Nevada marijuana legalization gets official OK for 2016 ballot
thecannabist.co
thecannabist.co
1) There's no mention of tourism in that article. Vegas seems like a natural fit for marijuana legalization, as a party destination, and while I don't have hard data on this, I do wonder if they are/fear seeing a negative impact on tourism as people seek out more "green friendly" destinations.
2) The utter lack of surprise about this. Another state legalizing/decriminalizing marijuana, ho hum, whatevs. The issue has reached the point where it feels inevitable. That's still a bit shocking for me (in a good way).
I don't mean to equate the substance of the issue, but in my mind it feels similar to the march of progress on marriage equality (AKA "gay marriage"). They're both areas where I've long thought our society needed obvious reforms, but as the years marched by, I began to expect not to see any substantive changes in my life.
Now I sit here in my 30's, and by the time my daughter is an adult (~15 years), she'll live in a society where (probably/hopefully) most states have some form of marriage equality and marijuana is at least decriminalized. That is amazing to me.
P.S. For those who think it trivializes marriage equality to compare it to marijuana legalization, I'll remind you that this issue isn't about making it easier for people to get high. It's about the millions of lives hurt by a drug arrest, over 11,0000,000 arrests for marijuana possession from 1996-2012 – and the unequal enforcement of drug laws. For example, in California, a black person is 10 times more likely to serve prison time for a marijuana arrest than a non-black offender. And across the US, black offenders are 3.7 times more likely than white offenders to be arrested for possession. Even ignoring the unequal enforcement, about 12% of prisoners are serving time due to a marijuana-related offense. So yeah, it's kind of a big deal.
Welcome to the majority of developed countries on the planet now.
One day, you might even see universal healthcare!
* Uruguay
* Portugal
As anonbanker noticed, Uruguay is where it is legal. Another one - North Korea. The rest of places are either sorta-legal, or "decriminalized", which often still come with fines or some kind of pressure from the law.
I am not sure if I am willing to say that legalization is an inevitability yet though.
Same-sex marriage is but a small part in the deceptively named "marriage equality". All people will be doing is playing whack-a-mole for decades (or likely longer) until all non-standard marriage configurations are finally enshrined into law. This is when they could simply privatize it and recognize marriage for what it is - a business/economic contract, and have marriage equality happen now.
While these numbers are prtty shocking, when you look at WHY this is happening, it's pretty obvious why the numbers are so skewed.
Generally speaking cops tend to focus on high crime areas, which tend to be where low income, minority residents live. As such, the odds you're going to stop someone who's black and poor who just happens to have some weed on them grows exponentially.
Add in other issues like COMSTAT tracking and making police departments more accountable for their the cost of their resources to tax payers. They also have to prove they are indeed lowering crime means they're almost forced to arrest and convict low level offenders to prove they're doing their jobs. This then makes departments institute arrest quotas, and questionable tactics like stop-and-frisk.
The last point is also the federal government and their grants they give to high performing departments. If you're department is on the dole for federal money, you think they're going to do anything which would jeopardize that? The very nature of taking federal money makes them do anything to make it look like the tax payers money is doing some good.
All of these make the low-income minorities very susceptible to being arrested and then convicted by a system which is very much stacked against them.
What do you call a justice system that catches two people in the same 'illegal' act but only one of has their life ruined? Certainly not just.
Depending on the state, it costs over 20,000/yr and sometimes over 40,000 to house each inmate, state's tried to solve this problem by contracting out to private prison complexes, and often they would give the private companies large tax deals and even free or heavily subsidized land. Of course these private companies do what every private company does, took the generous offers from the state and plowed more money into politics to get even more generous offers, better deals, more pay, and more business.
Incident #1 - I was a suburban kid who had a lot of friends who lived in the inner city when I was in high school (mainly from sports) and with whom I hung out a lot with. We got pulled over (2 black kids, and me, the white kid) on Chicago's North side. My buddies had smoked a joint before they picked me up. Cop smelled the weed, asked us if we had been smoking. We all confessed we had. WHITE cop searched all of us and asked if we had any on us. My BLACK friend said he had a few joints and handed them over. WHITE cop took the weed and wrote us a ticket for expired tabs (why he pulled us over) and gave us a lecture on why drugs are bad and thanked us for being honest and not lying to him. This doesn't jive with your assertion. If it did, my black friends would've been arrested and convicted and I would've been sent on my way.
Incident #2 - I was with friends from my suburban school. There were four of us. Three white and one black guy. We were in a park sharing a joint. Cop rolls up and we don't have time to scatter. BLACK cop gets out and starts telling us we're in the park after hours. We say, "ok" and agree we should leave. Cop grabs my white friend and says he smells like weed. Cop tells us all to sit down and starts asking us questions. Who has the weed (none of us, we already smoked the joint) where the drugs were, etc. My white friend finally says we just smoked a joint and its gone and we were just talking. BLACK cop starts harassing my buddy since he recognizes him from the Varsity football team, telling him he could kicked off the team, he knows his parents etc. We all stayed cool and eventually the cop let us go without any fines and told us to stay out of the park after hours. If your assertion was correct, my BLACK friend would have been arrested and convicted of possession, but he wasn't.
Incident #3 - In college, I used to hang out a lot with the guys on the basketball team since my best friend was black and I was freshman. I was really into hip hop so the guys let me roll with them. It also didn't hurt I was from a Chicago suburb. We were in the dorm room smoking weed off of a bong, there were three players, myself and some other white guy I didn't know (I found out later he was their dealer). Get a knock at the door, go answer it and its the RA with three City Cops in tow. The RA could smell the weed, and instead of confronting us, called the cops who were now standing at our door, asking to come in. We let them in and right away he starts harassing the black guys. I'm thinking, "Ok here we go." and after grilling us about who was smoking the weed, where it was and not to lie to him, we finally confessed to smoking some weed in the bong. I handed the bong over, but the cop now wanted to know where the weed was. I had no idea who had it since I answered the door, and no one was coming forward. The cop then said he's going to call in the K-9 and whoever it alerts on is going to get arrested. The white dude says its his weed and produces a small bag with barely anything in it. RA says he's not a resident so the cop tells him was arresting him for possession and asked him several times to confirm it was his weed and he said it was. The rest of us got written up and put on probation for the rest of the quarter and were a lot more careful in the future. Again, had your assertion been accurate, my BLACK friends would have been arrested and myself and the dealer would have walked away without any trouble.
Also, its no wonder you didn't put in any actual data in your "private prison" debate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#In_the_United_St...
"The US Department of Justice statistics show that, as of 2013, there were 133,000 state and federal prisoners housed in privately owned prisons in the US, constituting 8.4% of the overall U.S. prison population.[12] Broken down to prison type, 19.1% of the federal prison population in the United States is housed in private prisons and 6.8% of the U.S. state prison population is housed in federal prisons"
While your assertion is true many of these companies seek profits from their endeavors, the numbers still seem relatively small in comparison to saying 80% of the prison population is still being housed by state and federal facilities. Also, compared to other countries, even prisoners in Super Max facilities have better perks than their counter parts in South America, Europe, Africa and Russia.
Say it takes 5 years? Could happen!
I think it will go more quickly for economic "land grab" type reasons. Those who move early will gain advantages over those who move later. I know Oregon was thinking growth in industry right along with savings from unproductive corrections.
In that kind of scenario, movements are very highly likely to form to do release advocacy. Some States may be active about it too. I suspect Oregon will do this once the law is settled and working.
Like many of us, pot has always been part of the underground culture, associated with serious trouble.
Now that it's normalizing rapidly where I live, I see many of us just sort of in a state of wonder. Very soon, it's going to be perfectly ordinary to have a BBQ or some other basic social event and see people light a few up, talk, code, game, whatever, and doing that will be as OK as drinking is.
Strange and wonderful times we live in.
the NRA was an elaborate way to milk money from gun owners whilst sabotaging the overall movement. I can't help but think NORML is the exact same thing from their track record.
Personally, I think there's a lot of interesting startups that will be enabled by legalization of marijuana...if you can't see the opportunities for tech in a burgeoning multibillion dollar industry...well...I dunno. I think it's an interesting change in the world; the kind that entrepreneurs love to spot early.