Delaware will become the 22nd state to legalize recreational marijuana
delawarebusinesstimes.com
delawarebusinesstimes.com
Since federal law applies everywhere, marijuana is still technically illegal everywhere in the US.
It’s fascinating, however, that under three presidents spanning both parties, the federal authorities have given up on enforcing the ban in states that have removed marijuana laws from their own books. Perhaps this is a glimpse into the long-term solution to the problem of the federal legislature being intractably deadlocked: states will simply start ignoring federal law more and more, and its relevance will fade over time.
Or maybe not, and marijuana is a one-off situation. Time will tell.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S....
1. It’s inaccurate to claim that marijuana is legal anywhere in the US, and 2. The situation is fascinating.
https://www.mpp.org/policy/federal/are-consumers-or-cannabis...
> There are some exceptions. In each fiscal year since 2015, Congress has included provisions in appropriations acts that prohibit the U.S. Department of Justice from using funds to prevent states from “implementing their own laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana.” In effect, Congress prevents the DOJ from enforcing federal law in medical marijuana states. Courts have held up the provisions, and federal prosecutions of state-licensed businesses effectively stopped when it went into effect. However, those same protections haven’t been extended to adult-use (recreational) program participants, who remain at risk.
(not legal advice, not an attorney, not your attorney)
We have to figure out how to regulate it rather than making it illegal.
For instance, minors should be protected from it*, but medical marijuana must be available to minors with certain medical conditions.
And DUIs must be prevented. That includes employment forms for operating heavy equipment.
Those legalizing and those still fighting the racist drug war share some problems.
* and also protected from harmful law enforcement practices
Caveat to the caveat is that DOJ keeps pushing the limit on the medical marijuana prosecution prohibition, and that in California (and the rest of the Ninth Circuit), the controlling case law is that the prohibition only applies to strict compliance with state medical use rules, and that even minor technical violations (even in states that also allow non-medical use) allows federal prosecution (the First Circuit last year established a slightly different rule).
* completely, of course they can here and there and not vice versa. But this asymmetry doesn't render it illegal IMO.
Sanctuary cities have shown that the state/local governments partially override the federal government on an overall basis, though not so much directly in individual cases (though they are able to request, not demand, and get their way in a lot of individual cases).
No, they don’t.
Sanctuary cities are not sanctuaries from the federal law the “sanctuary” status references, merely ones where the city has prohibited public resources from being used to provide extra, nonmandatory, help to the feds.
“Not actively helping” isn’t “overriding”.
Well it's completely* legal to smoke it at home.
https://sonomacounty.ca.gov/health-and-human-services/health....
* More or less
Something that is true de facto is true in effect despite not being true legally.
If the federal government isn't arresting folks in legal states, how can they justify arresting others? We're close to half the US legalizing cannabis, when will the federal ban end?
They are, though, and enough that there are circuit court cases as recently as last year addressing the limitation of the funding prohibition Congress has established since 2015 on federal interference with state-legal medical marijuana programs.
If nobody rolled their eyes at what you said, maybe it wouldn't be much work and the federal government could stop it. They can't without vastly changing how they operate though.
Also if you get extra technical it's legal because of the constitution. Show me the constitutional amendment that says it's illegal.
I feel that this may be the best way to do things, since each state is unique in it people and geography.
I also feel like universal healthcare on a state level would be the only thing to work at this point, it seems like the federal government is unable to budge at all when it comes to fixing it.
Even Canada does it per province, and even there, doing it at a federal level would be too intractable.
This is just so wrong on so many levels it's hard to know what to respond to.
Maybe try going outside, you'll find it's actually completly continuous, there is no species change when crossing state lines 8-)
Even more to the point, typical (media prtrayed) state based differences all have gapping inaccuracies:
- california has more republicans than texas - texas has more democrats than new york
The division into states is one of the biggest problems facing actual democracy in the us. Coupled with first-past-the-post, and the electoral college, the us is far far from a government that enforces the public will.
And as far as the specific issue of marijuana is concerned, this is such a poster child for how locked into the "leave it to beaver" american dream state of the 1950s the eastern us still is.
The whole: "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, like the little baby jesus intended" mindset.
Having said that, I actually do agree that the state level is about the only place anything at all can be acomplished. Because the DNC and RNC have both blocked public health care repeatedly, and you're NEVER going to see either of those parties back any policy that disenfranchises their donor class.
Culture is different even in nearby states. I grew up in Virginia, went to college in Georgia, and live in Maryland now. Right before the pandemic my parents moved nearby, after living in Virginia for 30 years. My dad pointed out the other day that Marylanders aren’t like Virginians, something he has realized immediately. Then it clicked for me: Maryland is part of the mid Atlantic (PA, NJ, DE) while Virginia is part of the south. Now I can’t unsee it: the accents, the odd mannerisms, etc.
I married an Oregonian. Oregon might as well be Canada. Weird libertarian Canada. My family is originally from Bangladesh, but at least half of the cultural friction between our families comes from Oregon versus Virginia.
Yes, but the US is arguably much more culturally homogenous than many other countries. Whatever differences you see between Virginia and Maryland, I think they are significantly smaller than the differences between Ontario and Quebec. New York and Alabama may seem far apart culturally, but how does that compare to the cultural differences between Uttar Pradesh and Kerala, or between Sokoto and Akwa Ibom?
Canada is also French-speaking. There are some big differences in attitudes between the US and Australia on various topics - for example, Australians have a mostly settled cultural consensus in favour of gun control and liberal abortion laws, to give two examples, unlike the US where both are very heated political conflicts
> What about Australia and New Zealand?
New Zealand actually participated in the negotiations for forming Australia (as a federation of British colonies), but at the end decided to stay out-if history had turned out a bit differently, it might have been an Australian state not a separate country. In a lot of ways the differences between Australian and New Zealand culture are relatively trivial - different accents, different words for certain things. You get the same differences between Australian states, albeit to a more limited degree.
However, there is one big difference: over 17% of New Zealand’s population have Indigenous (Māori) ancestry, and Māori have a common language and a great deal of common culture-leading to a significant Māori influence on mainstream NZ culture. Australia’s Indigenous peoples are less than 4% of the population, and divided among numerous languages and nations, which means their impact on mainstream Australian culture has been significantly smaller.
> Britain and Scotland?
One way in which the US is very homogeneous is that state politics aren’t particularly distinctive from national politics. Every state is the same two parties facing off against each other, the main political difference between states is the relative power of the two. Whereas, each of the UK’s four constituent countries have different party systems - the SNP only exists in Scotland, Plaid Cymru only exists in Wales, the major parties in Northern Ireland are different from those in the rest of the UK. Spain, Canada, India and Italy are other examples of countries in which region-specific parties are big players in politics. The only real example in the US are territories such as Puerto Rico, and if Puerto Rico ever became a state, it would likely start converging with the American political monoculture.
Politics isn’t the same thing as culture, but political culture is part of culture, and greater political diversity is generally both a symptom of and simultaneously a promoter of greater cultural diversity.
That's my point--just because places speak the same language doesn't mean they're culturally the same. Australia's response to COVID lockdowns versus America's is highly illustrative as well.
> One way in which the US is very homogeneous is that state politics aren’t particularly distinctive from national politics. Every state is the same two parties facing off against each other, the main political difference between states is the relative power of the two
American politics isn't homogenous at all--that's just an artifact of political narratives being filtered through mass media in New York City. To use your abortion example (because I agree politics is an expression of culture): black people in Georgia are overwhelmingly Democrats, while white people are overwhelmingly Republicans. But there is no racial difference on the question of abortion: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu.... Stacey Abrams, who grew up in Mississippi and Georgia (Atlanta), was always a democrat, but grew up opposed to abortion: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/women-rule/2022/09/23/s.... If the Democratic Party wasn't run by New York and California liberals and donors, Georgia Democrats would moderate on the abortion issue (because as a practical matter you don't want to play up issues that split your own voting bloc).
By contrast, Republicans west of the rockies are quite liberal on abortion due to a strong libertarian streak. Western Republicans tipped the scales to the social liberal side on key cultural issues in the past few decades. Reagan legalized abortion in California. Nixon and Reagan were California Republicans who appointed a bunch of Supreme Court Justices like Harry Blackmun (who wrote Roe). O'Connor (who wrote Casey) is from Arizona and was appointed by Reagan. Kennedy (who wrote Obergefell) is from California and was appointed by Reagan. Gorsuch (who wrote Bostock) is from Colorado.
Yes that's true. But I compare different Australian states – yes there are cultural differences even there, but they are pretty minor. If I compare US states – I'd say somewhat bigger cultural differences than between Australian states, for a bunch of reasons.
But still, my impression is, the cultural differences between US states aren't really that big by global standards. If you ranked countries by degree of internal cultural diversity, the US wouldn't be at the very bottom of the list, but it would be a long way from the top – I'd even say closer to the bottom than the top.
In some other countries, you have state/province/regional nationalist movements. Hard nationalists want their state/province/region to be an independent country – such as the Scottish National Party or Parti Québécois. You also have soft nationalists, who don't ask for independence, but seek greater autonomy while staying in the federation – such as Quebec's current ruling party, Coalition Avenir Québec; or the former ruling party of India's Punjab state, Shiromani Akali Dal. The US has a few state-based nationalist movements, but they've never been remotely mainstream, none of them have ever controlled a statehouse or a Governor's mansion. The existence of (practically significant) regional nationalism is a sign of greater interregional cultural difference, so countries which have it (such as Belgium, Canada, India, Spain, the UK) generally have significantly greater internal cultural diversity than those which lack it (such as Australia or the US).
> American politics isn't homogenous at all--that's just an artifact of political narratives being filtered through mass media in New York City. To use your abortion example (because I agree politics is an expression of culture):
Okay, but on the other hand that actually is an example of American politics being homogenous – because the whole country is arguing about the same things, of which abortion is a big one. Compare that to the UK – the Protocol is arguably the biggest political issue in Northern Ireland politics at the moment, in England it is a lot further down the list of people's concerns. A never-ending political debate in Quebec is about how to balance the promotion of the French language with the rights of the Anglophone minority – a topic that isn't very interesting to the average person in British Columbia.
Your example is just that in some parts of the US, the national abortion debate doesn't neatly line up with the two national parties. Meanwhile other countries have completely different debates in different parts of the country, and even completely different party systems in different parts of the country. All are examples of diversity, but your example is a little bit of diversity compared to other countries which have a lot lot more.
Also, your point about "mass media in New York City" is another example of homogeneity – US media is very centralised, national, tends to focus on national narratives more than regionally specific ones – that media homogeneity is both a symptom and a cause of cultural homogeneity. The BBC has its own division for Scotland – many people in Scotland (especially nationalists) complain that BBC Scotland is too London-focused and doesn't provide enough coverage of Scotland's own politics and culture – but even if those complaints are valid, no doubt it is doing a much better job of being regionally-focused than the US media does.
But there are good reasons other than those to hope the states evolve towards more autonomy. The US political system at the federal level is fundamentally broken, making it incapable of governing the country. Due to a combination of factors: first-past-the-post voting, skewed representation in the senate, media polarization, the filibuster, and others, it is unique among supposed democracies in allowing small minority factions to effectively veto any mildly controversial legislation.
Because meaningfully modifying the constitution is functionally impossible, these issues simply can’t be fixed. But luckily, that isn’t true at the state level! Most states still are functioning, if imperfect, democracies, as evidenced by the very thing we’re discussing in this thread: they’re capable of changing policy in response to changing needs and wishes of the population, in a way that the federal level simply isn’t.
It's mostly unenforced on the individual basis, but it is a huge aspect of the legal markets. Being able to do business across the entire country is a very large factor in USA's economic success. Removing the federal criminal laws on cannabis will remove this and many other inefficiencies of the cannabis industry.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/Politics/story?id=4577105&page...
It's not that simple and not everyone agrees with the above statement. Harm reduction is not really emphasized with marijuana, yet it's increasingly necessary as concentrations increase. "Everything in moderation" seems to have been forgotten in that case.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9462911/
Orange man took notice, but he's wrong about everything, so carry on.
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/trump-suggests-genetically-e...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/mass-shootings-...
> While many mass shooters had mental-health problems, as the Mother Jones data shows, there is no reason to believe that there has been an increase in mental illness rates in the last several years that could help explain the rise in mass shootings. (In fact, federal research on the prevalence of severe mental illness shows a decrease in recent years.)
You can't rule out these things when you consider that delta-8-thc has only been found in noticeable amounts in marijuana since 2010 or so. That particular compound has been known to cause psychosis, which can cause other long-term cascading mental illness.
As a drug supporter I'm sure you've heard of the concept of a "bad batch"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987131/table/T...
(Quick genuflection for the potentially offended: I am pro abortion rights at the national level, but I think they should be implemented properly, i.e. through Congress, because a precedent of improperly implemented legal standards threatens the entire democratic system).
Hemp and marijuana are the same species, so the 2018 farm bill just defines "hemp" as a cannabis plant with less than 0.3% delta 9 THC by weight. So some enterprising folks decided to take these low-THC hemp plants, extract the THC from them, and put them into gummies. Since the gummies still need to be < 0.3% THC, they are just slightly larger gummies than "normal" marijuana gummies, but they're not gargantuan or anything, and they come in pretty standard 10-20mg per gummy doses.
I live in a state that has hardly any legal marijuana (there is some medical but only for very limited conditions like epilepsy, and it's strictly enforced, unlike in some other states where anyone saying "my back hurts" can get prescription), and you can go into a well lit, clean CBD store in a strip mall on a major street where friendly employees will happily sell you these D9 gummies.
IIRC Florida (ahh, Florida) was trying to close this loophole by limiting the total amount of THC in any single package, but not sure where that went.
There are sometimes cases where laws that go unenforced for a long time can eventually become unenforceable. I wonder if this could happen federally to normal marijuana possession. The legal principle is called desuetude.
The next battleground will be abortion rights. If republicans fulfill their goals of banning abortion and birth control the next time that they control the government, watch blue states refuse to enforce those laws and refuse to cooperate with federal authorities.
We shouldn't really care about the President, because their real influence on our lives would be minimal. As Marijuana shows, it's much easier to affect policy at the state level than Federal, and states would ostensibly spend the tax revenue on things that benefit their direct constituents, rather than being so disconnected from real issues that vast sums of money flows to causes that most taxpayers don't understand or care about.
Furthermore, the much lower level of oversight in states lead to more extreme, low quality decisions, often which end up with people less happy than with national level decisions. See abortion: Leaving the decision to the states led to fewer people being happy with the laws they had, instead of more. This isn't because there aren't plenty of people that want very strong abortion restrictions, but because state lawmakers in states with Republican legislative majorities are far to the right of not just the median voter of their state, but even the median Republican. Similar things can occur in blue states. And how are legislators acting when they see voter-driven referendums to change legislation? By passing laws demanding 60%+ of the popular vote to overrule the legislature.
You also talk about politicians disconnected from real issues: When I look at the laws my state representatives try to pass recently, they are either not clear 50% of the popular opinion, or focus on key things like, say, legislating high school athletics for trans students. Given that the fact that they know which part of the state votes in favor of the majority of legislators, and which parts don't, how do you think they spend the money? That's right, the parts of the state that don't vote correctly don't get anywhere near the level of investment that matches their contributions to the state coffers. After all, making sure there are fewer people living in those places is a sure way to maintain control of the state government in the long term.
So while I am not unsympathetic to the idea of more local government, States are such a poor example of 'laboratories of democracy' that in a majority of cases, the federal government works less badly. Marijuana is the rare case where things happen to work out.
It does not work when one state wants to keep slavery legal.
Like everything, a balance needs to be made.
But also Congress has forbid the federal government from spending to interfere with state medical marijuana laws, which federal courts have (with slight variations in details between the Circuit Courts) ruled prohibits not only direct actions against states, but also prosecutions of private parties for acts consistent with (and, in at least one Circuit, even in technical violation of) state medical marijuana laws. While this does not cover non-medical use, it does put a significant practical “asterisk” to the idea that marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US.
> It’s fascinating, however, that under three presidents spanning both parties, the federal authorities have given up on enforcing the ban in states that have removed marijuana laws from their own books.
That would be quite interesting, but nothing like that has actually happened. The reason we have a conflict in circuits on the scope of the funding restrictions is that the feds have continued to prosecute marijuana violations, even in states which have legalized some or all marijuana use, and even for acts which are closely connected to those states medical-use rules. (The First Circuit decision on the scope of the prohibition is from 2022.)
It sounds like people are realizing it's an old, useless battle to fight against marijuana legalization. Finally.
It is hard when you have little kids and the air is filled with the smell.
Edit: And that number even includes people who have used it "at least once", so the number of regular/habitual users would be lower than that.
But cannabis itself turning us into a nation of locust eaters? Laughable.
Yeah, it may well be less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol, but if you're smoking it, it's certainly not good for you. Why give people this specific freedom while the trend is to take freedoms away? (Tax revenue, I guess...)