It’s not effectively legal in California, or anywhere. In 16 states the criminal penalty for personal use, not in public, no sales, no consumption by those under 21, no driving… is a parking ticket. In New York, where it has been decriminalized for 34 years, the police will coax people they believe have marijuana into showing to the police (so they will get their ticket), and then the police arrest the users on public display charges. Completely ridiculous.
Legalization is when it is regulated and sold to the general public.
Very creepy. Consider the fact that the Drug Czar is the one who controls the drug policy. Thus, the official position of the United States is that no drugs may studied for possible legalization for any reason, if at some previous date, they were scheduled and controlled for an arbitrary and not scientifically valid reason.
Thanks for the cite.
It gets even creepier if you read the reasons for particular drugs going illegal. For example, ecstasy… The government was unable to find literally any reason that it was dangerous, and so they conducted a study where they fed monkeys hundreds of ecstasy pills a day, and then concluded that it caused minor brain damage.
I dunno about that. That’s what we Atari-wave Gen Xers thought back in the early 1980s. “Once the Boomers, who all spent the entire 60s smoking pot, get control of the government, it’ll be legal”. The hit movie *Poltergeist *showed the parents lighting up after the kids went to bed, and it was rated PG. Pot songs were on the radio - “Light Up”, “Smoke Two Joints”, “Pass the Dutchie”. Cheech & Chong were box office stars. We thought legalization was just around the corner. Instead, we got Nancy’s “Just Say No”, Douglas Ginsburg was forced to withdraw his name from consideration for the Supreme Court because he liked to toke, and presidential candidates had to inanely insist they didn’t inhale or write it off as “youthful indiscretions”.
30 years later, after the boomers have been in power for 20, nothing has changed, other than the medical mj back door opening. As long as politicians can get votes being “tough on crime”, nothing will change. As recently as 16 months ago (November 2010) the “super-liberal-hippy-dippy” California voters rejected legalization 53.5%-46.5%. Even Humboldt county, home to most of the crop, rejected it, although it’s speculated that rejection there had to do with keeping the price up. Heaviest opposition came from the Central Valley and Inland Empire, both notorious centers for meth production.
Perhaps, but please give me some statistics showing popular support.
It looks like back in your day, maybe marijuana use was accepted, but it certainly was not supported by popular opinion. Just as reference,
1970: 12% for, 84% against
2012: 50% for, 46% against
And it’s been a steady increase since then.
And what legal steps forward were made? New York decriminalized it and I don’t know if Alaska ever criminalized it. But there was no widespread popular support for legalization like there is now.
I don’t think it has to do with who is in government but has more to do with popular support, trends, and the introduction of it as a medicine.
I think the effort to legalize marijuana needs a “Nixon goes to China” moment if it’s ever going to get anywhere. There has to be an elected conservative non-libertarian Republican of some gravitas who will openly advocate the legalization of marijuana (or at least the loosening of federal control over the drug in favor of the states and localities) and not end up getting smacked down at the polls. Granted, there are non-libertarian conservatives who support legalization or decriminalization but they don’t hold any elected office. (Ron Paul doesn’t count because he’s a libertarian.) There are also elected officials like Barney Frank who support legalization or decriminalization but they’re liberal Democrats who come from heavily liberal districts. I realize this may be a tall order but I don’t see any serious progress on this issue until this happens.
And there is no reason for this to happen. It’s easy enough to get and casual users face very little threat consequences of using. It’s not a serious civil rights matter like same sex marriage. Why would anyone want to die on that hill?
Quite true. The fact that this issue still ranks low on the priority list of even most social liberals is another reason why I think legalization and decriminalization supporters are in for a long wait. It’s like normalization of diplomatic relations and trade with Cuba. A significant number–if not an outright majority–of Americans think this is something that should be done but the issue isn’t important enough to press for.
Incidentally, which one of these things do you think is going to happen first:
Legalization or decriminalization of federal marijuana laws; or
Normalization of diplomatic relations and trade with Cuba?
My recollection is that decriminalization and legalization in various places has not been shown to have any major impact on the number of users. So Doritos is already milking that particular cow.
Think back to 1992, and how huge a deal it was when Bill Clinton revealed that he once experimented with pot, but “didn’t inhale.” It was something that threatened to derail his campaign.
Fast forward 16 years. Barack Obama has not only admitted to using marijuana and cocaine, but wrote about it in his autobiography. Yet his past drug use barely made a ripple during the campaign. Even the right wing, who happily hammered him on his every other indiscretion, both real and perceived, hardly mentioned it. In fact I think it was one of Hillary Clinton’s big gripes during the primaries that year, that stories about his drug use failed to gain any traction in the media.
For many people under 60 these days, smoking pot in college really isn’t seen as anything more than a youthful indiscretion, if not a right of passage. But it takes awhile for these attitudes to translate into legislative action. As others have mentioned, it’s really not a battle worth fighting right now, and in today’s cutthroat political environment it’s a good way to get yourself tarnished as being soft on crime.
But I suspect that to change over the next decade as the electorate becomes more diverse, and the younger generations gain more power.
Barney Frank has long been a supporter of this kind of thing. Wikipedia quotes, “In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government’s business. We should make criminal what’s going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.” A position I wholly agree with in a number of ways, not just related to drugs.