Pubdate: Wed, 21 Nov 2012
Source: Colorado Springs Independent (CO)
Copyright: 2012 Colorado Springs Independent
Contact:  http://www.csindy.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1536
Column: City Sage
Author: John Hazlehurst

WHAT'S THE WORLD COMING TO?

"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single 
courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; 
and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the 
rest of the country." - Justice Louis D. Brandeis (in dissent), New 
State Ice Co. v. Liebmann 285 U.S. 262 (1932).

By approving Amendment 64 on Nov. 6, Colorado voters did what 
generations of craven elected officials, from city councilors to 
district attorneys to state legislators to governors to congressmen 
to every president since 1970, have been afraid to do. They 
challenged the lunatic might of the national drug-control bureaucracy.

Drug warriors like to portray marijuana as a "gateway drug," a 
seductive portal that leads innocent youths to perdition. Close the 
gateway, so they claim, and we'll all grow up to be healthy, 
athletic, clean-living folks like Paul Ryan, or Lance Armstrong or 
Paula Broadwell ... oh, never mind!

Legalizing marijuana strikes at the heart of drug control and 
criminalization - the Controlled Substances Act, signed into law by 
President Richard Nixon in 1970. It divides drugs into five 
"schedules." Schedule 1 includes drugs with "high potential for 
abuse, for which there are no accepted medical uses, and for which 
there is a lack of accepted safety under medical supervision."

The list includes virtually every popular recreational drug of the 
1960s. In the halcyon days before worldwide drug control, I tried at 
least three.

Marijuana made me paranoid, and peyote made me puke. Psilocybin? I 
fondly remember wandering through cow pastures in Grenada during the 
mid-1970s looking for mushrooms. We'd walk the fields at dawn, before 
the fierce tropical sun burned off the blue-tinged 'shrooms that grew 
from cow patties. Three or four would give you a nice, mellow, day-long high.

My experiences are hardly unique. Millions of Americans have used 
illegal drugs, and millions have dealt them. Such behavior may be 
mildly reprehensible, but it shouldn't be criminal, except when truly 
dangerous substances are involved. Few would advocate blanket 
legalization of heroin, methamphetamine or cocaine. Fewer still would 
argue that marijuana should continue to be classified as Schedule 1. 
The classification is arbitrary, capricious, punitive, irrational and 
vengeful - thoroughly Nixonian.

Remember when Douglas Bruce persuaded a comfortable majority of 
Colorado voters to approve the tax-limiting, revenue-capping 
Taxpayer's Bill of Rights? Powerful forces in and out of government 
did everything to delay, dilute and defang the law. Confident of 
support, Bruce fought back.

TABOR endures, but it's an emasculated shadow of its former majestic 
self - as is its author, brought low by ceaseless battle and careless pride.

Legal dope is much easier to attack than tax limitation - so what's 
next? Though we've reported that District Attorney Dan May is 
re-evaluating cases, he's stated he will not be following the lead of 
Boulder DA Stan Garnett by simply dismissing all minor marijuana 
cases. (See CannaBiz for more.)

In Washington, federal lawyers are busy fending off another legal 
challenge to the CSA being considered by a three-judge appeals panel. 
The courts historically have deferred to government in refusing to 
change marijuana's classification, but perhaps they'll defer to 
science and voters this time.

What if they do? And what if the feds take marijuana off the list? 
It'd be legal, subject only to controls similar to those on alcohol 
and tobacco.

Amendment 64 doesn't merely require that the state regulate 
production, distribution, sale and possession of the demon weed. It 
effectively creates a state-sanctioned indoor marijuana industry, 
heavily taxed and regulated.

If CSA falls, that structure will not long endure. Tobacco, hops and 
barley are grown in the open air, not warehouses. Breweries and 
distilleries locate wherever it makes economic sense, not in unmarked 
buildings.

A new world awaits. Imagine vast fields of marijuana along our city's 
eastern edge, irrigated by water from the otherwise-unneeded Southern 
Delivery System. We could even have a new state song:

"Colorado! Where the dope grows thick upon the plain / And the 
bloomin' buds can sure smell sweet / When the wind comes right behind 
the rain."

Or maybe we should just stick with "Rocky Mountain High."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom