases, filed as a red meat for their electoral base.

Contrary to the idealistic view courts do not simply judge cases on the merits and the law but most definitely do take into account practical concerns about enforceability and public opinion.
Courts will generally not make rulings that undermine their own authority, so if they see that their ruling will be ignored anyway, that does shape their opinion.
After many state referendums legalizing cannabis, especially in western states which are already hostile to the federal government, the Supreme Court would think long and hard about the potential constitutional crisis that could arise from going against the popular will on this issue.
I expect they will find some new justifications for a more nuanced approach if the issue is put to them again.

> There are so many laws on the books, many of them horribly outdated, and legislatures are overworked / grid locked. Often, the only way for us to have a working body of law that makes sense is for the government to simply stop enforcing the outdated ones.
Normalising this is a dangerous precedent. It leads to the situation where every citizen is technically a criminal according to the letter of the law, but it's not enforced as long as you don't stand out. But as soon as you annoy someone in government, they can choose to arrest and imprison you.

> Normalising this is a dangerous precedent
Not really, and even if so, we are a few centuries too late to do anything about it.
Having unenforceable laws in a necessity of how the legal system works. If a law is ruled to be unconstitutional it does not magically get removed from the books. That requires legislative action, but why waste time in the legislature on something with no practical effect?

That is different, such laws are unenforceable because they have been ruled to be so by a court. The problem is with laws that are unenforced, but are still enforcable. If the situation of having unenforced laws becomes normalized, then legislatures will indeed not "waste time" removing them, and such laws will be only unenforced until some official decides they don't like you.

I doubt that people whose lives/finances have been ruined defending themselves against vindictive/overzealous prosecutors and litigious citizens would agree that this is not a dangerous precedent. Being dragged through the courts based on outdated or unreasonably applied laws can ruin a person's finances or reputation even when they successfully defend themselves.
The minors on trial for sex crimes for sending nude pictures of themselves, as well as innovative business being stifled buy outdated protectionist regulations, may also have something to say about it.
Outdated, unreasonable, misinterpreted, and in some cases know unconstitutional laws, can be used as tools to attack and harass.
The fact the Constitutional action is not being taken to remove these laws and regulations from the books is not an argument for them to continue existing, but rather an argument for the need to change how the government operates in regards to updating and clarifying the law.

>Often, the only way for us to have a working body of law that makes sense is for the government to simply stop enforcing the outdated ones.
Fairly enforcing every law on the books regardless of a person's income or gender and ending plea deals, which would tie up the court systems, would create a disaster. But it is something we need, because the law as is, where everything is illegal and the police target whomever makes them mad is even worse of a disaster. (Yes, police do consistently enforce some laws, like no murder, but there are far too many laws on the books police pick and choose to enforce as it suits their prejudices).
>with a lot of very costly court cases and headaches for the various agencies tasked with enforcement.
Sounds good to me. When those agencies are so low on budget they can't enforce the laws and people get sick enough of the status quo they elect law makers who'll actually remove bad laws, then we will end up better off.

You say this as if Sessions is a good-faith actor, when clearly he is not.

I keep seeing this “good-faith” buzzword everywhere lately. It seems that the current political usage is just a way to dismiss any legitimate arguments or actions made by someone who is supposed to be a villain in the narrative.

But remember, Jeff Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 with the reason being, "He was too racist". Now how racist did you have to be in 1986 to be too racist?!
This is the same guy who in March of 1986 said he would refer to a white civil rights lawyer as (and I quote), "A disgrace to his race." He then went on to refer to the ACLU, NAACP, and National Council of Churches as communist inspired and un-american.
I'd almost argue it is hard to find anything he has done in good faith given his bias towards laws that overwhelmingly target racial minorities.
I say this as a pasty white dude who is appalled by the overwhelming amount of racism in our current executive branch.

>Now how racist did you have to be in 1986 to be too racist?!
About as racist as today. If you want to see what racism really looks like (and not merely bigotry), look to the 60s and prior.

This is really racism too. Just milder then kkk.

Well yes, what Sessions was accused of doing is systemic racism, which IMO is much worse than idiots throwing around pejoratives. Granted, the systemic racism is a lot better overall than it was. I mean lynching was legal, rape was legal, assault was legal and fighting back got your mobbed or worse.
Racism is the belief that a group of people are inferior to another group of people based solely on what they look like. I mean inferior as in inferior beings or sub-human, like a dog. Historically, US racism was particularly nasty. If you are interested, there is an iTunes podcast from Yale on Reconstruction (the whole war era really). The things you hear turn your stomach.
The WW2 propaganda about the Japanese as a dumb people is a good recent example. Of course the Japanese were very fierce and brutal fighters who would rather die than surrender. That's probably not going to get enlistment up though.

I couldn't agree with you more if I wanted to. The internment camps were an abomination and against everything I personally believe the US was originally founded upon. May we remember our folly to never repeat it.

It's interesting that you mention that. On one hand, the war department said the Japanese were dumb and easy to beat, while on the other hand they said they were too dangerous and needed to be confined.

You mean this one? https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-civil-war-and-recons...

Yes. It's very good. I listened to it for the reconstruction part, but ended up listening to the whole thing.

I've been to Selma and Montgomery, AL (google: Edmund Pettus Bridge) and the surrounding museums around it. Sadly, I'm all too familar with this side of the country as I was raised in the south, but not of it (my parents were strongly against racism in all forms).

>In initiating the case, Mr. Sessions ignored allegations of similar behaviors by whites, choosing instead to chill the exercise of the franchise by blacks because of his misguided investigation. In fact, Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisors, and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. Their only sin the committed was being too successful in gaining votes.
Coretta Scott King
https://www.snopes.com/coretta-scott-king-criticize-jeff-ses...

This comment crosses over the line where the thread becomes generically political. We need to resist that here, because there's nothing of value in generically political subthreads—they're all the same. People who want to fight the same fights over and over—and there are valid reasons to want that, obviously—need to do so elsewhere.
Of course the original topic is highly politicized, but at least it was an alloy, not the pure thing, and it's important to preserve that property in the comments.

As an example, Kansas tried to pass a law about firearm suppressors. If it was made in Kansas and strictly used inside Kansas, it would be legal. This ended in the unfortunate federal conviction of a few men.
http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article126014...
Selective enforcement is very terrible indeed. I have my doubts Trump will go after weed farmers, I think he might press Congress however for a solution.

I agree with you, but it's interesting to see the "worse-is-better" philosophy applied outside of tech.
I would hope that most readers of HN who build systems for a living see the value in your argument of separation of concerns and clear interfaces: Congress makes laws, executive branch enforces those laws, states make their own laws within the latitude they have.
That said, in life like in software, when subject to resource constraints and a deadline, it's so much easier to just slap in some hardcoded conditions or let this module take on a little more responsibility than it should. I think that's what happened here in the Obama era, and like C, we had a pretty good outcome from it. But again, like C, if we let it fester too long it can cause no end of pain down the road.
So I'm actually happy with this outcome - Obama hacked in a proof of concept that seems to be working, and Sessions (though perhaps not his intention) is tackling the tech debt. I don't see this going any way but marijuana being legalized federally down the road.
(All that said, the current "system" is not great in terms of separation of concerns. It's my understanding that Congress didn't say marijuana should be illegal, but the DEA, right? The DEA should totally have no say over it.)

As a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions said he thought the KKK "were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/jeff-session...

> It's my understanding that Congress didn't say marijuana should be illegal, but the DEA, right?
Incorrect. While the Attorney-General can add or remove drugs from the scehdules established under the Controlled Substances Act based on the criteria in the Act, with advice from the Secretary of Health and Human Services (in practice, as I understand, this is delegated largely to the DEA in DoJ supported by the FDA in HHS), the initial scehdules were set by Congress, and it is Congress that initially placed Marijuana in Schedule I, from which it has not been moved, when the Act was passed.

Have you heard of prosecutorial discretion?

I think he has heard of it. He's making a case for how things should be not how things are. And his point is consistent with Socrates, who chose to live in compliance with the law even though it meant his death; and with Lincoln, who famously said "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." Not bad company.

I agree regarding enforcement of every law, but I would also point out that the federal drug laws — like other laws still on the books which are not enforced — are unconstitutional, and thus that he has a responsibility given his oath of office to refrain from enforcing them.

No. The executive branch does not have the power to strike down laws it sees as unconstitutional. That is the power of the courts. The executive should follow the laws as written.

If two laws contradict one another, the executive must make a determination which to follow; it cannot follow both. It could choose to follow the newest, or the oldest, but fortunately the Constitution itself spells out the precedence of the laws: 'This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.'
The Constitution takes precedence over federal law, and the executive must refrain from executing a law which is unconstitutional.

Police officers can choose whether or not to enforce a law.
Someone is driving 50 in a 35 mph zone. Police officer’s radar says it, the gun is calibrated, and it’s illegal to do that.
Police officer pulls that person over, then after a little chat, decided to let them go with a warning.
Presumably the reason for letting someone go is because they feel the penalty imposed by the law is too stiff in this case. Okay, then how about we reduce the penalty?
I guess I’ve always been confused why officers are allowed to do this, and unsure if this is wise.

That's still enforcing the law. Not enforcing the law would be witnessing the person driving 50 in a 35 zone and doing nothing.

First five minutes of criminology 101 "Law Enforcement vs Policing"
Law Enforcement means replacing that cop with a very small shell script hooked up to a red light camera style radar gun and a ticket printer. Policing is a somewhat more nuanced human task.
With a side dish of the Peelian Principles that define the difference between an occupying military light infantry force and a police force
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
So Peelian interpretation #2 its a speed trap intentional or unintentional
Peelian principle #4 if the cop was in anyway legitimately disrespectful the ticket should not be written.
Peelian principle #6 there is a diversity in humanity such that the law (aside from mandatory minimums) has always specified "up to". Its a very medical doctor Hippocratic oath like outlook of first do no harm, do the minimum necessary act to get the result.
Peelian principle #9 realistically there is no way to prevent speeding while driving the pregnant wife in labor to the ER, so why bother with a retributive ticket? Turn on the lights and escort them to make it safer, maybe. On the other hand business as usual idiot woke up late trying to speed to work to catch up, that can be permanently cured by a retributive ticket. Principle 9 is the logic behind how we treat medically impaired driving ; intentionally getting drunk equals ticket, having a heart attack means no ticket, although in an authoritarian law enforcement philosophy both are equally hazardous driving situation for the general public.
To some extent pot legalization is a classic law enforcement vs policing argument. By Peelian principles individual use while not endangering the public should never, ever, be enforced anyway regardless of law. By definition MJ can't be a hazard to yourself or the public as long as you're not driving or operating heavy machinery, so its simply not a police issue. Kinda like how some people argue immigration law enforcement is not a Peelian police issue.

> Sessions will instead let federal prosecutors where pot is legal decide how aggressively to enforce federal marijuana law, the people said.
He's pushing the choice to whether "to defend every law" down to regional federal prosecutors. Prosecutors always decide what laws to enforce by deciding how to allocate their scarce resources. This is an established legal custom called "prosecutorial discretion."

Prosecutional discretion is legalized bigotry. The legal system has a strong history of allowing sexist, racist, and classist thought to drive how laws are enforced. Any fair or just system would allow no such discretion.

I agree that prosecutorial discretion allows racism and other prejudice to be reflected in enforcement. However, every practical system will have prosecutorial discretion because resources are always limited.

Except, Congress's ability to create a never-ending stream of new laws seems to be limitless. Maybe we should require a 3/4 majority and "slow" process to create a law but only a 1/4 minority and fast track needed to repeal one.

I feel the same way. Passing 'laws' (maybe decrees is a better word?) through the Executive Branch and even a memo in this case just sets up horrible precedent, as well as being temporary.
In a perfect world, this would actually ignite the public to the point where the Federal Government is forced to actually remove Marijuana from the banned substance list. Republicans aren't so against it today where they wouldn't be able to get it in through a compromise bill of some sort.

> I also think Sessions should enforce every law, lest he pick and choose what is illegal and what is not, thus becoming the most powerful law-maker ( or unmaker ) in the land.
Setting prosecutorial priorities is an important executive branch function, both in terms of resource management and in terms of avoiding injustice; criminal laws are not designed to be applied by automatons, and executive officials are not doing he job they are paid to do if they act like blind automatons in applying them.

>I also think Sessions should enforce every law
Do you appreciate what that would entail? Laws exists on the books so that when the political class wants someone squashed, they can. They are swinging swords of Damocles above the throats of citizens that are snipped when convenient.

By your logic, Sessions should be directing police officers everywhere to harshly enforce all traffic signs, to harshly enforce jay walking laws, and to go bust every small poker game for illegal gambling. Enforcing all our laws with equal effort is a massive waste of resources. Plus, we still have a lot of fairly crazy old laws on the books that no one cares to enforce. It took until 2003 for the Supreme Court to say laws against sodomy were illegal. We don't want to rely on congress to choose which laws to enforce, we want to rely on smart and empathetic prosecutors. Unfortunately Sessions does not seem very empathetic.

This is a deeply naive view of how government works. The exclusive domain of the purse string rests with the legislature, that is in the constitution. If the legislature makes something illegal, but they do not fund enforcement, and the president signs that into law, there is nothing the executive can do to get more money for enforcement, they simply can't enforce it. And there are all kinds of examples of this.
Enforce every law is just nonsense talk. Absolutely they pick and choose what to enforce and what not to enforce. It's all a resource allocation, and ideology and politics determines a lot of how it gets allocated, which is why elections matter.

I agree, and taking into account objections / observations raised by other commentors, the most practical method is to stop enforcing outdated laws.
BUT, in the last ten years, we have seen same-sex marriage go from "cops looking the other way" to legitimate laws in many states (37) to a SCOTUS ruling which overturned the ban.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/same-sex-marriage-civil-un...
And thanks to Obama and the State of Colorado, we have evidence - albeit subject to interpretation - instead of Summer of Love / Reefer Madness conjectures.
At the very least, the Congress should consider amending the meaning of Schedule I to distinguish marijuana from heroin -- a phrase similar to "toxic in large doses." IOW, the danger posed by a drug should have weight in its scheduling.
Schedule I - drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
https://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml

Good post. I agree.

Is there an easy way to track donations from alcohol/big pharma lobbyists to the Republican party? I'm betting quite a bit of money, rather than concern for the prole's welfare, is behind this.
Sessions said this in March: "I reject the idea that America will be a better place if marijuana is sold in every corner store. And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana – so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful,” he told law enforcement officials in March. Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life."
As it happens, a person close to me who was a true alcoholic (physically dependent, would have seizures if they didn't drink, tried AA and failed through the 12 steps a number of times) successfully stopped drinking by choosing to safely vape pot instead. They vape about every two days. How exactly did pot destroy this person's life?
- edited to add big pharma

I was considering writing this on a throwaway but no, this makes me so incensed I have to speak up as myself.
As a long-term, gainfully employed and rather successful engineer, marijuana was the _one_ reason I was able to get my unhealthily low body weight up to par after years of attempting other methods. I would go multiple days without eating/without an appetite, between this and my weight resulting in a multitude of unfortunate ailments. To say that pot "destroyed" my life is about as far from the truth as you can get.
This is such a heartless decision, paramount in my mind to the same corrupt ideologues who enabled prohibition; and while I'm in no means surprised, I feel like there needs to be stronger action at this point to fight back.

Congratulations on your weight maintenance...that is wonderful.
Regarding using a throwaway, I understand the impulse. It's sad that in 2018 we are judged by potential employers or peers for just saying that a plant should be legal.
Personally, I decided last year to no longer hide my feelings on the matter. I believe this fear of being judged leads many of us to do so, and sadly, it impedes progress. So, I've started telling people openly and honestly how I feel. I'm no longer afraid to say it should be legal, and I'm not afraid for my wife, my children, my family, or my peers to know.
I'm not a regular user, but I know many who are and lead happy, functional lives, including the person I mentioned in the original post.
It should be legal.

If you follow the donations in this sector its usually boring and more towards whomever is in power. I would concentrate more on police and sheriff PACs and those related to the prison systems; not private but public which are most covered by PACs
while I find some things to like about this Administration as a Libertarian it stops when confronted with Sessions.
then again all this opens the door to more opportunities to flip this to Congress and put pressure there. The previous Administration did not push this either, they did their typical chicken move of pretending it wasn't an issue. As in, if we don't enforce the law then that means we don't support it. Yet no effort to repeal

There have been multiple bills to reschedule marijuana over the past several years. They all died. There was another introduced this year and it met the same fate. I'm not sure why you'd blame Obama for the House's unwillingness to act.

The executive branch can't repeal laws, they can choose to selectively enforce them. Also, the previous administration via the state department, was working on unwinding the many agreements we have with other countries on marijuana legalization, it's hardly tenable to legalize it at a federal level while we're still giving (let's call it slush) money to governments who make it illegal, and punishing those who don't.
This administration has castrated the state department, so near as I can tell, none of that effort is happening anymore. And in fact any government paying attention would refuse to take such moves seriously now that the AG is reversing the prior administration's efforts thus far.

I really wouldn’t worry about it too much at this point. The cat is out of the bag; there’s waay too much legitimate money involved in the weed business now, especially in California. There are a dozen storefronts within a few miles of me right now. California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington are recieving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. On top of >60% public support for legalization, all the feds can do at this point is sit back and watch. It would be a governmental overreach not matched since the days of internment camps if they were to attempt enforcing federal law around this, not to even mention the political suicide of siding with the few people who still support prohibition.

Though they do it for guns. Here in KS the law says firearms and accessory made in KS are exempt from federal regulation. Two guys were recently convicted in federal court for making a suppressor.

Why? What harm can the Feds point to, with respect to legal marijuana? It's been mostly good in Colorado. Sales tax on marijuana has offset some budget problems citizens of Colorado inflicted on themselves (TABOR). Apparently, crime in Colorado isn't uniformly rising: most categories of crime are less common since legalization, a few have risen a bit. This is in line with a secular drop in crime in all of th USA, however, so, again, mixed bag.

It harms the pharmaceutical industry, the private prisons and police budgets, to name a few examples.

Police unions are also uniformly opposed to legalization, as it will reduce the need for police by definition if the hundreds of thousands of "crimes" per year vanish into smoke.
Fewer officers, less money and less power.
Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana (ACLU).

So, all their favorites.

So much for « states rights »
> Sessions, who has assailed marijuana as comparable to heroin and has blamed it for spikes in violence
Pot smokers aren’t violent people because it tends to chill you out. The growers and dealers can belong to criminal organizations and cause problems. So naturally, keeping the gangs in business by keeping pot illegal is top priority.

The giant opioid industry--pharma--is the biggest criminal gang, and they oppose legalizing pot. Maybe that's where this political push is really coming from.

The Trump administration has also been tied to the private prison industry.

That's doesn't make much sense as a premise data wise.
The prison boom around the war on drugs overwhelmingly involved the government prison complex, from 1980 to 2010.
Clinton didn't have meaningful ties to the private prison industry (which barely existed at the time), and a frightening number of people were thrown into prison for drug crimes during his eight years.
About ~95% of all people put into prison over those 30 years from 1980 to 2010, went into government prisons.
Who benefitted? We spent over a trillion dollars on the government prison complex. Millions of government employees pocketed hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in cash from the scheme. It makes the private prison industry and its meager profits look hilariously tiny by comparison.
The US has about a million law enforcement related employees it doesn't need, used to prosecute the war on drugs in various ways. Those are government employees, they benefit from the government prison system, they were made possible by government laws that date back five decades or more. They cost $80-$100 billion per year. Now compare just that one section of the government prison complex, to the private prison complex money.
CoreCivic generates $200m in profit per year. That's equal to about the cost of just ~3,000 cops. The US has at least several hundred thousand more cops than it needs, due to the war on drugs. That's how truly massive the government side of this is by comparison.
Private prisons only began to meaningfully expand in the middle of George W Bush's Presidency. In the 1990s, when such an extraordinary number of people were put into prison, the private prison industry was miniscule.
Blaming any of this mess on the private prison complex, is pretty absurd given the facts of what happened in prisons and the war on drugs in the 30 to 40 years pre ~2005.
And this post is in no way arguing in favor of the private prison system, it shouldn't exist.

You shouldn't look at profits to gauge how big a company is, you should look at revenues. Otherwise, Amazon would until recently be considered a tiny company. CoreCivic generates around $1.7B in revenues, far greater than your $200M figure. If your ratio of 200m = 3k cops, CoreCivic would be closer to ~25k cops.

The profit motive is a common argument about the private prison complex, which is why I used the $200m. I believe it was very justified as the reference point.
That $200m goes to the shareholders, owners, in theory. That's the profit motive sum in their business.
I don't disagree that also referencing the $1.7b in sales is relevant. It's just as tiny looking when stacked up against the monster that is a million unnecessary government employees costing $80-$100 billion each year, that exist solely due to the war on drugs.
I'd like to see someone tabulate up the total cost of all reasonably unnecessary government employees, related to prisons and law enforcement, dating from 1980 to 2010, the prime years of the prison population boom (during which the private prison complex was an averaged single digit fraction of the whole thing). What do we suppose that would come to? $2 trillion inflation adjusted?

A few thoughts:
1. I don't think you have to disagree with vel0city to make your point. Just agree that the private prison complex is large and dangerous to society (as you apparently have) and point out that the unnecessary aspects of the public sector prison complex are also large and dangerous.
2. Any time someone can have a financial stake is something like a prison while also holding immense political power, we should all be very scared and concerned. This is why there's so much well-placed concern over the private prison industry. Of course, it's worth noting that there are also lots of ways to make lots of money off of public prisons. And those mechanisms should also be choked off.
3. Damon Hininger makes about $1M/yr in salary. Presumably if total revenue were only $200M, he'd be making a lot less in salary.

> Any time someone can have a financial stake is something like a prison while also holding immense political power, we should all be very scared and concerned. This is why there's so much well-placed concern over the private prison industry.
I still don't get the hysteria-like concern over private prisons, when the extreme majority of all harm and money has related to the government prison system, which almost never gets tagged eg on HN in conversations like these. I've brought it up a dozen times over the years, and I'm usually the only person in the thread bringing it up. Yet the fear about the private side of it, is dramatic. That upside-down concern doesn't make any sense to me. That isn't to play down the negatives of the private prison industry, rather, it's to highlight that the public system is radically larger and just as financially motivated. Some of the strongest and best funded advocate groups against pot legalization have been government prison & police groups / unions / lobbyists; they all have a truly vast, financial stake in the government prison system.
Those people earn relatively decent wages. There are maybe 2.5 million of them total in the system, across all government prisons and law enforcement related jobs. They vote. Their representatives lobby aggressively. They hold immense collective political influence, far beyond anything the private prison industry could muster.
Hiniger makes $1 million? The total cost of 8 or 12 government cops. We've got 300k or 500k too many. Yet, again, the private side gets a hugely lopsided amount of attention.
What's the total prison population scale difference between government & private prisons, between 1980 and 2017? 20 to 1? More than that?
If we're adding up lives destroyed, the number of people harmed by being unjustly put into government or private prison, the economic value of all those destroyed lives, how would that come out? How many millions of people were put into government prisons over 30-40 years that shouldn't have been and how does that compare to the private industry? We must surely be talking about trillions of dollars more in real cost to society from the government side vs the private side.
The real comedy of the fear? The US prison population finally began to stop rising and began to fall, as the private prison system has gotten larger. And pot is getting legalized during that time as well. Peak war on drugs existed during peak government prison complex. Nobody likes to talk about that.

> Hiniger makes $1 million? The total cost of 8 or 12 government cops.
You claimed that profits, not revenues, constitute "the profit motive sum" for private prison operators. But if revenue is tied to executive compensation, that's clearly not true. I didn't offer the number as a comparative, but rather as a way of refuting your claim that total revenues don't contribute to profit motive.
Aside from this point, I don't really think Hiniger's salary is relevant to this conversation.
> Peak war on drugs existed during peak government prison complex. Nobody likes to talk about that.
So are you really claiming that private prisons caused prison populations to decline? If not, what point are you trying to make by mentioning this obviously-not-causative correlation?
> rather, it's to highlight that the public system is radically larger and just as financially motivated
You'll find just as much "hysteria-like concern" here on hn, and elsewhere, about profiteering in public prisons. And yes, that includes concern over lobbying by prison guard unions.
I agree with your general point that a wave of stupid in the 80s and 90s is more to blame for our current situation than profit motive. And to get back to the article, Sessions has always been in the eye of that hurricane of stupid.
But profiteering -- by unions, by private prison suppliers, by suppliers to public prisons -- certainly helps sustain the present situation. Different people choose different subsets of that Goliath. So what?
Like I said above, I really, really don't understand the battle lines you're trying to draw here. Surely, we can all agree that the solution is putting fewer people in jails, right?

Gangs will always be in business even with legal pot. Just look at cigarettes and alcohol. Both those things are legal and both those things have massive black markets to bypass the heavy regulations and taxes imposed on them.

>cigarettes and alchohol have massive black markets to bypass heavy regulations.
Are you speaking on the US or worldwide? A quick search doesn't produce any reliable statistics that indicate this. I have never once heard of anyone purchasing alcohol on the black market. Cigarettes, sure, but even then it's typically only very low-income folks purchasing cheap, illegal tobacco that is generally not of great quality. This is in stark contrast to marijuana where high-grade product can be purchased on the "street".
I suspect that once(if) pot goes legal the black-market will consist mostly of cheap, poor quality marijuana. This should take a nice chunk out of the profits that gangs see from marijuana distribution.

Blackmarket alcohol is not uncommon in the US. Particularly among poor white and hispanic populations. Most cultures have their equivalent of moonshine. You can easily buy illegally manufactured alcohol in every corner of Appalachia, basically all of the south, and poorer areas of every blue state including California and New York (most of NY being rural, and not particularly affluent, there's a healthy trade in illegal alcohol there as well, it is then sold in NYC as well).
You can get hooked up with illegal alcohol in basically every liquor store in every state in Appalachia, if you know someone that works there. It's commonly sold under the table so to speak.
edit: for wherever the downvotes are coming from - yes, I do know this stuff for a fact. I grew up in Appalachia, I know for a fact that what I'm saying is extremely common, I saw just about every aspect of the illegal alcohol trade first-hand. From that I came to learn second-hand the scope and nature of it up and down the east coast of the US and other parts of the country. It's easy enough to google this subject as well if you're skeptical.

It is amazing that backyard moonshine stills aren’t a meme in popular culture anymore.

> Blackmarket alcohol is not uncommon in the US.
But large criminal syndicates funded by blackmarket alcohol are very much a thing of the past. At least in the USA.
I guess I technically know quite a few people who make "black market" whiskey. It's not legal to distill without lots of licensing and these people do sell bottles to friends and friends-of-friends.
But it's Really Hard to understate the difference between poor folks running cottage industries around moonshine and the sprawling violent criminal enterprises that flourished around the alcohol trade during prohibition.
(e: also, illegal alcohol isn't just a poor person thing. Plenty of wealthy folks illegally distill, they just normally aren't motivated to sell.)

> it's Really Hard to understate the difference between poor folks running cottage industries around moonshine and the sprawling violent criminal enterprises that flourished around the alcohol trade during prohibition.
Certainly. And it's some gargantuan scale different versus the illegal drug trade as a comparison (0.1% as large perhaps). My point was that it isn't particularly uncommon, the underground illegal alcohol trade (it's also not monetarily massive in size as you're noting, which is why it exists at all, local police mostly look the other way so long as it stays small'ish).

FWIW, as someone who currently resides in a recreationally legal state (Oregon), everyone I know who uses marijuana both medically and recreationally chooses to do so with legally purchased Marijuana. It's more convenient, safer, and typically higher quality than an non-legal state.

> Pot smokers aren’t violent people because it tends to chill you out
This is not a great argument. I'd say pot smokers aren't violent people because they are everyone as in they are average people not drug addicts, which is mostly true (in my dataless opinion). Most people don't causally or recreationally use heroin, but like alcohol, a large portion of average people do enjoy regular MJ use.

The referenced violence in the parent comment is related to the trafficking of rather than the usage of pot, I believe.

You can debate the likelihood of alcohol or marijuana's influence on people to commit crimes all you like - but at the end of the day it's not a useful argument:
a) people were still getting both alcohol and marijuana under prohibition, prohibition does not work, so whether or not it makes people more violent doesn't really matter. Especially for the demographics who typically commit crimes are usually the people who have the greatest access to black market products.
b) the vast majority of the violence directly related to the drug comes from trafficking, which is ultimately a product of prohibition, not drug use
There's not much of a debate here if both a) and b) can't be meaningfully influence by federal policy.

Quite the contrary. I am glad he is doing this. It is a huge tactical blunder that will force the states' rights issue into court and either result in a victory for the states or massive public discontent about federal overthrow of popular state policies.
Either way the federal government is going to see their influence eroded here.

As I understand it, the Supreme Court already ruled against states' right on this matter in Gonzales v. Raich. That case was about medical marijuana, but I don't think that matters.
(IANAL.)

The composition of the court has changed quite a bit since then as has public opinion.
Cannabis is now legal for medical use in 29 states. Many of these laws were passed through the referendum process. That is a lot of democracy to overrule from a bench in D.C.

We forget that America cares very little for democracy, being largely an oligarchy.

I'm sure conservatives would put up w/cannabis in exchange for effectively overturning Roe vs Wade, which is the effect this would have precedentally.

It was all the "liberals" and the phony "originalist" Scalia who ruled for the government in Gonzales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
That is all B.S. though. The real issue is federal vs. state power and that has nothing to do with left and right.

Only 20% of Americans polled are against abortion entirely, it's not the powerful topic it used to be. You're right that marijuana prohibition is not a strongly supported topic either, or at least one that is met with a growing indifference. Almost no one (outside of Sessions) seems to have held strong opinions on the matter.
But regardless I highly, highly doubt this one law being overturned could be equated to states having free reign to do whatever they like, regardless of federal law. There are tons of these individual issues that are finely regulated between state and federal power balances.
Not to mention the Supreme Court doesn't work like politics where you trade one issue for going easy on another.

Roe isn't based on the commerce clause, so overturning Raich's Commerce Clause application wouldn't be particularly relevant to it.
OTOH, dodging the Commerce Clause and adopting a broad 10th Amendment interpretation might affect Roe, but a 10th Amendment interpretation powerful enough to affect otherwise Constitutional federal legislation (which Roe is not) would have broad and severe effects on federal power generally, far beyond marijuana policy and Roe.

I agree. The cole memo was a real half-assed political approach in the first place, perhaps necessary at the time. This is a move coming at a time when this now state legal industry is gaining widespread popularity and acceptance and most importantly income.
It’s time to challenge the feds on the outdated CSA classification of marijuana as schedule one in general, in addition to forcing another states rights debate.
Also as I understand it, the only argument for the constitutional acceptance of the CSA is essentially the feds rights to govern interstate commerce. In this case they’re trying assert that right in an industry which is essentially operating within single states where the legality has been democratically assessed. IANAL, but I think this fact has some weight behind it in the states favor.

Reinterpreting “interstate commerce” to mean “commerce that actually involves money, goods, or services crossing state lines” would be a huge deal. It would essentially overturn Wickard v Filburn and put the brakes on a huge number of federal laws that exist to compel the states to do things. It seems very, very unlikely that the SC would make such a move, but it would be spectacularly welcome for us strict-constructionists.

> It is a huge tactical blunder that will force the states' rights issue into court and either result in a victory for the states or massive public discontent about federal overthrow of popular state policies.
The states already lost; this already went to the Supreme Court before Congress restricted such prosecution, and the feds won completely.
What will go to court next—unless Rohrabacher-Farr fails to be renewed (it's included in the most recent stopgap spending measure, but that expires, IIRC, later this month) before any prosecutions under the new DoJ policy—will not be a Constitutional states rights issue, but a federal statutory interpretation issue over whether DoJ is prohibited by Congress from this action.

> The states already lost
precisely. which is why we need the feds to try and enforce the law again in order to relitigate it.

That's not how this works. The court operates under the rule of stare decsis which would already make this a tough hill to climb. Even more, the line of reasoning in the decision agreeing to federal restriction of in-state marijuana sales goes all the way back to the great depression and is really unlikely to be overturned in just over a decade since it was decided last time.

> the court operates under the rule of stare decsis
Yes and no. If you have a decision on one set of facts made on one basis just come up with another set of facts and another basis where you can get a opposing result without necessary logical conflict and you are all good.
The rat's nest of federal law and prior opinions makes this trivial, so at the end of the day, all legal opinions are arbitrary, and the only actual basis for any decision is whether or not it serves the interests of the court, which outside of the pet peeves, biases, and corruptions of individual judges, consists mostly of the perpetuation of the institution.
The SC's power is rooted in the federal government, and it is stacked with statist/corporatist hacks, so it will always have a preference for extending federal power, but that instinct must be tempered by the threat of an over-extension which reveals the inherent weakness of their position.
Making a move against a majority of the states now, on a subject where popular opinion is clearly against them, and with an all time low level of trust and respect for the federal government would definitely not be desirable.
Normally they could just refuse to hear appeals, but the 9th circuit is in a pretty feisty mood these days so I wouldn't be too surprised if they sided with the states, which would then force the SC to either let their ruling stand, or expose themselves directly on the issue.
Either way, they either let the states keep this going, or they piss off a lot of people, and either way is bad for them and good for the states.

If Rohrabacher-Farr doesn't expire, the states will challenge the action as a violation of federal statute (where they've won before against the Feds trying to narrowly interpret Rohrabacher-Farr) rather than launching a Constitutional challenge of on grounds where there is crystal clear Supreme Court precedent against them, and little reason to believe the Court has moved in their favor.
Even if they also raise the Constitutional argument, a Court that fears public opinion as much as you suggest would likely take the less precedent-disturbing approach to the popular result by resting a decision on Rohrabacher-Farr (even if that took a somewhat expansive interpretation of that prohibition on DoJ use of funds) rather than overturning Gonzalez v. Raich.

Thanks for reiterating this point. It’s hard to focus on the silver lining when it’s issues you care about.

So much for << states rights >> with slavery

The doctrine of States' rights is presupposes federal supremacy and a legalistic viewpoint. Marijuana can't be a State's rights issue because it's a federal issue. This is why you often hear the states' rights advocates call for a smaller federal government - states rights can only flourish without the shadow of federal jurisdiction.
Right now marijuana is illegal federally - all States' rights proponents acknowledge this. The old policy of being hands off but reserving the right to bring the iron fist down on otherwise legal businesses was a bad policy. The uncertainty and risk profile killed a lot of investment - to this day, the tax burden on pot businesses is insanely high because they're not permitted to deduct business expenses related to growing/distributing marijuana because those activities are federally illegal.
Thankfully, Sessions is legalistic. If congress got off their butts and legalized it/returned the legality decisions to the state, Sessions would surely respect their decision.
I enjoy marijuana more than most and I suppose Sessions enforcing the law - it's a bad law and collectively we need the motivation to make it better. This legal twilight zone is complete bogus - bring it into the open and drive out the criminal element and let the best organization flourish.

Vouched for your dead comment. I believe you're shadowbanned, but I personally don't see a problem with the stuff you've written...

> Thankfully, Sessions is legalistic. If congress got off their butts and legalized it/returned the legality decisions to the state, Sessions would surely respect their decision.
This is a bit like saying "Thankfully, the black hole hurtling toward us is influenced by gravity, so all we need to do is move a star into its path and it will be flung off course."
The fact that a terrible situation could theoretically be saved by something wildly unlikely isn't anything to be thankful for. This isn't going to force this awful Congress we're stuck with to suddenly legalize marijuana. It's most likely just going to lead to a lot of good people being imprisoned.

Technically Obama was saying "I get to choose what laws the feds follow" with the stroke of my pen. To me that sounds more authoritative than what Sessions did here by revoking such an act.
I'm all for state rights, but I personally see overreach in executive power as the far bigger problem of the modern era. Executive power exploded under Obama (a trend which Bush started before him, which Obama took much farther).
Ultimately the real problem is that congress needs to end prohibition via law.
Obama basically took a 'sanctuary city' approach, a "workaround" and not a solution to this problem. Which ultimately still left the law very much up in the air for many people in states running weed businesses. I hate the fact people are going to jail for marijuana but I do see an argument here that Session's change:
a) incentivizes congress to put a proper policy together, where before it was left in legal/political limbo
b) ended a bad law which typified executive power overreach
c) is not yet clear how it will affect states in practice, as it's still up to the state attorneys to act on it
In practice this sucks, but I don't think this sucks because it's an extension of government overrearch.

If you look at the fine print he's still leaving the decision to crack down to each stares attorney general but sessions is doing exactly what you would want to do is you want to see the opiate crisis get much worse. These people in DC are so stupid they don't even have the brain power of an earthworm but they want to treat us lower than dogs like we were born to be Jeff Sessions slaves. I'm so sick of these bullies.

Cannabis use isn't the solution to opioid deaths.
Other countries have strict laws about cannabis, and those laws are enforced, and they don't have the problems of opioid deaths that the US has.
The real solution to opioid death is adequate treatment for pain; and treating addiction as a health problem not a criminal justice problem.

"The real solution to opioid death is adequate treatment for pain"
Like.... medical marijuana?
Hard to believe you wrote those three sentences without putting two and two together.
Regardless if I partially agree with you, further criminalizing marijuana is also NOT the solution to opioid deaths.

Marijuana may treat some forms of light pain, but it is in no way comparable to opioids as an adequate treatment for pain. It may be similar to Tylenol 3 (small amount of codeine plus APAP) on an opioid scale that goes much, much higher to medications such as hydromorphone, oxymorphone and fentanyl. Even heroin would only be classified as a 'medium strength' opioid compared to these examples.

There's not much evidence of efficacy for cannabis as a treatment for long term pain.

To replace all instances of opioids? No.
It does a very good job with neuropathic pain though.

Very often opioids are the only adequate treatment for pain; what else would you suggest?

> Very often opioids are the only adequate treatment for pain;
The Royal College of Anaesthetists have useful info here: https://www.rcoa.ac.uk/faculty-of-pain-medicine/opioids-awar...

Keep in mind this is based on two anonymous sources. The track record for those has been less than stellar since Trump began his administration.

Sometimes the leaks are intentional to gauge public reaction, and then actual action is taken based in part on feedback.

Leaks of this sort are almost always trial balloons. I'm sure this was an intentional leak. They're looking for a backlash, at which point they can quietly forget about it (if they don't want the fight) and pretend it never happened.

I doubt that prosecutors in liberal states with legal markets (Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada) will clamp down on the industry, in fact under certain conditions I could see them clarifying their stance and perhaps clearing confusion as to how federal law will be enforced.
However, I do think that this may halt the spread of the industry into midwest and north east markets.

I think it may already be too established in the midwest for anything like this to threaten the spread of the legal pot industry.
I suspect this is a tactic to justify Federally taxing marijuana, and would be consistent with Trump's broader approach of making tax policy tweaks that hit the bluest states and regions the hardest.

Never forget: Trump did not even want to be president, as revealed yesterday. So this is the alt-rights way of exacting revenge for 8 years of Obama, by punishing the 52% of voters who didn't vote for Trump. The right is getting their licks in while they can.
Edited for clarity

Note that these are federal prosecutors, not state prosecutors; they have no incentive to respect state law over federal law. In particular, if the Justice Department intended to respect states' rights, then I suspect they wouldn't have changed these regulations.
Of course, this isn't an official announcement; we can save most of the hand-wringing, moral outrage, and/or smug satisfaction (depending on your views) until after the official policy change, at which point I'm sure it will show up here on the front page again.

Actually they do have incentives to care about local and state laws because they need cooperation from local and state governments to enforce the law.

They can always enforce federal law themselves, it’s just more expensive for them. Getting into street-level marijuana dealing isn’t something the FBI or DEA have resources for.

They were busting California medical marijuana dispensaries left and right as recently as 10 years ago, which is more than a decade after we passed Proposition 215. It seems a bit optimistic to think that now they'll bow to state law.

This guy is messing with my gains. Can't he go rant about tax deductions and too much regulation like a normal republican?

My gains on my 401k have been excellent.

Budz off 37% already today.
Hope sessions and his boyfriend had short positions on this dumpster fire

Please don't post like this here.

The Justice Dept has now issued a memorandum https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-issues-mem...

It’d be nice if pro drug and pro gun laws were both exempt from federal pre-emption. In Kansas, state law says guns made in the state are exempt from federal regulation. Of course the federal government disagrees. Pot and gun enthusiasts should band together.

This reads like a strong warning to the already cautious payment processors that legalization hasn’t eased any of the uncertainty around processing payments for dispensaries or made banking any simpler for them despite a massive market having just opened.

If I were a US Attorney trying to bring pot cases in California, Colorado, or Washington I'd be very worried about jury nullification. Maybe I'd be able to solve the problem in voir dire but I wouldn't bet on it.

Most people don't know what jury nullification is, and the courts specifically do not instruct juries on it. Hence, it is not a big concern really.

People don't need to know what jury nullification or be instructed on it in order to engage in it. It was happening in England before this country even existed. Ask any prosecutor and she'll tell you about a case where it happened to her.

Maybe this is a good thing: policies like this are going to damage the Republicans in the midterms.
There's only so much war waged on progressive policies before more and more even right-wing types feel their toes being stepped on.

The states that have legalized it should do everything in their power to not provide any assistance to the federal government in this or any other investigations till the policy is improved, just like sanctuary cities are doing. The states have a lot of legal options on how to handle this. We'll see if they do the right thing or if they bend over backwards for a piece of shit racist AG who has already allegedly (my ass) perjured himself.

https://www.popehat.com/2018/01/04/lawsplainer-attorney-gene...
Popehat's response is, as always, fun to read and more informative and less fear mongering than most sources of information.

> as polls show a solid majority of Americans believe the drug should be legal
I am for the legalizing of marijuana, but considering the majority of Americans live in only 9 of the states, decisions should not be made based on the "majority". Federal law based on what the majority wanted was one of the things that the framers were afraid of. 9 states should not be able to dictate what occurs in the other 41 states and vice versa. Full state rights. Again I am for the legalization marijuana, but this needs to be a state by state decision, not federal govt.

To flip this, the minority of the country that live in 39 states should not be able to dictate the law to the majority of the country who just happen to be concentrated in a relatively small area. That's tyranny of the minority, which is arguably far worse than the tyranny of the majority the framers feared.

On the other hand one could frame this as the majority of states decided and those nine states are the tyrannical minority.

Empty land doesn't have a right to suffrage, people do.

We're not talking about "empty land," we're talking about member states of a federation. Those members get to decide, you merely tell your state, vaguely, what you want.

That's why States Rights is the solution. Let each state control what the law is for them and only for them. Tyranny of thy own self.
(Ignoring for the moment state level tyranny of the majority.)

uh uh. Quirks of population distribution should certainly not permit a minority of citizens from driving policy in directions the rest of the country doesn't want to go. One person, one vote.

California getting to decide the will of Kansas is a broken system. It feels a lot like, say, the king of England ruling the colonies without representation.

States are completely arbitrary political constructs. Why should Albany have power over both New York City and upstate, for example?
You need either much smaller units, or one system with a more democratic structure.

Except it's not California. It's millions of American Citizens

Kansas (assumably) has a working general assembly and is perfectly capable of passing legislation at the state level to express their will in whatever way they see fit. Meanwhile, at the federal level, the will of the majority of citizens is what should be represented.

Kansas and California both have equal representation in the Senate, which every federal law must pass through; there is no taxation without representation comparison to be made here.

> this needs to be a state by state decision, not federal govt
According to the framers the federal govt has no authority at all to regulate the growing, distribution and sale of a product that takes place entirely within a state, so I do agree that this is a state decision.
But since the federal laws regulating cannabis activity within states are unconstitutional and unenforceable in the first place, eliminating or not enforcing them is merely complying with the law, not a change in law.

>Federal law based on what the majority wanted was one of the things that the framers were afraid of.
Some framers were afraid of like Jefferson. Hamilton and Washington were federalists and favored a strong central government.
I personally like state power over federal. If your state sucks, you always have the option to move to another state. That's a pretty fantastic option. Of course it has it's problems too. The South struggled to get states to put money in to fight the Civil War because the central government couldn't require it, it had to beg for it.
>9 states should not be able to dictate what occurs in the other 41 states and vice versa. Full state rights. Again I am for the legalization marijuana, but this needs to be a state by state decision, not federal govt.
Not sure of the logic there. It seems like rthe 41 states are dictating to the 9 states since 41 states pot is illegal.

> Not sure of the logic there.
Its really simple, if you don't understand this, you need to question your own logic. Basically the Marijuana issue should be a state decision, not dictated by the Fed Govt. What don't you understand here?

>9 states should not be able to dictate what occurs in the other 41 states and vice versa.
Because the 41 states are dictating to the 9 states that pot should be illegal, not the other way around.

> I personally like state power over federal. If your state sucks, you always have the option to move to another state. That's a pretty fantastic option.
Note that that option was not at all available for those for whom their stated sucked due to the issue that was the original focus of the “states rights” controversy in the US. It's kind of interesting that you point to the Confederacy’s difficulties in raising revenue for the Civil War as a potential drawback of state over federal power, but not the issue which motivated the Confederacy.

>Note that that option was not at all available for those for whom their stated sucked due to the issue that was the original focus of the “states rights” controversy in the US.
Because that would be a massive moral crusade tangent that nobody wanted to read and was hardly relevant to the discussion.
>It's kind of interesting that you point to the Confederacy’s difficulties in raising revenue for the Civil War as a potential drawback of state over federal power, but not the issue which motivated the Confederacy.
Everybody knows the issue that motivated the Confederacy that has half a brain. I assumed everyone on here did as well.

This is poised to be a giant states rights issue/fight and there's nothing Trump likes more than a fight

“Legal” is incorrect in the headline, as there is no “legal pot” in the United States (well, aside from very narrow research, etc., allowed by the feds, which is not the focus of this policy.)
The fact that states don't have espionage laws covering everything in the federal espionage act doesn't mean that those states have “legal espionage”.

You’re conflating two different things. In the former, states have set up legal framework for marijuana sales. In the later, state laws don’t have any opinion on the matter.

If a state like California sets up an imprisonment scheme under it's laws that violates federal law (to choose an example that has happened recently), it's still illegal prison overcrowding, not legal prison overcrowding.
A system under state law in violation of valid federal law is, because of the supremacy clause, an illegal system.

Sessions has clearly never had a session.

Given the frequency with which old guard Republican politicians get caught soliciting liaisons in public mens rooms while openly supporting legislation that discriminates against the LGBTQ+ community I'd drug test Sessions before I made any assumptions about his use habits.

If you're trying to destroy the country on behalf of Putin forcing millions of middle aged chronic pain patients off cannabis onto opiates and inevitably heroin and fentynal is an efficient way to murder millions of people without firing a single shot.

Fentanyl is legal and safe when used appropriately, just like heroin is in some countries like the UK, which uses diamorphine where US hospitals might use morphine or hydromorphone.

Please don't post inflammatory rants here. Any point worth making can be made civilly and substantively.
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