A bit overcast and quiet this early Wednesday on California’s north coast as we reach mid-week work style.
There’s just way-too-many days between Monday and Friday.
And speaking of ganja, especially up here in the pot-growing center of the entire universe, a bunch of well-respected economic brainiacs have called for the eternally-foolish, 40-year-old drug war to end: “The pursuit of a militarized and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage.”
No shit, Cheech, and hand me the bong, Chung.
The 82-page report, released this week by the London School of Economics’ IDEAS center and endorsed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists, attempts to reconcile a horrible idea with a shift for world governments to their shit from prosecutions and prisons to common sense — and the growing wave of change in the realm of marijuana. A recent Pew poll showed 67 percent of Americans desire drug laws to change, and of course, there’s Washington state and Colorado, where the whole whole anti-pot scheme has collapsed.
The whole report (pdf) is found here.
Yet one must remember there are still assholes.
Especially, the cash-proud war-machine like the DEA, which will ignore the whole shebang and keep busting people until there’s no busting left — spark that doobie, you waylaid asshole, and you goin’ to jail.
Last month, the DEA told President Obama, the above-mentioned brainiacs, and anyone with walking-around sense, to fuck off!
Despite the reality:
Well, the clock’s ticking on Drug Enforcement Administration Chief Michele Leonhart.
She’s saying her anti-marijuana agency is “fighting back” against White House instructions to focus on heroin and OxyContin deaths, and leave alone lawful cannabis activity in Colorado and Washington.
“[President Obama’s instructions] make us fight harder”, Leonhart told a House Appropriations subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies today (April 2).
The meeting was not webcasted, but Dan Riffle with the Marijuana Policy Project wrote us that Leonhart also lied to Congress, stating that Coloradans no longer endorse legalization.
In fact, Riffle notes that “two recent polls suggest Colorado residents are more supportive of the law than ever before. A Public Policy Polling survey from March showed that 57 percent of Colorado voters think marijuana should be legal, and a Quinnipiac poll from February showed 58 percent support for the state’s legalization law. It was supported by 54.8 percent of voters in 2012.”
As Leonhart testified, the Pew Research Center also released a poll showing 75 percent of Americans expect national pot legalization, and more than 60 percent understand that alcohol is more harmful to people and society than cannabis.
…
The Marijuana Policy Project is calling on the president through a Change.org petition to fire Leonhart and “replace her with someone who will base decisions on science and evidence instead of politics and ideology.”
A good first step, but stumbling might be involved.
All this against the wave of change. As I said, anyone with any walking-around sense knows the attitudes/laws are in a major flux of change, but there’s the literal-ass elephant in the room.
From the Washington Post last month:
This is something of a preview of the arguments we’ll see as we move toward 2016 and legalization initiatives are on ballots all over the country.
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Opponents of legalization realize that moralistic arguments against marijuana are going to be political losers, what with the fact that a majority of Americans now support legalization, plus the fact that most Americans have used it at some point in their lives.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans are going to come around to legalization any time soon, a fact Democrats hope will allow them to use ballot initiatives to burst turnout among some of their target constituencies.
To be sure, this fall there may end up being only a couple of marijuana initiatives on the ballot.
Florida voters will decide on a constitutional amendment providing for medical marijuana, and a full legalization initiative could make it to the ballot in Alaska.
Advocates are also trying to put a measure on the ballot in Oregon.
But if you’re a legalization advocate, you actually shouldn’t want to have an initiative on the ballot this year.
In state after state, advocates have decided to wait until 2016, when they know more of Democrats and young people will be going to the polls to vote for president, to put the question to the voters.
Advocates in California considered mounting a push this year, then put it off until 2016.
That presidential year could also see initiatives in Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, and Nevada, and possibly other states as well.
There’s a good reason for this: Polls show huge divides by age and party on the issue.
Recent surveys by the Pew Research Center show that while only 32 percent of Americans over 65 favor legalization, 70 percent of those 18 to 29 favor it.
The divide between parties is only slightly smaller, with 63 percent of Democrats favoring legalization compared to 39 percent of Republicans.
Politics and pot — they go together like seeds and stems.
Oh, that’s just so bogus, dude — just sayin’.
(Illustration above found here).