Will Washington and Colorado Voters Legalize Marijuana Today?
via Three states to vote on legalizing recreational pot – chicagotribune.com.
Voters in three western U.S. states go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use in a move that could spur a showdown with the federal government, with polls showing legalization ahead in Washington and Colorado.
If voters approve the measures, the states could become the first in the country to legalize the recreational use of pot. Each of the initiatives would see marijuana taxed and would regulate its sale in special stores to adults age 21 and older.
But the prospect of legalizing pot, which the federal government considers an illicit and dangerous drug liable to be abused, has raised concerns about how to keep stoned drivers off the roads and joints out of the hands of teenagers.
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A survey of 932 likely voters in Washington state released on Saturday by Public Policy Polling found 53 percent support legalization, with a margin of error of 3.2 percent.
Legalization was also ahead in Colorado, where a recent SurveyUSA poll of 695 likely voters conducted for the Denver Post showed 50 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed. The survey had a 3.8 percent margin of error.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
I guy I know from Columbia told me a story about what happened in his country when they tried to legalize drugs back in the ’80s because the crime was so bad. The passed the law which was then sent to the Supreme Court. Every judge got an anonymous phone call from one of the gangster henchmen telling them that if this law passed they, and every member of their family, would be dead the next day.
I’m proud to tell you I voted in favor of Colorado’s referendum to decriminalize marijuana.
Does this mean the old guy is going to rush out to buy some weed and get high? No. I never did care for the smell of the stuff, and haven’t smoked it since the summer of 1972. I voted to remove the criminal penalties for it because I’ve had it up to here and beyond with government’s arrogant assumption it has the authority to tell us, the people what we may and may not do when nothing and less than nothing that even remotely concerns government is at stake.
Some governments have problems.
Some governments cause problems.
Some governments just plain are problems.
Personal use and possession of less than four ounces of pot was legal here in Alaska from the mid-’70s until the early ’90s on State Constitutional privacy grounds. Unlike the federal and most other states’ Constitutions, Alaska’s Constitution has an explicit guarantee of privacy. Pot was re-criminalized by citizens’ initiative. The first judicial district, Southeast Alaska, Superior Court found that the recriminalization initiative likewise violated the State Constitution; the State didn’t contest it to the AKSC, and it hasn’t been taken up in the other three judicial districts, and consequently, personal use and possession is legal from Ketchikan to Yakutat and illegal in the rest of the State.
That said, you’d have to send local police or the State Troopers an engraved invitation to get busted solely for pot possession in any reasonable quantity. If you do something else stupid and are holding, they’ll charge you with the pot, but personal use and possession is de facto legal. When I first went to work for the State in Juneau in the late eighties, the odor of marajuana smoke wafted through the parking garage before and after work and at break and lunch times and more than a few employees returned from lunch or breaks vibrating; cocaine was the currency of power. I was single back then and there wasn’t any reason to take a pretty young thing out unless you were prepared to powder her nose. An aging workforce and adult supervision cut down on employee drug use, at least at work, but it saw a resurgence when the Democrats came back into power from ’94 to ’02, though never anything like it was in the ’70s and ’80s.
Frankly, Alaska has a youth culture right out of A Clockwork Orange; any middle schooler that wanted it could get pot and all of my kids had been exposed to it by middle school and the three younger ones used recreationally, the youngest quite heavily, in high school. If you see three kids in the mall or walking down the street, the odds are pretty good that two of them are stoned. The most valuable skill for those without a college degree is the ability to pee in a bottle; any decent private sector job is going to require a pre-employment drug test and most that involve heavy equipment or other dangerous work also have random and safety issue testing. Unfortunately, the State gets dumber everytime Pomp and Circumstance gets played; the smart, disciplined kids go Outside to school and rarely come back. A very lucrative social welfare system and lots of transfer payment based public or quasi-public employment makes the livin’ easy, too easy, and the State is entirely too safe for screwups, of which there are many, many of which stay stoned most of the time.
Oh, and the gangs fight over territory and markets for coke, meth, herion, oxy, just the same and pot is just as expensive as in places were it is less legal, so none of the “hemp” afficionados and libertarians’ predictions of how there wouldn’t be increases in use, that it wouldn’t be a gateway, and that we’d practically be able to do away with law enforcement if we just made pot legal have all proven not only untrue but dead wrong, and anybody who thinks that they can keep a kid from using if they know there’s a bag in the house is a complete idiot.