Last week’s contest was won by Geoduck. It was in Saltsjobaden, Sweden, where a woman stole a train and drove it into an apartment building.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

– This story by Ryan Grim and Ryan J. Reilly on how Obama’s DOJ dealt with medical marijuana in his first term is long, but very much worth your time. It provides some details of the internal high-level discussions that we’ve only been able to speculate about before.

One thing that stands out to me is how the Obama Administration and the DOJ are engaging in some revisionist history about the Ogden memo, the DOJ statement in March 2009 affirming that they intended to keep Obama’s promise about not going after individuals who were in compliance with state law. There was absolutely an expectation that the DOJ would honor this in this good faith and that the memo was an affirmation of Obama’s campaign promise. As state-sanctioned systems grew, however, many U.S. Attorneys simply didn’t do that. And once some of them crossed that line and didn’t get smacked down from above, others began to undermine it as well. This was a clear failure in Obama’s first term, and there continues to be an expectation that Obama do better in his second term.

– Eric Mortenson at the Oregonian writes about the fledgling industries that are starting to crop up as I-502 becomes a reality. The Washington State Liquor Control Board hearing in Seattle last Thursday saw a huge turnout. If you happen have a spare 2.5 hours, you can watch the full hearing here and here.

Last week’s contest was won by Poster Child. It was Mercer Island.

This week’s contest is related to something in the news from January, good luck!

Gene Johnson writes about the meeting today in the other Washington:

SEATTLE (AP) — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson met with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday, but came away no further enlightened about how the federal government will respond to last fall’s votes in Washington and Colorado that set up legal markets for marijuana.

…

Inslee said the meeting with Holder was collegial and the attorney general asked a lot of questions but gave no indication about when the DOJ might make a decision. Colorado’s governor did not attend.

“I went into this believing that our state should continue to move forward with our rulemaking process,” Inslee said. “Nothing I heard during that discussion dissuaded me of that view.”

During a speech in early December, Holder said the DOJ would have a decision relatively soon.

The fact that Holder didn’t make any attempt to stop Inslee and Ferguson from trying to implement I-502 is certainly a positive sign. Holder has to know that the consequences of allowing Inslee and Ferguson to move forward for months and then later decide to use the courts or some other means to shut it down will be embarrassing both to the Obama Administration and to their fellow Democrats in Olympia. Nothing that cynical is likely to happen.

But the fact that Holder gave no additional assurances regarding the federal government’s response makes me a little concerned about what will happen when people start participating in this new above-ground market. This is an important point:

Inslee described the meeting as the opening of an ongoing conversation. He said he gave Holder details of the role of state employees — noting that although they issue licenses to private entities, they won’t be charged with handling or distributing the weed.

This is key because it gets down to some of the more nuanced legal aspects involved. Most (but not all) attorneys I’ve heard from don’t believe that the feds can legally pre-empt the state and arrest workers merely for setting up and carrying out regulations. The only thing that’s pre-emptible is actual participation in the marketplace (and thanks to Raich vs. Gonzalez, privately growing or even merely possessing marijuana is within that definition).

This concerns me because it’s entirely possible that Holder simply doesn’t care about either Washington or Colorado sets up regulations because he’d likely lose that battle in the courts. He may just be biding his time until licenses are given out and then allowing prosecutors to go after growers and sellers he knows he can win cases against. That also may be too cynical an expectation, but after the experiences in Obama’s first term regarding medical marijuana, the cynicism might be justified.

As Obama began his first term, he re-iterated a promise that he – and every other Democratic hopeful in 2008 – made regarding medical marijuana. He wouldn’t use DOJ resources to undercut the various state laws that made it legal. However, over time, that promise was repeatedly violated and a number of folks who were complying with their state laws are now facing long jail terms.

But this turnaround wasn’t the result of a top-down decree by either Obama or the DOJ. This was a bottom-up attempt by various U.S. Attorneys and other folks in the embattled drug war bureaucracy to find ways to circumvent the intent of that decree. In states like California and Montana, the meaning of the state law was ignored and even actively undermined. But in states like Colorado and New Mexico, it was largely respected. And here in Washington, there was even a noticeable difference between the aggressive enforcement in Eastern Washington and the saner approach in Western Washington.

And it was more than just enforcement. We also saw attempts from various institutional drug war tools to scare some state politicians away from regulations that they knew would be impossible to undermine. This is what happened to both Governor Gregoire and Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee as each of them attempted to establish more concrete statewide medical marijuana regulations.

So until there are actual assurances from Holder (and maybe not even then) that our state laws will be fully respected, there’s definitely a concern about what various lower level drug warriors in the DOJ and the DEA could do once we start handing out the licenses. There would certainly be a political backlash to any attempt to undermine the will of Washington and Colorado voters, but it could be another in a long line of political backlashes that folks in Washington DC barely notice. Or maybe this time will be different. Maybe having state officials like Inslee and Ferguson fighting for the voters of their state will force Holder to keep his folks in line. Still a long way to go before this starts to play out.

Cathy McLain at the Seattle Times has a post with some info about tomorrow’s meeting between Gov. Inslee, AG Ferguson, and US AG Holder that I wrote about yesterday:

Rick Garza of the Washington Liquor Control Board said Monday he expects the federal government will try to take action if Washington’s system has loose controls. He says it’s important for Washington to have a strong regulatory structure that would limit how much marijuana is grown to ensure that it’s only meeting demand for in-state users.

I-502 already codifies a lot of the specifics of the regulatory scheme, but also leaves a lot up to the discretion of the state liquor control board. If you look at the text of the new law [PDF] on page 18, you’ll see the following:

NEW SECTION. Sec. 10. The state liquor control board, subject to the provisions of this act, must adopt rules by December 1, 2013, that establish the procedures and criteria necessary to implement the following:

…

(3) Determining the maximum quantity of marijuana a marijuana producer may have on the premises of a licensed location at any time without violating Washington state law;

That section also deals with how the LCB can regulate other parameters of a legal marketplace, including how many retail outlets will be allowed in an area and how marijuana can be advertised. If Garza is speaking with knowledge of what Holder is planning to do, this is a good sign that they’re willing to tolerate I-502’s implementation.

On the other hand, what could end up happening is that we’ll get overly restrictive regulations based upon a fear that Washington will become a supplier for other states. If that’s the case, we’ll be the pioneering state for all of this, but we might end up with an archaic and inefficient regulatory model similar to what we previously had for liquor, while other states are freer to set up smarter regulations when they later take this step.

Last week’s contest was won by Geoduck, who edged out Liberal Scientist by a few minutes. It was Surprise, AZ.

This week’s contest is somewhere in Washington state, good luck!

This Tuesday, Governor Inslee and Attorney General Ferguson will meet with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss the implementation of the state’s new marijuana regulations. According to Inslee’s communications director, David Postman, Inslee requested the meeting.

A good part of this news I’m enthusiastic about. Despite not being a supporter of I-502 during the campaign, Inslee appears to be keeping his word about supporting its implementation, part of which could involve some butting of heads with the Obama Administration. Inslee has a certain amount of leverage right now to get things started. He’s a Democratic governor in a state that just overwhelmingly voted to bring about this change.

Also, with Eric Holder staying on the job in Obama’s second term, it’ll be easier for Inslee to come to an understanding that won’t be swept under the rug by someone else coming in. Maybe I’m being too optimistic about that considering what happened with Obama’s promises regarding medical marijuana in his first term, but it’s worth noting that states that had more thorough statewide medical marijuana regulations (like Colorado, New Mexico, and New Jersey) didn’t have as much interference as states that didn’t (like California and Montana).

Regulated marijuana sales to all adults are certainly another level of defiance against federal prohibition, and the Obama Administration has yet to make any kind of statement about respecting statewide laws like I-502 that they previously did with medical marijuana laws (and then didn’t quite keep). But the country has transformed quite a bit since medical marijuana laws started becoming a reality in the 90s. When even the Drug Czar is forced to acknowledge the changed landscape, we’re in uncharted territory.

If Inslee and Ferguson can get a promise (even if it’s a private one) from Holder that they’ll respect the implementation of I-502, that’ll be an even more significant sign of how much things have changed. I-502 was set up with this in mind, including a number of provisions meant to placate the fears of feds (requiring facilities to be 1000 ft from schools and parks, FBI background checks for licensees, per se DUI language). That may be enough for the Administration to take that next leap.

But it may not. It’s also possible that Holder will dig in his heels for the drug war establishment and tell Inslee to put the brakes on I-502’s implementation or to expect enforcement actions or a lawsuit. I’d hope that Inslee would be able to explain how politically unwise this is, but it’s not clear where his thinking (or the Administration’s) is on all this. All of this is now happening in the shadow of the larger battle over gun control, and the optics of overriding a law like I-502 in the midst of that could make for some unusual alliances.

We’ll find out something on Tuesday, even if it’s just that the Administration is still not ready to commit to anything. As I’ve mentioned before, this may be the worst outcome, as it casts doubt over the ability of the WSLCB to start regulating this market without the participants later becoming criminals.

Last week’s contest was won by Darryl. It was in Markham, Ontario.

This week we shift over to Google Maps to find this random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

Andrew Sullivan has been dutifully debunking some of the terrible arguments in defense of marijuana prohibition. Conor Friedersdorf has been doing the same. The discussion in those posts centers around a defense of paternalism being made by those in favor of keeping marijuana markets underground. Mark Kleiman here makes a partial defense of those arguments:

Sullivan is horrified by the frank paternalism involved, but horror isn’t a criticism, and he’s wrong to attribute to Frum and Dreher the notion that “all American adults are basically children that we have to protect from their own choices.” What Frum and Dreher are saying is that some Americans – many of them minors – are indeed in need of protection from their own bad choices. (Dreher is especially clear-minded in pointing out that the need for paternalistic protection varies not just from person to person but from choice to choice: lots of people are capable of managing their diets but not their retirement financial planning. I, for example, want paternalistic protection against being sold adulterated drugs or contaminated food.) There’s no logical flaw in the idea that more-liberal policies in a variety of domains might serve the interests of those better-placed to make good choices at the expense of those worse-placed.

There’s an important distinction that’s not being made here. There’s a difference between an uninformed choice, where a buyer is unaware of the true consequences of their decision-making, and a potentially “bad” choice, where people are fully aware of the consequences of their decision-making and are willing to accept the risks. In the former, we should certainly have laws that protect consumers from having to make uninformed decisions where the seller has an advantage that they can exploit. That’s true in our financial markets and in various other places. But it’s not true for adults buying marijuana.

When adults buy marijuana, they’re not being conned into buying a product they don’t understand. For minors, you can more easily make that argument, and that’s why the folks pushing for the end of marijuana prohibition support age limits on its purchase in a regulated market. Like Kleiman, I’d love to see “paternalistic” laws against being sold adulterated marijuana, but those laws are only possible in a legal, regulated marketplace. But identifying any adult purchase of marijuana as a “bad” choice that needs to be prevented is a far different level of paternalism than trying to keep people from being suckered into a bad mortgage or buying contaminated fruit.

The second half of Kleiman’s post tries to make an interesting parallel between prohibition and a lack of prohibition, which was summarized in this tweet:

Legalizing drugs tempts people into drug abuse. Banning them tempts people with drug dealing.

— SameFacts (@SameFacts) January 11, 2013

Both Pete Guither and I found this to be odd, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. I find this to be a very uneven parallel between prohibition and regulated markets. Even under prohibition, the risks of drug abuse still exist, and in some ways they can be exacerbated. Yet under a regulated market, drug dealing is called “commerce”. There aren’t people being tempted into a potentially lucrative (although usually not) life of illegally producing or selling those drugs. The tradeoffs are far from equal in their magnitude.

To expand on that a bit, I certainly know some folks here in Washington who have more interest in trying marijuana now that it’s legal. Taking away that stigma of illegality will certainly expand the amount of folks who are willing to try it. But that subset of the population tends to be older, and far less likely to embark on a lifetime of vaporizer sessions after breakfast. So Kleiman is correct to note that drug use could go up, but on the other side of that, regulated markets that limit sales only to adults will put up a barrier at the other end of the age scale.

Most people accept that lots of young people will still be able to get access to marijuana through friends or with fake ID’s (just as with alcohol), but it’s an additional barrier that didn’t exist before. And it’s being put where it can do the most good, as numerous studies have shown that the earlier in life a marijuana habit begins, the more likely it is to become a more serious problem. Even if that trade-off yields higher overall use rates, it could potentially still be better overall from a drug abuse standpoint.

And thankfully, we already have the experience of Holland over the past several decades to know that an open marketplace for marijuana doesn’t lead to large increases in use. Compared to neighboring countries, the Dutch don’t use marijuana at a higher rate, despite the temptation of coffeeshops where it can be freely purchased.

The main point here is that the first part of Kleiman’s trade-off is largely negligible in its magnitude (and possibly non-existent). Yet the second part is enormous, when you factor in the overall societal costs of funneling tens of billions of dollars into a lucrative black market, tempting those with few options into risking arrest to get some of that money. Kleiman suggests that in poorer neighborhoods, this trade-off might still be close. I find that to be laughable, and more and more people in poor and minority communities are demanding an end to the drug war for the very same reason.

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist, who got all 6 locations (Oakland, CA – Minneapolis, MN – Webster, NY – Pittsburgh, PA – Oak Creek, WI – Hollidaysburg, PA).

This week’s is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck! And Go Seahawks!

– I find there to be somewhat of a logical inconsistency in the outrage over a newspaper in New York identifying who has handgun permits in their area. We often hear that regardless of how accessible you make guns, people who want them will still have them. To a very limited extent, I agree with that. But if that’s true for guns, why isn’t it true for the information about gun permits? The gun permit information that the newspaper printed was publicly available. Anyone could look it up. They just made it more accessible. Does that additional accessibility make a difference? Particularly to an unstable person who might never have thought to look that up in the first place? For folks who are making that argument, the same logic applies to guns.

– I was going to write up something about how Rob McKenna’s acknowledgement that the GOP needs to work harder to appeal to women, minorities, and young people is an odd realization to have immediately after a career filled with supporting terrible policies for women, minorities, and young people, but after some Googling, I found that Cienna Madrid already wrote it for me.

– It’s cool to see how much interest there is in legal pot farming, but I do worry that some folks are a little too optimistic about how easy it’ll be to hit the jackpot as a pot farmer. The taxes dictated by the initiative are high enough that margins will still be relatively low, and unless the state greatly limits the amount of licenses it gives out, people with no experience growing quality product might have trouble competing with more experienced growers. My advice to people looking to make money from Washington’s newfound liberty is to avoid the supply chain for now and focus on opening places where marijuana users can congregate: an Amsterdam-style coffee shop with an outdoor smoking area, a movie theater with a rooftop patio, video arcade, bowling alley, concert hall, etc, etc.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was the dental office in Fort Dodge, Iowa that was at the center of a recent court case involving a dental assistant who was fired for being “too sexy”.

This is the last contest of 2012 and since it’s the fifth Sunday of the month as well, I’m going to do a special year end contest. Normally when I do the month-end contests related to a news item, I try to avoid particularly sad events like shootings. Unfortunately they dominated the news this year, especially in the past month. Far too often, we saw some unbalanced jackass with a gun end the lives of random, innocent people. The six pictures below are all from tragic mass shootings within the past year. Good luck, happy New Year, and may there be far fewer of these in 2013.

Two notes:
1 – All views are default orientation (up is north) and a mass shooting is defined as any event where a gunman kills multiple people indiscriminately
2 – The “no political comments” rule will be strictly enforced in this thread – feel free to send me an email if I don’t peel myself away from watching football quickly enough

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Mark Kleiman accuses Eugene Jarecki, director of the anti-drug war movie “The House I Live In”, of engaging in some truthiness:

I saw a screening of the anti-incarceration documentary The House I Live In some months ago. The film is right that prisons are horrible places and that we have vastly too many people in them. And it’s right that the “war on drugs” causes untold needless suffering. But the film strongly implies that the mass-incarceration problem consists mostly of non-violent drug dealers serving ludicrously long terms. False.

In fact, only about 20% of U.S. incarceration is on drug charges, and by no means are all of those folks non-violent. That’s still way too many drug prisoners; have drugs-only incarceration rate higher than the total incarceration rate of anyplace we’d like to compare ourselves with. But if we let them tomorrow, we’d still have four times our historical incarceration rate and four times the incarceration rate of any other OECD country, instead of five times.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t say for sure that Kleiman is misrepresenting Jarecki’s viewpoint, but his use of “strongly implies” rather than “says” makes me very suspicious that he is. If Jarecki is merely saying that the drug war is primarily responsible for our mass incarceration problems, he’s correct. And Kleiman’s response that only 20% of those incarcerated are there for drug charges misses the bigger picture by a mile.

The most widespread damage done by the drug war isn’t necessarily that low-level drug offenders go to jail for a long time. The damage is done by the downstream effects of having that in your criminal record for the rest of your life. Even if someone arrested for simple drug possession never goes to jail, they often take plea deals that leave them with a criminal record. And that follows them everywhere, making it extremely difficult for many of them to get money for school, get into public housing, or find employment. People caught in this situation often become destined to a life of more serious and more violent crime.

So to imply that 80% of America’s prisoners would still be there regardless of the war on drugs is incredibly off-base. A significant number of those prisoners had their first contact with the criminal justice system as a result of the drug war and – as a result of that contact – were set on a path of likelier criminality. This phenomenon is explained very well by Michelle Alexander in “The New Jim Crow”. And with over 1 million drug arrests occurring annually, we’re putting enormous amounts of Americans down this path, particularly minorities and the poor.

In addition, this analysis doesn’t even take into account the fact that many of the violent offenders in the criminal justice system are there because of the prohibitionist policies that lead to violent confrontations within black markets in the first place. As one of the commenters to the post pointed out, the Global Commission on Drug Policy points out quite simply that “Drug Policy and the incarceration of low-level drug offenders is the primary cause of mass incarceration in the United States.” I have trouble believing that Kleiman would dispute that, but his post “strongly implies” that he does.

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist. It was the concert grounds at the Tulalip Casino.

This week’s is related to something in the news from December (it was hard, but I found something not related to a shooting). Good luck!

Last Friday’s shooting shook this country to its core, arguably more than any single event since 9/11. The senselessness, the innocence of the victims, and the proximity to Christmas really jarred us into a new political reality – one where gun control efforts no longer feel like a political taboo. People I know who generally reject gun control based upon a vague notion of 2nd Amendment rights have begun to question the logical underpinnings of those arguments. And we’re starting to get smarter about recognizing that certain types of gun crimes and gun deaths do correlate with gun ownership rates.

The issue of gun control has always been a difficult one for me to navigate. I have been, and continue to be, rather skeptical that gun control efforts in this country can do much of anything on their own to fix this. Our fascination – or perhaps obsession – with guns is unparalleled in the world. I often hear arguments such as “if Australia and the UK can ban guns, so can we” and that translates to me as “if Saudi Arabia can ban alcohol, so can we”. No other country has the level of consumer demand for powerful and extreme firearms that we do.

Our problem is now a deeply rooted cultural one. It’s not that I don’t think it can ever change, I just don’t think there’s a set of realistic laws that can bring about that change by itself. It has to be a cultural shift over time. It will happen if the next generation of Americans grows up with a healthy measure of disgust over our obsessive gun culture and firearm extremism.

The best parallel I can point to is with cigarettes. Within a generation, we’ve greatly stigmatized being a smoker, while also passing a number of laws that didn’t outlaw smoking, but made it more inconvenient. It’s likely the laws did less than the information campaign to educate people about its unhealthiness, but both happened in parallel. And cigarette smoking was greatly reduced over my lifetime.

My background following the drug war also colors my perspective on this subject. I’m skeptical – even fearful – of overarching efforts to disarm all Americans. I still feel that it’s a fundamental right to feel secure in one’s one home and that we should have a right to privately own firearms for our own protection or for sport. But another thing we can learn from the history of drug regulation and prohibition is that smart regulations that steer demand towards safer products can sometimes work as well. Would an outright ban on assault weapons reduce the amount of damage that a mass shooter can do, or would those restrictions easily be circumvented by a black market that comes with with own significant security drawbacks?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I’ve heard smart arguments on both sides and there’s really no historical parallel that fits the mess we’re in. But one thing is clear, and it became much clearer after watching the insane spectacle of NRA President Wayne LaPierre’s remarks Friday morning. The NRA and other “pro-gun” lobbying groups have played an outsized and inexcusable role in getting us where we are today.

To understand what I’m talking about, this New York Times article about Newtown’s recent internal conflicts over gun rights is a good starting point:

But in the last couple of years, residents began noticing loud, repeated gunfire, and even explosions, coming from new places. Near a trailer park. By a boat launch. Next to well-appointed houses. At 2:20 p.m. on one Wednesday last spring, multiple shots were reported in a wooded area on Cold Spring Road near South Main Street, right across the road from an elementary school.

Yet recent efforts by the police chief and other town leaders to gain some control over the shooting and the weaponry turned into a tumultuous civic fight, with traditional hunters and discreet gun owners opposed by assault weapon enthusiasts, and a modest tolerance for bearing arms competing with the staunch views of a gun industry trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which has made Newtown its home.

It’s important to remember that the NRA doesn’t exist today to serve the basic interests of gun owners. It exists to protect the profits of gun manufacturers and others in the marketplace for firearms. Everything that LaPierre said yesterday makes perfect sense when you understand this. Every solution is always about more guns being purchased, even if it means via taxpayer money for absurd and unrealistic things, like putting armed guards in every American school.

And even when LaPierre doesn’t have actual events to springboard from, he makes them up. Throughout Obama’s presidency, he’s been loudly warning people that Obama is planning to take their guns away. This nonsense has had exactly the intended effect, higher gun sales. And even worse, this kind of paranoid rhetoric tends to focus that message on the already somewhat unstable. We no longer had a marketplace for guns that was mostly about hunting and recreation or for responsible folks who merely want to protect their home. We have more and more people building up arsenals of ridiculously powerful weapons they don’t need. We’ve ended up with folks like Nancy Lanza, a woman who – for reasons that make no sense to anyone – was preparing for some kind of apocalyptic scenario and stockpiling the weapons that would instead kill her and a classroom of small children.

After the Gabby Giffords shooting, a lot of folks on the right were quick to dismiss the connection to right wing politics, and they were right, but they were also missing the bigger point. Certainly Jared Loughner wasn’t a typical right-wing tea partier by any stretch. But he was mentally unstable. And even though Loughner wasn’t a true believer of right-wing politics, he was clearly influenced by an atmosphere were the rhetoric of gun violence was unusually commonplace. I think this is becoming the common thread, that more and more unstable and paranoid folks in this country don’t just have access to firearms, they’re constantly being bombarded with messages about how they need those firearms to protect themselves from some vague internal enemy. That, I’m convinced, is far worse than any lack of sensible gun laws.

The irony here, of course, is that the cultivation of this paranoia might actually lead to the scenario that many of them have been warning about. Obama has had no interest in gun control so far. It’s only now that we’re seeing mass shootings by unstable people at an unprecedented frequency that he’s being forced to take action. My worry is that those who expect new gun laws to be an automatic panacea are going to be mighty disappointed at their ineffectiveness. Our gun problem is a uniquely American one. It’s one that we should be far more ashamed of. And it’s one that I worry we may be dealing with for a lot longer.