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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

The issue is not whether or not they are enforcing. The fact that they can, at any time, for any arbitrary reason (including political speech, which would otherwise be protected) is the issue.

Doing something routinely and openly that is an unenforced federal felony is to voluntarily surrender your constitutional rights under the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and probably others. (Breaking the law openly like this means they can instantly jail you for speech, for protesting, for being inconvenient, for carrying, and obtain a search warrant at any time.)

It is not "effectively legal", any more than driving 9mph over the limit is. It's just not enforced: it's still a huge felony.

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As much as I hate to admit it, this is a solid argument.

I like that I can go to a cannabis dispensary if I want to (even though it’s not my thing). But I remember the outrage I felt learning about federal agents destroying a place some years back. They didn’t just arrest people; they deliberately trashed everything they could.

That said, you gotta start somewhere. People have to take risks to effect change and progress. The civil rights movement wouldn’t have led to change if people weren’t willing to put themselves at risk of being arrested.

The California cannabis industry is $4.4 billion in size.[1] While your argument is technically plausible, the size of the industry means that you have more and more lobbyists and lawyers working full time to make it politically less practical every day.

1. https://cannabusinessplans.com/california-cannabis-market/

The California cannabis industry is several multiples, perhaps an order of magnitude, larger than 4.4 billion.

You're just talking about the part that is the white people with state licenses, insurance, and mailing addresses.

Entrepreneurs make up another segment, 5-10x larger than that one.

Nice race bait/comic book. My favorite grower is owned/operated by an east Asian couple btw. If you know anything about California, the idea of an all-white cannabis cabal is absurd. But that may be hard to recognize from Berlin, I don't know. Okay, that's enough HN for a bit.

Still means it is perfectly legal for the feds to deploy troops and arrest people from the streets in California whenever they feel like it. It would be way uglier than what happened in Portland.

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