Save The Pot Dealers! By Joel Stein
CN Source: Time Magazine November 05, 2009 California
There are more medical-marijuana dispensaries in L.A. than Starbucks. Most are like nice tea shops, where salespeople behind a counter open glass jars so you can smell the Sugar Kush, look at the Purple Urkel under a magnifying lens and ask about the effects of Hindu Skunk. At the Farmacy, I spun a wheel to determine my first-time-buyer gift and was handed a pot lollipop. If the pot-dispensary people ran General Motors, the recession would be over. Although GM cars would be engineered to just stare idly at the road for hours. Which is more than they’re good for now.

Medical Marijuana Shops Abound in California
By Marcus Wohlsen and Greg Risling, AP Writers
The medical marijuana dispensary in this California wine country town is in a former auto dealership, and has more registered patients than the town has residents. Los Angeles has more pot shops than Starbucks or schools.

The Futility of Pot Prohibition
Seventy-two years ago, the federal government took marijuana off the market through the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, based on various reports and hearings about the effects of the substance, which included testimonies that cannabis caused “murder, insanity and death.” Although the act did not criminalize the usage or possession of the herb, it levied a tax of about one dollar for anyone who dealt it and included penalty provisions and complex rules of enforcement that, if they weren’t followed, would lead to heavy fines and even prison time. The act made it extremely difficult to sell pot and increased the risk in doing so.

More Ski Towns May Vote To Change Pot Laws

States Should Decide Usage Laws

It was also the reason for the Hatch Act, so that bureaucrats couldn’t use the taxpayer’s money against them by employing the resources purchased with those taxpayer dollars to lobby against popular referenda and legislation that would negatively affect the bureaucracies. It was supposed to maintain the neutrality of the civil service, but that has been all but nullified thanks to the GAO’s cowardly refusal to call the ONDCP out on its’ blatant abrogation of the Hatch Act…and the equally cowardly refusal of Democrats to do something about it.

MPP is saving human life in their cause.

The cold hard facts of life are sometimes hard to swallow…this graph might be mis-leading but only to someone like you!

What a bunch of Machiavellians American politicians have become. Exactly why i don’t trust them. While they are spinning the economic BS and pretending to help the common people, they always have selfish, ulterior motives that work for the wealthy, corporate ruling-class and against the common people.

The only thing that stops the common people from seriously planning the demolition of their high castle is the dumbed-down, sold-out, undemocratic, traitorous, fascist police departments everywhere, ready to protect the governor and his parties even if it means cutting down the masses on the opposition.

However, this graph is terribly misleading. MPP does not even take into account the various number of other things that could have caused a spike in marijuana possession and lower arrest rates in the other categories.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the reason they are claiming but they should cite more sources and compare other correlations before coming to a conclusion like this.

In forgetting this and allowing this practice to continue, we have created the condition where States have become provinces’ of an empire, not de facto countries voluntarily engaging in a federation, as The Founders intended. Which is why the Feds act so blatantly arrogant with regards to the only bulwarks against centralized tyranny crushing individual rights…the State governments, themselves.

Brandeis understood the necessity for this, but later Courts have ruled on greater and greater erosion of those bulwarks to the point that nothing stands between the citizen and the overwhelmingly powerful centralized government. Hence our present misery.

“Some people assert that our present plight (the Great Depression) is due, in part, to the limitations set by courts upon experimentation in the fields of social and economic science; and to the discouragement to which proposals for betterment there have been subjected otherwise. There must be power in the States and the Nation to remould, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs. I cannot believe that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, or the States which ratified it, intended to deprive us of the power to correct the evils of technological unemployment and excess productive capacity which have attended progress in the useful arts.

To stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the Nation. 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. This Court has the power to prevent an experiment. We may strike down the statute which embodies it on the ground that, in our opinion, the measure is arbitrary, capricious or unreasonable. We have power to do this, because the due process clause has been held by the Court applicable to matters of substantive law as well as to matters of procedure. But in the exercise of this high power, we must be ever on our guard, lest we erect our prejudices into legal principles. If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.”

Contrast this with the decidedly timid approach of the Roberts Court to the Commerce Clause issue of Raich vs. Gonzales. Clearly, Brandeis had the huevos, and the Roberts Court, well, pardon the crudity, but those 5 Justices who ruled against Raich had nothing between their legs but air…

So, even though this is indeed a legitimate ‘State’s rights’ issue as far as the concept of ‘federalism’ is concerned (as outlined by Supreme Court Justice Brandeis and his ‘States as laboratories’ ruling went) neither so-called ‘progressives’ nor putative ‘neo-conservatives’ want to touch this. Only a traditional, Goldwater conservative like Congressman Dr. Ron Paul dares say anything.