20220210 Shep as Author
Elected federal and local officials often cannot resist their totalitarian desires to enrich their feifdoms and to control how other people live their lives. Nowhere is this more evident than marijuana regulation. Sheriff Shannon Dicus of San Bernadino county provides a recent example. He has teamed with federal law enforcement to literally rob armored cars.
The authority for these quasi-legal robberies arises from Federal Civil Asset Forfeiture laws. Money seized by a local sheriff or police department is transferred to the FBI, which collects a twenty percent haircut prior to returning the money to the local department. This skirts California law which explicitly permits the legal sale of marijuana. It is not an overstatement to say this is nothing more than sheriff deputies using the threat of lethal force to commit robberies. San Bernadino County sheriff deputies have stopped armored vehicles carrying cash from the state-legal marijuana trade at least three times, seizing over a million dollars in total. The activities of the Sheriff Department are illegal under California statutes. An organized group of armed men is stealing money arising from a business activity the California legislature has explicitly said is legal. In a sane world this money would be considered "dirty" and neither the officers nor their departments would be allowed to retain it. The work-around comes from the Federal Justice Department's "Equitable Sharing" program. The money first goes to the feds, who then return eighty percent of it to the department as "clean" money.
Enough already.
The half-assed decriminalization of marijuana by many states is an embarrassing failure on multiple levels. Politicians on the left when "legalizing" marijuana in their respective states could not resist the totalitarian urge to create Byzantine licensing schemes as well as other unnecessary regulation and taxation. The net effect in every state I've reviewed is a regulatory regime so burdensome that it is roughly as big of a hassle to buy weed from your new state-sanctioned drug dealer as it was to buy it from your old illegal trafficker. One commonly stated goal of legalization was to cut down on the violence and other criminal activity associated with drug trafficking. If a states regulation of weed is so inefficient and so greedy for taxes that the price and hassle factor are about the same, we'll never be able to get on top of the problems tied to illicit trafficking. The failure of representatives from those states to bring legislation to do away with federal marijuana laws merely created a legal environment for unscrupulous lawmen to legally hold up armored trucks for the benefit of their local department.
Models for marijuana legislation should have minimal regulation as a goal. There is no reason for the sale of marijuana to be more tightly regulated than the sale of alcohol. Let's dispense with the fiction of medical marijuana. There are other drugs that handle any of the medicinal benefits attributed to marijuana. Simply make weed a product available for adult use. If a grown-up wants to buy it to get high, fine. If a grown up wants to buy it to control nausea, to stimulate appetite, or to relieve pain, fine. The state has no reason to be concerned with how the product is used as long as there is no harm from the product's use outside of the commonly known side effects of smoking or consuming marijuana, and so long as non-users are not being harmed. Let the consumer take responsibility for his own use.
The only possible regulatory interest a government can have is to limit the use to adults and the same sorts of oversight that any other plant product receives.
Of course all federal marijuana laws should be repealed.
Heavy taxation of the product either by the states or the federal government will only further the harm caused by illicit trafficking. Marijuana should be taxed just as most other over the counter items are taxed in retail stores.
Let's elect people who understand that they are not there to rule, but to govern.
On background, I've never smoked pot. I've sometimes said I'd try it if Willie Nelson offered me some, but I've never met Willie, and of course he has stopped using weed. My interest here is based on the advancement of individual liberty.
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