> In an online press conference with his younger supporters, the first question was about whether legalising and taxing pot would be a good thing to help raise revenues.<p>That was Reddit.<p>It seems insane that our last three presidents admitted to smoking weed yet thousands upon thousands of people are languishing in jail for doing the same thing. Cognitive dissonance much?
Funny that The Times are running anti-prohibition articles during this whole furore about the sacking of David Nutt. They can't be a happy bunch at the Home Office this weekend.
The war on drugs has always been a failure: there has been no measureable decline in usage. Legalization will eliminate a dangerous black market and free our law enforcement to focus on more serious crime. Most importantly - legalization will no longer label hundreds of thousands of otherwise law abiding citizens "criminals" for enjoying a substance that humans have been using for as long as we can tell.
I support legalization of pot in the U.S., but I don't think it's going to happen like the article's title predicts.<p>What will happen, and the article alludes to it, is a mish-mash of conflicting state and local laws that legalize or decriminalize pot to various degrees. The federal government will continue to be a wild card. Wholesale legalization is not in the cards.<p>That's because the way pot was made illegal was illegal to begin with. When alcohol was made illegal, it took a constitutional amendment. Ever wonder why? After all, they tried making alcohol illegal other ways and the courts threw it out. The government got tired of all that constitutional stuff and decided that in the future substances would be regulated by administrative fiat. The DEA maintains a list which it adds and subtracts items whenever it feels like it. No president is going to completely pull something like pot from the list -- too much political hassle what with getting into why the list exists in the first place. Instead pot will be ignored to some degree, leaving the same big constitutional problem we had to start with to fester for decades.<p>So the real news is that the people are tired of pot criminal laws, state and local governments are responding to them, and the federal government, having taken on itself to tell people what they can ingest or not, is stuck with a big bag of laws that don't meet the people's needs any more. That could take 50 years or more to work out (if ever).
This seems to be basically a "legalize it!" bent to rehashing an earlier Fortune / CNN Money article:<p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/11/magazines/fortune/medical_marijuana_legalizing.fortune/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/11/magazines/fortune/medical_ma...</a>
I was approached by a friend who wanted to do a dispensary locator app for the iPhone and my thoughts were: "No way Apple will EVER let that through!" - he called me the other day to tell me about an app that got through...
The reality is that states are going to be asserting their rights against Federal ability.<p>This is happening in gun-related issues as well, with Montana and Ohio, at the least, considering the passage of laws that ignore the BATF if the gun is produced in and sold in the state. This gets around the interstate commerce clause used by the Feds to claim jurisdiction.
Let's not forget about Hemp: <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=pkMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA15&dq=hemp%20henry%20ford&lr=&as_brr=1&as_pt=MAGAZINES&pg=PA15#v=twopage&q=&f=true" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=pkMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA15&#...</a>