So, Arizonans get a chance to vote on legalized recreational marijuana... again. It's come up before and failed by respectable margins. This year may be watershed. Public opinion has shifted heavily in the last few years on medical marijuana use, and we're faced with the most comical presidential tickets since the script of Idiocracy got the green light. People are tired of shitty options with shittier justifications.
I just scanned past CNN for the headlines (for which my ultra-Republican boss calls me a "commie") and saw a graphic that indicates early voting returns in Arizona are favoring the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. That. Is. Epic. Anyone remotely familiar with Arizona knows that this is just a Republican state. Not that it matters much, since our meager few electoral votes don't amount to a fart in the wind of democracy. Be that as it may, we still vote red. Always have, always... well...
The implication that such a conservative state is willing to shift on something like the presidential candidate, to the untested Libertarian no less, is very favorable to the marijuana lobby. Libertarians, as you may know, generally object to the government telling them what they can and cannot do. As previous entries have intimated, as much as explicitly stated, the nature of marijuana puts it on par with regulating a tomato. There is no scientific purposed to keeping it a Schedule 1 drug.
Like most legislative decisions, this continued status is a result of misinformation and [likely] corporate interests. The emergence of a rumor in 2014 that Phillip Morris was introducing Marlboro M marijuana cigarettes was at the very least plausible, given that special interest groups have being buying representation from Capitol Hill for as long as there have been elected officials. There's nothing partisan about it. The 1% occupy both sides of the aisle, after all, but this is a fabricated story.
Even so, there is the fact that US law disallows placing any naturally occurring substance under patent. There is only one way to capitalize on a substance that cannot be trademarked. Make it illegal to posses, distribute, or transport; issue huge fines for non-compliance.
Does this sound conspiratorial? A little. Is it true? Probably more than anyone really wants to admit. Colorado and Oregon both experienced an interesting set of interrelated phenomena following the legalization of recreational marijuana. The first was pot-tourism. People flocked into the state(s) to get legal weed at licensed dispensaries. The second was a reinforcement of the black market, as locals with connections didn't want to pay the exceptional taxes associated with product purchased through dispensaries. The third, and most telling, was a massive decrease in misdemeanor crimes (mostly related to possession) and a drastic increase in felonies.
Wait, increased crime? Well, really a redistribution based on the nature and degree of the crimes being committed. Dispensaries may be legal at the state level, but they are still subject to federal banking laws which make banking monies made on the drug trade illegal. All transactions for weed, [state] legal or not, have to be in cash. Dispensaries are subject to more armed robberies now than any other retail business.
Curious, don't you think, that the often-hyped increased crime that was expected to accompany legal weed is actually a result of violent crime tangential to the weed sales? No one started crashing cars into school loading zones. Cheeto theft didn't suddenly explode. There weren't bloody dance-offs breaking out in shopping malls. No crime, other than that related to the incapacity to securely perform the business of selling weed, increased.
Prop. 205 covers a lot of legal hurdles that would keep Arizonans out of jail for possession, but I believe that additional steps need to be taken to keep dispensaries safe. That seems to be dependent entirely on the the Federal government though. Simple ideas like state exchanges similar to the child support system would allow Arizona to collect secure transactions from consumers and then distribute funds to retailers, and at the same time collect user fees in the form of taxes to be used for the State. However, to whatever extent those are intertwined with the Fed, everyone still remains exposed.
The States are starting to exercise their authority, reflective of the will of the People. Lawmakers aren't going to be able to deny the public voice much longer. Arizona previously passed ballots that allowed medical marijuana use, first in 1996, then again in 1998. Both of those measures, however, were inadequately worded to protect patients from prosecution. Rather than amending the statutes, the state simply overturned them and waited until later measures received enough support to qualify them for the ballot. In effect, the AZ legislature back-doored the public in what I would call a governmental repurposing of the term "changing lanes without signaling."
It wasn't until Prop. 203 passed in 2010 that medical and compassionate care use came to be. To some degree or another, the voting pubic is of a majority opinion that marijuana should be legal. With elections in just two weeks, I'm hopeful that Arizona joins the ranks of more enlightened society.
We've demonized weed for decades without cause. It's been indoctrinated into entire generations without the benefit of critical examination. It's legal use has been pulled out from under the public by poorly written language. We've been cheated, lied to, and blinded from reality.
The world has a long and intimate romance with pseudoscience and medical quackery. Hopefully, the tide is turning.
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