Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Detroit.

This week’s is from the Google Maps 45 degree views, good luck!

Dylan Matthews has a graph-filled post at Wonkblog digging into the data behind the just-released report on the racial disparity in marijuana law enforcement.

When I first saw this on Twitter yesterday, I was certain that the disparity figures reported by the ACLU marked a decrease from previous years, but they’re mostly unchanged over the past decade. Historically, the disparity for all drugs is even higher, particularly because of crack-cocaine enforcement.

I’ve been thrilled to see sharp, wonky folks like Matthews dive into this subject more and more since marijuana was made legal here and in Colorado (and here’s another post from Talking Points Memo, which has begun covering this topic with more frequency as well). But I think Matthews undersells the seriousness of the problem when he writes this:

How important is this? Well, while making up a quite small share of our prison population, marijuana possession charges make up nearly half of total drug arrests:

Obviously, being arrested without going to jail is a lot better than getting arrested and going to jail. But it’s still a major nuisance, leading to fines, long hours of community service and thousands of dollars in legal fees.

The downsides of having a marijuana arrest are often far worse than just fines and legal fees. Many of those arrested end up taking pleas in order to avoid jail. Part of that deal is that you plead guilty to a felony charge in order to avoid that jail term. And that felony charge goes on your record and follows you around for the rest of your life. For a young black man, often with little financial resources to get ahead in the first place, this makes it just about impossible to further their education or find employment. They become doomed to what has been appropriately described as the “new Jim Crow”, a second-class status that keeps them outside of the walls of opportunity for life.

The 4 to 1 disparity discussed by the ACLU doesn’t even take into account what happens after these arrests. Those with the resources to fight back can often get their charges reduced or thrown out. Those without them end up being told to plea guilty by an overworked public defender. To see the kind of impact this is happening in our major cities, just take a look at this chart within Matthews’ post:

For so many of the urban areas listed there, these arrests are portrayed as a public safety need. But they’re exactly the opposite. When you have an urban area that has problems with gangs – which thrive from the policies of prohibition in the first place – all this does is give those gangs more young people to recruit, young people that might have other avenues if they didn’t have a felony on their record holding them back. It’s not a coincidence that Chicago’s astronomical arrest figures for at-risk youth go hand-in-hand with its astronomical homicide figures. It’s what you should expect to happen when you do this.

Last week’s contest was won by Jay S. It was the site of the shooting of Ibragim Todashev in Orlando, Florida.

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

As I mentioned last night, former Microsoft employee Jamen Shively’s press conference with former Mexican President Vicente Fox went down today:

Shively described grand visions for his pot brand — hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, tens of millions of customers, more than 1,000 jobs just at Diego Pellicer’s Seattle headquarters.

“Yes, we are Big Marijuana,” he announced.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last March, the company wrote that it had raised $125,000 of an anticipated $625,000. Shively suggested those were outdated, but did not provide different figures.

I’m far from someone who has concerns about a commercial marijuana industry. I find it natural that once marijuana is legal and regulated, there will be companies that will grow to resemble the large brewers and distillers in this country. They will even pander to heavy smokers and largely not care about people who develop dependency issues with their product. As far as I’m concerned, this is still far better than settling turf wars with gun battles and not having any government oversight into their production processes.

But I’m somewhat annoyed by what Shively is doing here (even beyond what I mentioned last night about the risks he’s taking with respect to provoking the feds). What annoys me is that there’s a sense that he can become “big marijuana” just through marketing and good corporate gamesmanship alone. As we develop this new market, I have hopes that the Liquor Control Board errs on the side if giving out more licenses to more folks to foster an atmosphere of competition. If someone is going to become “big marijuana”, I want them to get there by having a superior product, and by working their ass off to grow a good company. Not because they have connections and a lot of capital.

This gets more interesting:

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox is arriving in Seattle on Wednesday night to meet with local marijuana entrepreneur Jamen Shively.

On Thursday, Fox will join Shively and other leaders at his Kirkland-based company, Diego Pellicer, for a press conference at the Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle. They will announce details of the company’s new acquisitions and plans to expand domestically and internationally.

A lot of people have been breathing a sigh of relief that the DOJ has been very quiet about their intentions so far. But that doesn’t mean nothing will happen. Everything they’ve said and done in recent years has been centered around one basic truth – if you get too big, you become a target. In fact, San Francisco’s U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag said exactly that when it came to her decision to target the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the country, Harborside. As the war they’ve been foolishly fighting for decades slowly falls apart, nothing raises the ire of drug warriors more than seeing people get rich in an industry that they’ve been conditioned to believe is illegitimate.

Shively is an interesting individual. At this month’s Cannabis Freedom March, he spoke about how he’s only recently discovered marijuana, when a “brilliant programmer” he worked with at Microsoft introduced him to it. As a corporate strategist, he obviously knows a lot about how to set up and run a company, but it’s not clear he knows what he’s getting into when it comes to the drug war. Mark Kleiman, our state’s marijuana consultant, thinks Shively may be trying to scam some folks out of investment capital without actually crossing any lines that would get his ass arrested. I’m highly skeptical of that, but Shively’s approach really has me scratching my head. I guess we’ll see what happens at the press conference tomorrow.

Last week’s contest went unsolved (as of Friday night). It was Brier Terrace Middle School in Brier.

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

Last week’s contest was won by Geoduck. It was Birmingham, England.

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

– This week saw the release of the Washington State Liquor Control Board’s draft regulations for the new marijuana markets legalized under I-502. Here’s a sample of what product labels could look like early in 2014.

– The most controversial aspect of the rules might be that hash and hash oils cannot be sold in the retail stores. Ben Livingston provides more context on why this is a mistake and goes against the intent of I-502.

– The Seattle Times calls for clarifying the medical marijuana rules in this state so that they make sense alongside I-502’s regulated market. Medical marijuana providers have already been fearing this outcome and I’m convinced it’s going to happen.

– I-502 got over 55% of the vote in this state, but at least one gentleman is still not won over.

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist. It was West Memphis, AR.

This week’s is in Google Maps 45 degree views, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was in Tupelo, MS (and I believe it’s the Taekwondo business that is now the center of the weird ricin case).

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

Last week’s contest was won by Geoduck. It was in Olympia.

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

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Miami Beach, FL.

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

Last week’s contest was really tough and no one got it. It was just outside of San Diego.

This week’s contest is an image from Google’s 45 degree views, good luck!

One of the biggest hurdles to implementing I-502 in Washington is banking:

Banks fall under the scrutiny of federal regulators such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. And bankers fear punishment if their account holders violate anti-money laundering laws. I’ve also heard that banks are worried about pot-related businesses leasing out space in commercial real estate properties on which banks hold loans, which could limit where marijuana producers or retailers locate.

The pot industry’s banking dilemma is making it harder for state leaders to set up a legal pot industry in Washington. Scott Jarvis, director of Washington’s Department of Financial Institutions, recently went to Washington, D.C., and met with several federal banking regulators seeking clarity. Jarvis left without an answer.

This has long been a problem for medical marijuana businesses and is expected to be just as problematic for the new recreational marijuana businesses in both Washington and Colorado. With the emergence of bitcoins, however, does this provide a workable alternative?

Once considered a nutty idea favored by computer geeks and anti-government types, bitcoin is gaining traction as a legitimate way to buy and sell goods.

True believers say it’s the future of Internet commerce, where the world is united in a common digital currency rather than dollars, euros, yens, pounds or pesos.

Shorter term, bitcoin has become a scorching-hot commodity among speculators who are trading the virtual currency at a record clip in deals worth millions of actual dollars.

I don’t have any well-formed opinions yet about the bitcoin phenomenon, but I’m very curious whether this would be a feasible workaround to the banking problem. I guess the main obstacles would be getting enough customer acceptance and perhaps tracking and paying all the required business taxes, but I certainly haven’t thought this through. Your thoughts?

I don’t have a whole lot to say about the issue of having private clubs within bars where individuals can use marijuana. There’s certainly a valid concern about the effect of mixing alcohol and marijuana and then having people drive home at night. But I think the best way to approach that is to promote an alternative rather than trying to make it impossible for anyone to gather and use marijuana.

Amsterdam has its coffeeshops and it’s always made sense to me that Seattle could replicate that, even if they were all private clubs rather than your typical Starbucks. But it makes sense to me that if you want to stop people from publicly partaking in a certain type of venue, you should give them a smarter alternative.