Addendum: One more point: Paraphrasing, someone said the Feds don’t go around arresting people on street corners. Maybe not the casual user. But, the Feds do bust crack houses, right? So, they COULD raid major marijuana growers property (with the proper warrants), right? Maybe the Feds just don’t bother - having larger fish to fry?
The ICC mentioned in this thread is an in-group reference to the Interstate Commerce clause of the US constitution. Which is the fig leaf the Feds hide behind when they want to extend their remit beyond the topics a couple dozen late 1700s farmers had thought of.
IMO its a darn good thing there are at least some elastic clauses in the Constitution or we’d already be irrelevant as a world power, limited as we would be to just what the farmers (spelling deliberate) thought a weak government of an isolated agrarian society should be.
TIWAAIAB.
(This is why acronyms and initialisms are bad.)
If you ski in Colorado, you have probably noticed that smoking weed in the park is not allowed and if caught will result in you losing your ski passes, and yes it is enforced by the resorts that run the ski operations. You first might think why would a company worry about enforcing a policy to prevent weed use in their park, especially in Colorado.
Most of the property that the ski operations lease is Federal land and in those leases there is a requirement for the leaseholder must not violate any laws or regulations, specifically Federal law. The ski operators don’t want to be in violation of their lease with the Federal government, so they enforce the “No Weed” rules on their property.
I suspect they don’t allow alcohol consumption outside of the lodge area either. It’s really not in a corporations interest to allow blatantly drunken/high people participating in high risk activities. Of course individual users do ignore the rules a lot, but if they get caught it moves liability for their action onto them.
I’ve never seen that enforced. Nor are there signs indicating its prohibition. Many people carry flasks with them on the slopes.
yes - the feds have made the argument that for example, drugs grown in one state very likely cross state boundaries later, thus asserting they have the right to control that activity. For a long time, the Supreme Court has accepted this argument, which is why when it was excluded as a validation of the Affordable Care Act it was surprising. (I.e. they didn’t buy that “people without health care may cross state lines to get better rates or impose themselves uninsured on hospitals, etc.”)
IIRC from some discussions I saw, the federal money allocated has to be specific for that purpose. For example, they would withhold highway funds from states that didn’t impose the 55mph speed limit back when that came into effect. I think the same logic was used to make states put the drinking age to 21, arguing the high DUI rates. The funds were only for states that used those funds in the manner the government prescribed, not funds in general. But (I’m guessing) they couldn’t withhold Medicare or agricultural funding if the speed limit was too high… So I guess the question is, what federal funding would be even peripherally related to drug laws? Money to support local police and law enforcement?
No more tanks and automatic weapons for East Bumfuck Police Department.
Reminds me of me ride up in a Gondola at Park City many years ago. Two young guys shared the car and part way up they asked if we had a problem with them sparking up. “Nah, go right ahead”. We got to talking and it turns out they were lift operators at the same resort. Off duty, I assumed, as they weren’t in company garb.
Also, I recently purchased some hemp-derived THC 9 drink enhancer. The info on the web site said it was perfectly legal under a loophole in the law having to to with THC percentage by weight or something. They had no problem shipping it via US mail. While I have very limited experience with edibles, it seemed to work as advertised. A much more experienced cannabis user agreed.
That is why you buy the booze, and go into the state and come back on a different route. Not drive direct to and then home.
Much easier in some smaller northeastern states than in the underpopulated Midwest and Plains.
e.g. there are relatively few border crossings between NV & CA even though they share a border almost 500 miles long. Taking a different route home might well be a day’s drive.
Fortunately at that particular interstate border there are no big legal differences as to contraband. One can gamble in NV or buy lottery tickets in CA, and bars are open different hours, but beyond that there’s not much you can legally do in one place, bring home to the other, and be in trouble for so doing.
IME/IIRC there are not brothels near the border crossings. Which discovery surprised me when I lived in Las Vegas. But even so, I don’t think you can be busted in CA for having visited a brothel in NV.
When my son was young, we’d go on an adventure drive from western Pennsylvania into eastern Ohio where all kinds of fireworks could be purchased. He knew what we were doing wasn’t legal and so he’d keep an eye out for po-po…
We’d buy our fireworks, then drive around for awhile. Stop somewhere for lunch and to rearrange the contraband under the quilt I brought along. All that for some bottle-rockets, black-cats, and m80s.
Depends - if they are really sitting in State A watching people go into the the (liquor, fireworks whatever ) store in State B and then busting them when they return to State A , the store must be very close to the border. And therefore, it might not be necessary to cross back at a different place - driving further into State B for 10 or 20 minutes and then turning around will do well enough if they are watching the store’s parking lot.
True.
But OTOH we’ve heard here and read in the news about the Kansas state police / highway patrol simply sitting along the eastbound highway leading from Colorado and pulling over cars more or less at random hoping to find marijuana legally bought in Colorado. Oddly they seemed to favor scruffier-looking cars with non-KS plates driven by scruffier-looking drivers. Local county Sherriff’s departments apparently got in on the act too.
As more states have legalized weed this is less of a thing than it once was. But back when Colorado was a pioneer in legal weed, this was quite a risk factor to out-of-state purchasers.
All the delay and driving around on the CO side of the border you’d care to do would be no protection for this KS police tactic.
It’s legality or lack of same is not an issue while you’re by the roadside. And IMO not a topic to explore in this thread. But certainly a worthwhile one.
Prostitution is legal in Nevada, but not in all its counties. Notably, it’s not legal in Clark County (Las Vegas) or Washoe County (Reno) where all the important border crossings are. (95% or more of the prostitutes in Nevada are in Clark and Washoe Counties, but that’s irrelevant.)
There’s a similar issue in Las Vegas casinos. Recreational marijuana is legal in Las Vegas, but the Casinos will not let you consume it inside the casino or in your hotel room. I think they just simply don’t want to give the feds any reason to go snooping around.
I imagine it’s actually enforced pretty strictly inside the hotel/casino, but several times when I was outside having a cigarette* I smelled weed being smoked. I was jealous-ish, but I was there for work, and didn’t want to cause any undue risk for myself.
*While you can smoke in the casino in Vegas, smoking cigarettes inside just seems weird now.
Yeah, the bridges between hotels are prime areas for smoking weed. The wind blows the smoke away rapidly, so there isn’t any lingering miasma, and there’s just enough time for everybody to get a puff or two before you are completely across.
That’s how the Feds forced the states to raise the drinking age to 21. The Feds said they’d withhold highway funds if a state did not raise the drinking age.
eta: I see @md-2000 has already mentioned this.
That really isn’t a matter of states enforcing Federal law- there was no Federal law that actually set the speed limit at 55 , just a law that said states that didn’t set that limit would lose highway funds. Same for drinking age - states where it was legal to purchase ( not consume) alcoholic beverages 21 would lose highway funds. Those Federal law require states to enact laws to receive the highway funds - but the states are enacting and enforcing state laws, not federal.
It may seem like a distinction without a difference but there are two reasons for it. One is that the Federal government has no authority to regulate alcohol as the Twenty-first Amendment (repeal of Prohibition) has been interpreted to give that right to the states and whether the Feds have the authority to set speed limits is questionable. The second is exactly what’s being discussed here - state and local authorities cannot be made to enforce Federal law. It’s all well and good for the Feds to set a national 55 mile per hour speed limit or a national drinking age of 21- but those laws do no good if they aren’t enforced and the aren’t enough Federal agents to enforce them.
If state and local law enforcement could be made to enforce Federal laws, the Feds just would have made those laws itself rather than coming up with a solution under which Montana can allow 10 year olds to buy alcohol and have no speed limit whatsoever as long as they don’t mind losing highway funds.
SCOTUS disagrees with you. If selling your neighbor a lid of Colorado Tabaccy could affect the price of corn in Iowa, Wickard v Filburn says the Feds can regulate it.
OK technically Wickard might not say that directly, but it did start the stretching of the ICC to include many intrastate transactions.