This weekend is the 10th anniversary of one of my favorite sites, TPM. Its format has grown from a simple one-person blog to a full-fledged news site, and they’ve done a good job of changing the perceptions of how news sites can be done. Joshua Green has a fun recounting of the early days of the site.

Last week’s contest was won by Scott, who recognized that it was the intersection of York Rd S and 36th Ave S in South Seattle.

This week’s contest is another random location someone in the world. Good luck!

Watching the Arizona-Stanford game right now, I want to post something that’s been on my mind related to college football. I don’t think I’ve ever met a college football fan who doesn’t despise the BCS system, but the money invested in the existing bowl system is what keeps us from ever getting the playoff system that everyone wants.

If college football fans want to usher in a playoff system, there’s one easy way to do it:

Stop going to the bowl games.

You could force the NCAA to adopt a playoff system by the end of January if the bowls were all played in front of tens of thousands of empty seats. I don’t understand why this isn’t discussed as a way to force their hand. You can yell and scream all you want about how much the BCS sucks, but they’re not going to listen until you figure out how to hit them in their wallets.

Levi Pulkkinen reports:

Thirteen teens associated with Redmond High School are facing drug charges after a long-running undercover operation involving a police officer posing as a student.

In charging documents filed earlier this week in King County Juvenile Court, investigators describe the months-long operation that saw a Redmond police detective enroll in the high school and buy drugs from students there.

Enrolled as a senior in August 2009, the detective described herself as a transfer student who’d recently moved to Redmond from California. She attended classes, ate lunch at the school and lived as a high school student until 11 students were arrested in February.

According to charging documents, the undercover officer was able to buy a wide variety of illicit drugs at the suburban high school, including ecstasy, heroin and cocaine.

Investigations like these are upsetting to me on a number of levels. For starters, if there are 13 different students dealing drugs at your suburban high school, arresting those students will – at best – provide a short window of time where those drugs are hard to obtain. In other words, if there’s enough commerce going on that it requires 13 different drug dealers to satisfy the demand, other sellers will quickly fill that void.

That said, I don’t really believe that there were 13 separate drug dealers supplying the students of Redmond High with drugs. What often happens in investigations like this one is the following scenario:

The female undercover officer enrolls in the school with the intent to seek out the “dealers”. With a little effort, she’s able to locate students who are occasional drug users. She then approaches a 16-year-old boy who perhaps some other students have told her smokes pot. This kid isn’t a drug dealer, but he knows the people who are. The undercover officer approaches him about acquiring drugs, asking “hey, do you know where I can buy drugs?” The 16-year-old, who thinks this new girl from California is kind of cute and now thinks she also likes to smoke pot, wants to impress her and decides to be the middleman himself. He visits someone he knows he can get some drugs from, buys them and brings it to her. He’s now a potential felon.

Without knowing any of the details of the cases against these 13 young people, no one other than the accused themselves has any idea how many would fit the profile I gave, but I have trouble believing that this one undercover cop managed to bring down over a dozen truly dangerous drug dealers in a single high school. Yes, drugs are widespread in our high schools, whether they’re in the city or out in the wealthy suburbs. But for the student in the scenario I gave, while his parents should rightfully be upset that he’s able to find drugs in high school, getting arrested will be far more detrimental to his prospects in life than the drugs were.

As a parent myself, this weighs heavily on my mind. I’m not happy about the fact that it’s so easy to get drugs in our schools (and it’s the main reason why I fight for regulated sales of softer drugs like marijuana and ecstasy – so that they can be as hard to obtain as alcohol), but sending in undercover officers to entrap at-risk teenage boys is not the right solution. In fact, it generally ends up being more of a threat to young people than a benefit.

California’s Proposition 19 failed at the polls last night, gaining only 46% of the vote. Here are some observations and thoughts [Thursday Updates below]:

– Despite the vote result, recreational marijuana users in California will still be able to purchase and consume high-quality marijuana. With the current system California has now, recreational users just have to visit any one of the doctors around the state who are willing to take their money in return for a medical authorization card. Technically, that makes them “medicinal” users, but the reality is that many of the people who hold medicinal authorizations are either suffering from rather superficial things or completely making it up. Once you have that card, however, you can buy marijuana at any of the state’s many dispensaries. And for those who haven’t taken the time to get a medical authorization, a sizable black market outside of the dispensary system continues to exist.

If anyone in California went to the polls yesterday thinking that their vote on Proposition 19 would have an impact on anyone’s ability to buy or consume marijuana, they were mistaken (the one exception to that is minors, who will still be able to purchase marijuana without having to show proof of age). What Proposition 19 would have done is to establish regulations for the overall industry. Proposition 19 was much more about the back door of the dispensary than the front door. It would have allowed for local and county governments to establish rules and regulations for production and distribution. As it stands now, dispensaries still supply themselves from unregulated growers without any oversight. For now, the DEA has backed off a bit on trying to take down these growers, but supply chains are still largely secret, and a certain percentage of the suppliers are tied to organized crime. The defeat of Proposition 19 was a very clear victory for the drug cartels in Mexico, who would have had an extremely hard time competing in a regulated marketplace.

– It’s not entirely clear how much of an impact Proposition 19 had on the rest of the ballot, but there are some strong signs that it helped California Democrats across the board. Democrats won every single statewide office in the state, from Governor to Insurance Commissioner. People tended to be focused on looking at the youth vote when assessing the effect of Proposition 19, but that was only part of the picture:

But judging by exit polling, which shows a strong conservative tide elsewhere in the country, the conservative surge did not materialize in California. This year’s electorate ended up looking a lot like 2006, according to exit poll data from both years.

Conservatives made up 33% of the California electorate this time around, according to preliminary results from this year’s California exit poll. Four years ago, the figure was 30%. Liberals made up 27% this time, compared with 25% four years ago. The percentage of self-identified moderates dropped to 40% this time, compared with 44% in 2006, the exit poll showed.

A similar pattern showed up when the exit poll asked voters what party they usually identify with. This time around, the results were 42% Democratic, 31% Republican and 27% independent. That compares with 40% Democrats, 35% Republicans and 25% independents in 2006.

While the 18-29 turnout in California was only modestly above average (13% vs. 11%), the enthusiasm of Democratic and liberal voters of all ages seems to have been greater in California than elsewhere. It may not have been enough to get Proposition 19 passed, but it appears to have helped negate the Republican wave in that state.

– One of the more interesting subplots of the initiative was the opposition coming from folks within the existing medical marijuana community. Even Dennis Peron, the man behind California’s initial medical marijuana law, opposed Proposition 19 using some rather bizarre reasoning. Other opponents of Proposition 19 were small growers who feared that legalization would lead to bigger corporations eating into their market share. In fact, the initiative got under 50% in the two rural counties notorious for growing much of the state’s marijuana, Humboldt and Mendocino. In response to this circular firing squad, one Proposition 19 supporter is now compiling a boycott list.

The sources of support and opposition for Proposition 19 were never as simple as potheads vs parents. The reason it went down had less to do with people’s moral views of pot (surveys have long shown that legalization in general has well over 50% support in California) than with discomfort over the specifics of this particular attempt at establishing regulation. Newspapers across the state, as well as the major politicians in each party, came out against the measure, finding enough gray areas (and inventing others) to defeat the measure and postpone the inevitable for a few more years. And as Kevin Drum points out here, California’s initiative-driven economic mess is only going to get worse, making it even more urgent for the state to figure out how to collect tax revenue on all that money being made by marijuana growers – many of whom were quite content to see Proposition 19 fail.

UPDATE: A few more items from Thursday:

– Matt Yglesias has some really sharp analysis here and provides a graph showing the demographic breakdown differences for all ages from 2008 to 2010.

If the demographic breakdown would have been like it was in 2008, the initiative would have still failed, but with a much closer margin (48.4% vs. 51.6%).

– Jeffrey Miron, the Harvard Professor who’s done a lot of great work on the economic impacts of drug legalization, has some self-serving concern trolling here. While I thought that Miron’s criticisms of some of the economic hyperbole of Prop 19 supporters were very valuable, anyone trying to win a statewide initiative effort should probably ignore most of what he’s saying. He gives very good advice for winning a policy debate with your wonky friends, but winning a statewide initiative campaign is a different beast altogether. Sometimes, if not most of the time, using hyperbole rather than reason is the better strategy. I don’t necessarily like this, but it’s the truth.

I think the campaign against I-1100 proved this. The fiscal reasons to vote against I-1100 were far more solid than the public safety issues, but the campaign hammered on the latter while largely ignoring the former. And that strategy appeared to work. People were largely scared at what would happen if access to alcohol was expanded, even though there’s little evidence to show that expanded access has any measurable detrimental effects. Miron believes that marijuana legalization campaigns should focus on the personal liberty aspects of legalization moreso than the public safety aspects. I think that would be a huge mistake.

– Steve Elliott has more insight into the widespread opposition to Proposition 19 from the marijuana growers themselves, who feared that they would lose their foothold in the current unregulated supply chain for the state’s dispensaries.

In case you missed it, NPR put out a great report on how the for-profit prison industry assisted in getting Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law on the books. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, as it shows how things that appear to be “grassroots” or being driven by the anger of everyday people are actually far more cynical efforts by special interests to boost their own bottom lines.

One aspect of this story, however, really jumped out at me:

It was last December at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC.

It’s a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association. Another member is the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country.

…

“ALEC is the conservative, free-market orientated, limited-government group,” said Michael Hough, who was staff director of the meeting.

Hough works for ALEC, but he’s also running for state delegate in Maryland, and if elected says he plans to support a similar bill to Arizona’s law.

That’s right. Not only are there state legislators around the country who enact laws that directly benefit private for-profit companies who build and run prisons (whose profits come directly from taxpayers, of course), but these legislators have the nerve to refer to that as “limited-government.”

There are a lot of misused and misunderstood terms in our political discourse – from socialist to libertarian to fascist – but I’m not sure any of that has been anywhere near as cynical as how the term “limited-government” has been used. It’s now been attached to the belief that we need to round up illegal immigrants en masse and house them in prisons (the 4th Amendment be damned!). And this is not an anomaly. I see this sentiment repeatedly on right-wing Tea Party blogs. There’s a weird kind of cognitive dissonance going on where the presence of large numbers of undocumented migrant workers is indicative of “big government” and the effort to arrest them all and put them in prison is “limited government”. The Tea Party movement, which we’re repeatedly told believes in “limited-government”, only believes in it as a slogan, not as an actual coherent political philosophy.

Last week’s contest was won by waguy. It was the law school at Widener University in Wilmington, DE where Christine O’Donnell recently discovered what the First Amendment to the Constitution says.

This is the fifth Sunday of the month, and what I think I’ll do for fifth Sundays is have it be specific to Washington state. Here’s this week’s, good luck.

Tonight at 7:15pm the Cannabis Defense Coalition is hosting a legislative forum in their SoDo headquarters with Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles and City Councilman Nick Licata to discuss the bill being introduced next session to create a working dispensary system in the state. There will be a live webcast of the forum at this site.

I’m impressed with the amount of work that CDC’s volunteers have put into this space. Below the fold are two pictures from the newly renovated Cannabis Resource Center.

[Read more…]

My ballot was mailed earlier this week, but unlike Goldy, I was torn over I-1100. I’d really like to see the state’s monopoly over liquor sales go away. The state store system is archaic, and one can easily look at state-by-state statistics to see that states with privatized liquor sales don’t have more problems with drunk driving (one of the bogus scare tactics that proponents have been using to get people to vote against it). There’s an argument to be made that underage people could potentially access liquor easier, but I think that’s a problem that can be solved with better enforcement and larger fines.

On the other hand, I wasn’t convinced that I-1100 adequately addressed the drop in revenue that would occur from dismantling the system. And in a year where our revenue problems aren’t showing any signs of improving, this outweighed my desire to move to a regulatory system that was more customer- and retailer-friendly. I ended up voting against it.

I’m currently reading Last Call by Daniel Okrent, a book detailing the history of alcohol prohibition. What’s interesting is that when the late 19th century movement to ban alcohol was gathering steam, the movement ran into a similar problem:

By 1910 the federal government was drawing more than $200 million a year from the bottle and the keg – 71 percent of all internal revenue, and more than 30 percent of federal revenue overall. Only external revenue – the tariff – provided a larger share of the federal budget, and by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the tariff’s continuation was the most intensely debated issue in American public life. It would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax. Given that you wouldn’t collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes.

It may make us feel uncomfortable to have our budgets rely on revenue generated by the sale of alcohol, but that was the reality then and it’s the reality now. In fact, Okrent points out that taxes on liquor helped fund each of the wars of the 19th century, from the War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War. Right now, our state relies on the revenue it generates from controlling the sale of liquor. I’d be perfectly happy with breaking that dependency, but it doesn’t happen from wishful thinking alone. It requires figuring out how to restructure our tax system to allow for us to replace that lost revenue. With the outcome of I-1053 and I-1098 about to be decided as well – each having a large impact on how our tax system is structured, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not we’ll be able to do this in the near future – and that was too much uncertainty for me this time around.

I thought this kind of nonsense wasn’t supposed to happen in Seattle any more?

There are two separate court dates tomorrow – one in Thurston County (8:45am) and one in Kitsap County (1:30pm) – where controversial medical marijuana prosecutions are occurring. The one in Thurston County involves a wheelchair-bound man with hereditary spastic paraplegia who didn’t get an authorization from a doctor until after his arrest. The one in Kitsap County involves a caregiver whose patient re-sold marijuana to an undercover cop. I know little more about these cases, but will update this post tomorrow with any further updates.

Last week’s contest was won by uptown, who edged out Steve by only a matter of seconds. It’s was Sterling Heights, MI.

This week’s is related to something in the news from October. Good luck!

Nina Shapiro at the Seattle Weekly writes about Tuesday’s protest in Tacoma over the city’s threat to close down eight medical marijuana dispensaries:

Yesterday’s showdown in Tacoma over the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries all but guarantees that the Legislature will finally attempt to resolve the question of whether such business are–or should be– legal. After the city initially threatened to shut the dispensaries down, it agreed last night to hold off until the end of the coming legislative session. Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) has already drafted a bill (see pdf) that proposes legalizing dispensaries. A number of fellow legislators, including a former cop and Republican senator named Jerome Delvin, are working with her. “There’s momentum,” says Kohl-Welles.

At the protest I spoke with an older woman who’s authorized to use marijuana to deal with severe muscle spasms that make it difficult for her to walk. I asked her where she’d be able to get her supply of marijuana if her dispensary were to close. She didn’t have an answer. The reality is that our medical marijuana law doesn’t work unless the law provides a safe and legal place for patients to obtain it. The one-patient-per-provider rule has left numerous patients – especially those who are disabled – from being able to obtain medicine. And the opposition to this obvious change is going to come from the same place once again:

On the other side of the spectrum, Rep. Christopher Hurst (D-Enumcluw) says he believes many legislators will oppose any bill that favors dispensaries. “You only need to look south” to California, he says, to realize that the dispensary business is a “sham,” a “nightmare,” and a “disaster.” Instead of serving people with real medical needs, he contends, California’s ubiquitous dispensaries sell pot “to anyone who walks in the door.” He says that’s why Los Angeles, among other jurisdictions, are currently cracking down on dispensaries, even while a broad pot legalization initiative is on the ballot.

California’s system is constantly held up as an example of how medical marijuana leads to “chaos”, but the only evidence of this is that unscrupulous doctors often authorize recreational users for profit. And even with that, California isn’t negatively affected in any way by its dispensary system. In fact, crime rates continue to drop across the state – to levels far lower than in the years before medical marijuana became legal.

That’s the root of the issue here. The more we legitimize this economic activity and bring it out of the shadows, the less violence there is surrounding it. Mexican drug cartels operate in Washington state. When locally-operated dispensaries are prohibited from forming, that just means more of the money goes towards those less afraid to break the law. Whether Representative Hurst understands it or not, what he’s doing is benefiting these organized crime groups.

It may seem hyperbolic to say that Hurst “stands up for the drug cartels”, but that’s unquestionably what’s occurring here. There’s no other way to characterize his position. The experience in Los Angeles, if anything, is an argument to craft realistic regulations for dispensaries (as Oakland and many other California cities did) rather than to follow Hurst’s lead and pretend everything would be better if they didn’t exist. If Los Angeles had set up a smarter method for licensing dispensaries, they’d have a small number of well-regulated dispensaries (again, like Oakland) rather than hundreds of unregulated ones that they’re now having difficulty shutting down.

The city of Tacoma has decided to crack down on its medical marijuana dispensaries. There’s an ongoing debate about the legality of dispensaries in this state, and Chris Legeros explains it well right here:

The city’s claim, detailed in a letter sent out to the co-ops last week, is that the co-ops are acting illegally by dispensing marijuana to more than one person. The city claims that under state law, a designated provider of medical marijuana can only help one patient at any one time.

“…In these businesses, that’s not the case; it’s a business supplying it to many patients,” said Rob McNair-Huff a city spokesman.

But Jay Berneburg, a lawyer for The C.O.B.R.A. Medical Group, one of the co-ops targeted by the city, has disputed that claim and said the co-op is complying with both the letter and the intent of the law.

Every patient who comes in to C.O.B.R.A. signs a form designating C.O.B.R.A. as their provider, Berneburg said. After receiving their marijuana, the patients immediately sign the form again, removing C.O.B.R.A. as their provider.

“And that means the designated provider who can only be a designated provider to any one person at a time is now available to be somebody else’s designated provider,” Berneburg said.

Dispensaries around the state have been relying on this creative interpretation of the law in order to operate, but after a review, Tacoma warned eight such establishments in the city that they’re breaking the law and will be shut down. In response, there’s a rally planned this evening outside the Tacoma City Council meeting. I’m planning to head down there shortly and might update this post later with additional info and/or photos.

UPDATE: There are about 100 protestors here, along with some news media. I spoke briefly with James Lucas from Tacoma Cross, a dispensary that opened in April and is under threat of shutdown.

His employees are here wearing their corporate logoed shirts. Lucas tells me that he’s licensed with the city to operate his business and he pays all federal, state and local taxes required of any business.

UPDATE 2: There are now roughly 200-250 protestors here and it appears that their presence has made a difference. Douglas Hiatt and other patient representatives just came out of the Tacoma Municipal Building and it appears that the city will allow the dispensaries to continue to operate until the legislature has an opportunity to fix the law in the next session.

[Read more…]

Last week’s contest had two winners. ‘Milk’ was the first to identify the house as the home of the Duggars, the Arkansas family with 19 kids who have their own show on TLC. And Brian wins for finding the view.

This week’s is just a random location, good luck!