Two questions:
A) I hear (some) schools in KY will allow minors to smoke if their parents give consent. This is no UL! My good friend’s relatives are experiencing this policy first-hand!
B) NV wants to legalize the use of small quantities of marijuana per person per day, I WAG? Not sure over what time period.
But…how is all this possible when Fed Regs prohibit such things? Is it as simple as like those states who did not comply with the (former) 55mph rule on the Interstates?
Very odd…
The Feds can prosecute if they want… but it might be politically expedient to just look the other way… at least for a while, if the polls favor these state laws. Take a look at the medical marijana laws in California.
According to the Fourteenth Amendment, Federal laws trump state laws. Period. The Federal Government might decide not to prosecute, but that is simply a political expedience and not indicative of any state’s rights. In short, the Feds can come down as hard as they want, any time they want, and nobody can say otherwise.
This is somewhat counterbalanced by the Tenth Amendment, which reserves all powers not explicitly granted the Federal Government to the states or the individual citizens. But since the Federal Government already has drug laws, and since the SCotUS hasn’t judged them unconstitutional yet, I don’t think a valid legal defense could turn on that point.
The Federal Government: All your base are belong to them.
Sounds like a good policy to me. But wait, there’s a federal law against underage smoking?
A quick Google search turned up some references to a federal law that prohibits selling tobacco to minors, but I couldn’t find anything about possession.
With respect to question (A), as mentioned, there probably are no federal laws concerning minors smoking tobaco.
In situation (B), it’s simple–today, toking up in Nevada violates both state and federal law. Either jurisdiction can prosecute you. If Nevada would have approved legalization, then it would no longer be against state law. It would still be against federal law. Since the federal government doesn’t have nearly as many agents or cops on the street, you would have been relatively safe toking up in Nevada. But not completely safe–as some California medical marijuana users have found out.
With respect to the 55 mph speed limit, Congress required states to adopt it as state law as a condition for receiving federal highway funds. Since states didn’t want to forego the money, they all complied. Obviously, however, some states were less than enthusiastic about enforcing it.
As a Kentucky born and bred 19 year old, I can assure you: no one in Kentucky gives a flip about underage smoking. This doesn’t really surprise me, even though I hadn’t heard it before. We have the 2nd lowest cigarette tax in the country for a reason: Kentucky is a tobacco state, and we don’t care who uses it.
(Note: I am not, nor have I ever been, an official representative of any state agency. I speak only from personal observation and experience. Only one person has ever ID’d me when buying cigs, and that was after I moved to Lexington.)
-brianjedi
jklann: In the old days in Montana, the fine for speeding was five bucks. You could pay the officer in cash on the spot. People kept fivers for just such occasions.
Of course, then came the `reasonable and prudent’ experiment. People were shocked – shocked – that going 120 coming into a big town was neither reasonable nor prudent. Even during that time, there were posted limits for night driving.
Now there are posted limits for all driving.
The trick is that Federal laws generally can’t regulate what an individual does like state laws can (there’s no Federal statute against murder, for example), but the Federal government can regulate interstate commerce. IIRC most of the Federal drug laws are phrased in terms of prohibiting someone from engaging in doing stuff with drugs that in some way crossed state lines, and are generally geared towards distributors and not individuals. That means that if Nevada legalizes pot, there might not be a federal statute to convict someone under even if the DEA wants to - they can grow it at home and distribute it only within the state. The feds can’t arrest someone without a law to do it, and can’t directly force the state to pass the laws they want. What they can do, though, is cut off various forms of support - federal monies to the state can be cut, DEA licenses can be cut for doctors who prescribe marijuana (those licenses are needed for other controlled drugs), and other forms of federal aid can suddenly disappear.
That’s what happened with the 21 drinking age; the feds just tied highway improvement money to setting the age to 21 and eventually most (or all? I forget) states shifted to it because they don’t like being cut out. State laws still have exceptions, though - a large number of states make exemptions to the 21 drinking age for religious ceremonies and/or parents providing alcohol to their own kids. What exactly would happen with marijuana legalization is anyone’s guess, since there’s more and more support for various types of legalization and ultimately the people making the decisions are elected.
Under accepted Interstate Commerce jurisprudence, the fact that the MJ is grown, distributed and consumed wholly within a single state probably would NOT strip the federal government of jurisdiction. A drug trade in one state could (and probably would) have effects on the economy of neighboring states and, as such, is regulable at the federal level.
I agree that at some point MJ might be federally decriminalized as popular support grown throughout the nation, but until then, the use or cultivation of MJ is illegal anywhere in the United States for any reason, even if it’s legal in the particular state the toker happens to be standing in.
I also agree with above posters that there is no federal law prohibiting sale of tobacco to minors; rather, there are fifty state laws doing so. There are federal regulations as to the advertisement of tobacco to minors, but again, that is justifiable as tobacco advertising has effects on interstate commerce.
–Cliffy