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Thursday, March 19, 2009

Are We Finally Ending the Insanity of America's Racist Puritanical War on (Some) Drugs? Step by Step by Step…

Yesterday:
WASHINGTON – Attorney General Eric Holder signaled a change on medical marijuana policy Wednesday, saying federal agents will target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state law.

That would be a departure from the policy of the Bush administration, which targeted medical marijuana dispensaries in California even if they complied with that state's law.

Last week:
On March 12, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) introduced H.R. 1466, the “Major Drug Trafficking Prosecution Act of 2009.’’ The bill would eliminate all mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses; curb federal prosecutions of low-level drug offenders; and allow courts to place offenders on probation or suspend their sentence.

The end of this month:
California: California’s first-ever marijuana legalization bill, Assembly Bill 390: The Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act, is tentatively scheduled for a hearing before the Committee on Public Safety and Health on Tuesday, March 31. The Committee is expected to vote on this proposal immediately following the hearing[.]

If you don't recall AB 390, cast your mind back to just last month:
Today Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) announced the introduction of groundbreaking legislation that would tax and regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. The Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education act (AB 390) would create a regulatory structure similar to that used for beer, wine and liquor, permitting taxed sales to adults while barring sales to or possession by those under 21.

"With the state in the midst of an historic economic crisis, the move towards regulating and taxing marijuana is simply common sense. This legislation would generate much needed revenue for the state, restrict access to only those over 21, end the environmental damage to our public lands from illicit crops, and improve public safety by redirecting law enforcement efforts to more serious crimes", said Ammiano. "California has the opportunity to be the first state in the nation to enact a smart, responsible public policy for the control and regulation of marijuana."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Dale Carrico said...

A meteor could hit the earth and end the problem of addiction for everybody for good. It really could.

It contributes less than little to the serious work of policy-making or activism that would facilitate more sensible and just outcomes where consensual (or not) private (or not) use of variously unhealthy (or not) variously addictive (or not) substances are concerned, however, to waste too much time pondering the whole meteor strike scenario, in my view.

Or at any rate, it is almost always wrongheaded to file the time one spends thinking that way (which might, after all, be quite as edifying as the time one spends reading a good book or praying or masturbating, all of which have their places in the lives of those who private perfections make recourse to them) under the heading of "serious thinking about actual problems that need thinking about" here and now.

With respect, here is what I hear you saying to me at the key point in your comment: Blah blah futurology "may allow" more blah blah futurology hence "could conceivably lead to" still more blah blah futurology and "so" dramatically still more blah blah futurology.

As an exercise, imagine it is 10 to 20 years ago and your counterpart offered up some comparable futurological thought experiment that was also logically possible I suppose in the abstract, certainly enough to sell the story, but either didn't come to fruition at all as these things almost never really do after all or even did indeed "arrive" after a fashion, through the historical glass darkly, as it were, through the inevitable complex socio-cultural- regulatory- promotional- engineering- economic- political- emotional- cluster-fuck of a trajectory that nobody could really sketch out back then, the ineradicable interminable stakeholder struggle that came to actually distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of its stepwise fraught fruition.

The person talking like you are now contributed less than little to the clarity or sense or justice of the vicissitudes of that struggle, or if he did it was entirely accidentally so, accidentally in the same way that any poet or politician or well-placed chef or rentboy could have done. And worse than that -- in my view -- that counterpart in the would-be futurological congress likely did a lot of damage instead, confusing idealized outcomes with real developmental struggles and sensible deliberation about actually-existing costs, risks, and benefits before us.

The fact that the worst variations of futurological discourse (which I do not attribute to you, but you should understand the company you are keeping) were media hype-notists and disasterbators whomping up irrationality to attract attention to themselves or salesmen whomping up exuberance to get at their marks' money -- and we are reaping the whirlwind of corporate capitalism's smarmy smart guy's and stooges right here right now -- does even less to endear me to this mode of thinking, I must say.

Foresight is all very well, but when it assumes the tonalities of prophesy or salesmanship or substitutes projection for the proximate you can be sure that it is a racket more often than not and should be treated as such by people of good sense.