When the CIA is involved in drugs for any of the many reasons it's involved in drug trafficking the feds look the other way but when Fred the Farmer is growing for medicinal purposes watch out.

But all this really begs the question of whatever happened to states rights? I've long forgotten the case (I believe it involved a skirmish between NY and NJ that was settled by SCOTUS but my 1 year of law school was 30+ years ago).

The federal government has interjected itself in the the affairs of states more and more unreasonably as time goes by (DOMA, interfering in Oregon's laws regarding end of life). For once strict constructionism might just appeal to me. And it pains me to write that.

Flat out legalization and taxation is being discussed seriously in the golden state, given the current budget crisis. A good move I think. Locking thousands of people up for non-violent drug offenses is how the US came to lead the world in the percentage of its people locked up behind bars.

It's always seemed to me that people with certain painful chronic conditions ought to be able to legally use it.

If Michael Jackson had turned to THC instead of opiates, he would be thriving today.

This Session in Salem I lobbied on three different bills, and one of them was the pot decriminalization issue. Starting with: Make the subtle distinction between 'legalization' (I'm not fully supportive of) and 'decriminalization' (I advocate). There is a difference in a thing being 'legal' and a thing being 'not illegal.' Such as: If a thing is legal, then rules, regulations, conditions, clauses, and in a word 'laws' may, and probably do, attach to it. If a thing is not illegal, then it's not given a thought ... like kissing your spouse (that's not illegal), picking your nose, drinking two 6-packs without leaving your easy chair in front of the TV, hyperventilating to 'get high' (that's not illegal), eating escargots and thinking lascivious thoughts (that's not illegal), and on and on. There is a distinction to see whereby 'being legal' is different from 'being not illegal.'

In large part, this distinction was previously applied to alcohol, distilled 'spirits,' in that first a constitutional amendment declared it 'illegal,' and then a second amendment 'remedy' declared it was 'not illegal.' That same condition continues today. Alcohol is popularly perceived NOT as 'legal' but rather as 'not illegal except in certain enumerated situations' such as when driving, or when in childhood with it, etc.

So ditto: Pot, and green beans and broccoli, grown in your backyard should be not illegal, I advocate. So I don't say 'legalize' it; I say decriminalize pot, and mushrooms.

In the linked article, AP re-chants the 'conventional wisdom' numbers for the tax revenue from decriminalized pot. (It is 'not illegal' to rent a hotel room, either, although it facilitates 'strange' behaviors among 'users,' and there is also tax revenue from that -- an 'accommodations' tax, not a 'behaviors' tax.) The cited pot tax revenues are waaay misunderestimated, IMO. I expect it could amount to much more than 100 Billion dollars in California (... in a ten-year period, which is the new political fashion for tossing around tax revenue guesses: in ten-year 'bundled packages' -- pretending that if there is no way to accurately guesstimate one year ahead, what with the shaky Economy and all, then the accuracy is improved by guesstimating ten years ahead).

Anyway, the article says decriminalized pot could bring California a new revenue source of $1.3 Billion the first year. I expect it could be 10 times as much.

And that State government only has a $25 Billion 'shortfall.' They could fix it simply with repeal of the pot-smoking hippie 'witch hunt' they started 40 years ago, the summer of Woodstock, when 'normal' 'sensible' God-fearing tax-paying Americans put their minds on the Moon instead of getting 'high.'

When I lobbied Salem legislators to decriminalize pot in this State, the main and only counter-argument I heard them say was that they themselves are ready to, and would support repeal of 'drug war' dumbDEAgovernment, but the voting public psychologically resists it and holds the Legislature back.

Like, it's always the voters' fault that elected officeholders are unrepresentative of us ....

If it weren't for the A)-Boomer guilt over the freak-out 60s and 70s, and B)-the entrenched corrections industry lobby, weed would be decriminalized by now.