Gregg will fix the double headline problem when he's awake.

Im 100 percent in favor of legalization too.

But you know what else I am in favor of? Congress doing it’s job and removing Cannabis from the Schedule One list of prohibited drugs.

The wink wink nod nod selective enforcement of the rotten and corrupt Obama administration should not be the norm in a Constitutional republic.
It is corrosive to freedom, and the Constitution.

These end runs around the Constitution and Congress never work out well in the long run. They keep government and legislators from being accountable ( which is exactly what they are designed to do)

Enforce the law or repeal it.

Always seemed odd that it took a constitutional amendment to outlaw liquor but no such step to outlaw drugs.

Wrong approach. Sessions' job is to enforce the laws of the United States, as currently constituted by legislation and court decisions. It is not within his purview to pick and choose which laws to enforce. It's up to Congress to fix this with legislation. Until then, Sessions is duty-bound to enforce existing law.

The real root of the problem: The Supreme Court, specifically, their decision in Wickard v. Filburn in 1942, in which the Court held that the Article 1 Commerce Clause constitutes a near-unlimited grant of authority to the federal government. This SCOTUS decision rendered the Ninth and Tenth Amendments dead letters. Once that was done, the supremacy principle of federal law over state law kicked in. The entire federal regulatory apparatus is based on this case, so there's not a chance in hell of it ever being overturned, despite the fact that it was a rather blatantly unconstitutional wartime decision, arrived at by a Court that was under FDR's thumb.

The only possible solution is a Constitutional amendment that repeals or modifies the Commerce Clause. And if that is ever seriously attempted -- if you think the Left's reaction to Trump over the past year has been insane, you ain't seen nothing yet.

I support legalizing marijuana. But I also support Jeff Sessions's actions. As Isab said either enforce the law or change it.

And stop calling everything you don't like racist.

Can we legalize weed and outlaw weed "culture"? Seems like a sensible compromise to me.

Always seemed odd that it took a constitutional amendment to outlaw liquor but no such step to outlaw drugs.

Probably because the founders brewed beer, fermented wine, and cooked whiskey. And those items are drinks, not drugs, at least in terms of the understanding of the population at that time.

The progressives who offered up prohibition also instituted the FDA, who then went after the drug trade with great zeal. So the minute they decided that Cocoa Cola with cocaine in it was a drug and subject to regulation, the recipe was modified.

The Commerce Clause has been severely abused to allow the feds to poke their noses in places they shouldn't.

> The government has no business
> telling you what plants you can
> grow, sell, or put in your body

Plants! Harmless plants, like that thing your Granny has in her window.

Whatever the particulars of the compounds under discussion, rhetoric like this about "plants" and "your body" has always seemed childish... And counterproductive to your argument.

What could we ever have to fear from a mere plant??????

PS for Isab re: Paulos——

It was a fun book, and I remember he made a charming appearance on Letterman 20 (or 30?) years ago. But JAP is troubled by confusions as are so many.

Sometimes, big ones.

Sessions isn’t going to be prosecuting anyone. He withdrew a memo that had directed district prosecutors to deprioritize enforcement of marijuana laws. He then directed them to pursue marijuana cases as they see fit. That’s it.

FWIW everyone in the pot industry knew this was a risk because marijuana has never been legalized at the federal level. Sessions is now forcing the question and compelling Congress to do its fricking job.

Like others here - I think it should be legalized the right way, not by directing law enforcement to look the other way.

The wink wink nod nod selective enforcement of the rotten and corrupt Obama administration should not be the norm in a Constitutional republic. It is corrosive to freedom, and the Constitution. ~ Isab at January 10, 2018 6:23 AM

You mean we don't get to choose which laws we'll obey and which ones we won't. Then why should an attorney general have that option?

I don't want an attorney general who chooses which laws he'll enforce and which ones he won't. No Attorney General should have that kind of power, state or federal. We have elected bodies to make laws, attorneys general exist to enforce them, not decide which laws should be enforced or defended in court.

On the other hand, as The Economist points out, the US has 50 laboratories of democracy with which to experiment and find out what works before deploying it on a grand scale.

If Congress wants states to experiment with marijuana laws, it needs to write a law that way, taking cannabis off the Schedule I list, allowing marijuana profits to be banked, and enabling states to experiment. Until then, marijuana is not legal, no matter what any statewide plebiscite says.

We're going off the rails with states usurping existing federal power with drug laws, immigration and sanctuary cities, trade boycotts, tax lawsuits, unratified treaties, etc. while sanctimonious Congress-critters, unwilling to pass laws to enable this, cheer them on, as if open defiance of federal law is something to be celebrated and will not have dire consequences in the long run.

By virtue of the union into which our forefathers entered over 200 years ago, there are some things the states are just not authorized to do, yet we seem to have states doing them right and left.

"Always seemed odd that it took a constitutional amendment to outlaw liquor but no such step to outlaw drugs."

If the FDA decided today to ban alcoholic beverages nationwide, via regulation, I think SCOTUS would uphold it. I don't see how they could not, without overturning Wickard v. Filburn, which they won't do. Oh, they may try to rule against the FDA based on some hokey theory of traditionalism. But everybody on both sides will see that as the transparent fig leaf that it is. If the federal government has the power to regulate wheat, how can it not have the power to regulate a dangerous intoxicant?

This is what bothers me about this whole thing. Yes, Congress can fix it by passing a bill (assuming Trump is willing to sign it, which I don't have a good read on). But... doesn't that establish the precedent that everything, except for that which the federal government specifically allows, is prohibited? It's the exact opposite of the plain language of the Tenth Amendment.

"while sanctimonious Congress-critters, unwilling to pass laws to enable this, cheer them on, as if open defiance of federal law is something to be celebrated and will not have dire consequences in the long run."

It's long been a sport, in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, to foist politically onerous decisions off onto other parts of the government where nobody has to stand for re-election. Legislators love to say to furious constituents, "So sorry, court has ruled, our hands are tied." We Americans should not let them get away with that.

It's long been a sport, in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, to foist politically onerous decisions off onto other parts of the government where nobody has to stand for re-election. ~ Cousin Dave at January 10, 2018 12:58 PM

California's made a system of government out of it. Controversial legislation is submitted to a plebiscite (Prop 8, anyone?) where the population votes on it and then the losing side sues. The law is ultimately made in the courts.

Sigh. More fuzzyheaded thinking, repeated at that.

Yes, you must abide by society's rules, because they outnumber you. It's been that way since the beginning of time. It doesn't matter that the Constitution is supposed to keep government from acting against the rules ---

Society has had enough of drug users robbing them in countless ways. That's why such laws as there are remain. One Friday or Saturday night watching LivePD might show you the tragedy of drug use in the USA: none of the people stopped have had their lives enhanced in any way.

I know you favor the personal anecdote: the wise professor, who uses his bong to decompress after a long day of being an upstanding citizen.
That's not what's happening. People with access to drugs demean themselves and burden others in order to continue drug use.

Now, here's a logical challenge.
If "government" should not be able to tell you, you cannot put something in your body, can they then logically mandate that you must?

I expect to see an immediate disavowal of mandatory vaccination.

People with access to drugs demean themselves and burden others in order to continue drug use. ~ Radwaste at January 10, 2018 3:28 PM

California decriminalized possession and property crimes with Prop 47. The intent was to ensure that addicts who steal to fund their habit were not imprisoned because of their disease. So, drug addicts caught with small amounts of drugs on their person are not being put in jail or directed to rehab programs as they had been in the past.

All across California nuisance property crimes are on the rise. Packages are being stolen off porches, cars are being broken into, etc. And the police are not responding to these incidents since they no longer have the threat of arrest to keep the tweakers and addicts in line and really can't do anything about the crimes except file a report for insurance purposes.

This is the real face of widespread drug use. Not, as Raddy points out, the professor who functions normally but blazes up in the evening to decompress.

Broken link in above post:

Okay, here it is:

Link

"This is the real face of widespread drug use. "

I somewhat disagree. It's not drug use per se; it's the face of the Left's animosity towards private property. Prior to about 1970, it was almost unheard of for a residence or small business to have an alarm system. The 1970s was the decade when the first big wave of alarm-system installations happened.

Why? Because that's when the Left started to take hold of a lot of big city governments in the U.S. And one of their directives to police departments was that, since private property was a form of sin anyhow, police should not expend a lot of effort into trying to prevent or solve property crimes. This conveniently worked out to their short-term political advantage, since violent crime was mushrooming and more police were needed to put onto such crimes. The Kitty Genovese case in New York horrified people enough to demand that the bulk of police resources be put into preventing violent crime, and they were willing (at the time) to overlook the resulting discontinuation of prosecuting property crimes, in order to get that result.

But when people do not feel secure in their property, respect for the law and law enforcement diminishes. In the minds of a lot of citizens, security in property is fundamental to the rule of law. When that disappears, people start to see the law, and the government that enforces it, as rigged against them. We had a close relative who was living in the projects for a while. One thing we realized, while visiting her, is that when you live in the projects, your stuff gets stolen, and there's not a thing you can do about it. Don't bother calling the police; they may not respond, and if they do, they will be cross with you for making them do a bunch of paperwork that will just get deposited in file #13 as soon as it hits the sergeant's desk. If someone's not bleeding out, and there's no drugs involved, they are not interested. Your only recourse is to buy someone else's stolen stuff from a fence. But it too will be stolen, possibly by the same person that stole it the first time.

The result is that, in the projects, law enforcement is widely regarded as a joke. In suburban America, when a police car cruises a neighborhood, people stop and wave. In the projects, people look down or go inside. No good can come from interacting with the police. They do not provide any kind of service to the people in the projects.

Momo: "Sessions is now forcing the question and compelling Congress to do its fricking job."

He's doing much more than that. He is propagandizing (with lies straight out of "Reefer Madness") and using all his influence against legalization, and even against renewing the Rorbacher Amendment. That is, he not only is he a deranged drug war addict, but he is trying to roll back the little bit of progress Congress has made on the issue.

Conan: Every prosecutor chooses which laws he will enforce. None of them have the time to prosecute every case that they could prove. And Cousin Dave just provided an example of police and prosecutors systematically ignoring a category of crimes - and that was crimes with real victims.

Yes, Congress is not doing its job here. But that's nothing new. Most of the states have laws still on the books that haven't been enforced in over half a century - laws against adultery and sodomy, laws requiring a flagman to walk in front of an automobile, etc.

“He's doing much more than that. He is propagandizing (with lies straight out of "Reefer Madness") and using all his influence against legalization, and even against renewing the Rorbacher Amendment. That is, he not only is he a deranged drug war addict, but he is trying to roll back the little bit of progress Congress has made on the issue.”

Well it is a free country, and Sessions didnt sign away his ability to express his opinions when he became attorney general.

However, if your congressmen and Senators are listening more to him, than you and the other voters on this subject, I think there problem lies there, dont ya think?

Conan: Every prosecutor chooses which laws he will enforce. None of them have the time to prosecute every case that they could prove. And Cousin Dave just provided an example of police and prosecutors systematically ignoring a category of crimes - and that was crimes with real victims. ~ markm at January 11, 2018 8:09 AM

They choose which cases they will prosecute, hopefully based on the merits of each individual case. Left on a case-by-case basis, this is not worrisome. When they move into choosing which laws they will uphold, they've moved beyond the scope of their authority and into legislating.

...and using all his influence against legalization.... ~ markm at January 11, 2018 8:09 AM

This is what an Attorney General is supposed to do. He uses his influence to argue which laws should be passed and which ones should not or would prove problematic to enforce.

Sessions is not arbitrarily enacting laws or making changes to existing laws (a la the various Obamacare changes), he's merely announcing his intention to enforce federal law as written. If Congress does not like his position, it can change the law.

Most of the states have laws still on the books that haven't been enforced in over half a century - laws against adultery and sodomy, laws requiring a flagman to walk in front of an automobile, etc. ~ markm at January 11, 2018 8:09 AM

And those laws could be suddenly enforced tomorrow, if a law enforcement agency so chose. Which is why legislatures need to review existing laws and remove outdated ones from the books.

Thing is, governments and politicians like having them there. Outdated laws provide a nice, handy tool for attacking political enemies. They also serve as a handy basis for regulatory overreach - e.g, imposing draconian Net Neutrality regulations with the justification being an outdated 1934 telephone law.