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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

OK I'll keep disagreeing. It's legal here.

It's de facto legal for someone to smoke a joint at Venice Beach, but you can still get arrested for possession in a national park, lose your job for smoking over the weekend, and even get your cash civil forfeiture'd by local police for running a dispensary in a way that is compliant with CA but not federal laws.

> It's de facto legal for someone to smoke a joint at Venice Beach

Well it's completely* legal to smoke it at home.

https://sonomacounty.ca.gov/health-and-human-services/health....

* More or less

Perhaps an explanation of why you can only buy it with cash would be helpful here.

It’s illegal in every state. California cannot override the federal government. They can choose not to enforce it, but federal law enforcement will still be able to arrest you.

...and the federal government can't override California*, unless they want to break a whole lot of eggshells to make their omelette

* completely, of course they can here and there and not vice versa. But this asymmetry doesn't render it illegal IMO.

Legality has nothing to do with enforcement. We can say that X Y or Z is illegal according to the laws of the Roman Empire, despite the fact that it hasn’t been able to enforce anything for more than 1000 years. Similarly, weed is illegal in the US — whether it’s unenforced because the feds choose not to do so, or because they can’t, is perhaps an interesting question but has nothing to do with whether it’s legal.

When I disagreed with "California cannot override the federal government." I didn't mean to override their law on a theoretical level but their authority on a practical level.

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).

> Sanctuary cities have shown that the state/local governments partially override the federal government on an overall basis

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”.

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