Category Archives: The Drug War

I’m as skeptical as Megan McArdle about the feds “allowing” the people of Colorado and Washington to get away with voting to legalize pot. They didn’t allow Arizona to control its own border with Mexico, remember? Even those so-called secession petitions to the White House were petitions, which is to say they were asking for permission to secede.

We’re simply not the Land of the Free that the flag wavers and patriotic song-singers like to pretend. The feds shackled us years ago and threw away the key.

The Tenth Amendment crowd like to write about the power of the states but, trust me, the states will do what Uncle Sugar says before they’ll give up, say, their federal highway and Medicaid money. For all the amusing talk around here about secession, Texas would be first in line to obey.

Washington’s legalization of pot on the alcohol model will be the easiest for the D.C. drug warriors to stop. They simply won’t allow the state’s licenses for growing and selling to mean anything. They’ll shut down the first business that tries to use the license and, if necessary, jail the executives. Risky investment, that one.

Colorado’s legalization will be trickier to overcome, since it wisely allows individuals to grow their own cannabis. Them as has the nerve, that is.

The DEA will simply get the always-compliant local badge gang to crank up their helicopters (or, maybe, their new video-carrying drones) and overfly neighborhoods to spy out any new crops amongst the tomatoes and sunflowers. And rely on neighborhood snitches to report the basement growers.

Labor intensive, sure, but a few spectacular urban court cases with big fines or long prison sentences should be enough to get the point across: the feds have billions of our tax dollars to spend and they like nothing better than to waste it on their ridiculous drug war which has given many cops employment and fancy new military weapons and, not incidentally, lined the pockets of the corrupt.

Instapundit raises the specter of “jury nullification” in these presumed upcoming federal marijuana indictments. That sounds good but requires individual jurors to stick their necks out so Uncle Sugar and his bully boys can chop off their heads. Not likely to happen.

If there really were a lot of bold Americans out there, who did more than whine on Facebook, there’d be a lot more than the ten percent of the eligible population that now volunteers for the military.

All in all, I doubt this legalization is going to work for long, unless the people of a lot more states (say thirty or more) vote to do the same at the same time. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t want to personally test it by lighting up a joint in a public park in downtown Seattle or Denver. But, like they say, there’s always that ten percent: folks who never seem to get the message until it’s too late.

UPDATE:  Now, if the Republicans really want to Take Back The Joint…