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Legalization Week Open Thread

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– Gene Johnson writes about how we got to this point.

– Based on Washington state data, a national market for regulated marijuana sales could be a nearly $50 billion a year market.

– In a letter to UW students, Eric Godfrey (Vice President and Vice Provost for Student Life) emphasizes that marijuana is still not allowed on University grounds. I’d imagine that’s probably true for alcohol as well, but hopefully someone can clarify in the comments. I’m curious to know if there’s a place on campus where alcohol is allowed, but marijuana would not be (for those over 21 of course).

– This Thursday at the Space Needle, people will gather to mark the milestone. Technically, using it outdoors is still illegal. But you only get to celebrate the end of prohibition once.

Comments

  1. 1

    It looks like they have to follow federal law, so it will be wherever its legal under federal law which is nowhere, not even if you are in the privacy of your own home writhing in pain with cancer and no other option works.

  2. 2

    From a quick Google look-up…

    Alcohol can now be served on the UW campus under a banquet permit, and as I recall there were several events connected with the University’s 150th anniversary at which adult beverages were available. Students over 21 are also allowed to have booze in their dorm rooms for personal consumption, but “common-use containers” (i. e. kegs) aren’t allowed in residence halls.

  3. 3

    If Washingtonians can afford to spend over $1 billion a year on marijuana, they can afford to pay more taxes for things we really need such as textbooks, school janitors, teachers, and health care.

  4. 4

    @ 3 RR

    Except that the people who support the idea of legalized marijuana are not the same people who oppose paying taxes. The folks who oppose taxation are the people who continue to vehemently support prohibition and demand ever-increasing levels of law enforcement against anyone who bucks the paradigm. The TeaBagger/Neonazi crowd would love to see the death penalty expanded to a lot of things. Like having an abortion or using birth control. Or having sex outside of marriage. Or resisting arrest. Or having brown skin.

    Not to mention being in possession of marijuana for recreational purposes.

  7. 7

    @ 6

    I live in TeaBagger country, jackass.

    I’m fascinated with the correlation of TeaBagger/White supremacist/John Birch Society/Sovereign Citizen people. They all seem to be driving the same truck or beater Cadillac with the Stars and Bars flag.

  8. 8

    @2
    Students over 21 are also allowed to have booze in their dorm rooms for personal consumption, but “common-use containers” (i. e. kegs) aren’t allowed in residence halls.

    I didn’t realize this. At U of Michigan, even students over 21 weren’t allowed to have alcohol in the dorms. My freshman year roommate was a junior. He turned 21 that October, but still got busted for having liquor in the room. I figured UW had the same rules.

  9. 9

    @5
    What?!? Do you think marijuana users across America have all figured out some magical way to get out of paying taxes?

    That’s pretty amazing!! And I thought the stereotype was that they were all lazy?

  10. 10

    @1
    From a practical standpoint, I don’t see how they can enforce anything off-campus. I think that even if a UW Police officer discovers that you’re in possession of marijuana after 12/6 (off campus), there’s nothing they can do. I believe they have to follow state law. Although I might need to look into this some more.

    I have a feeling that this issue is going to end up in a courtroom before the end of the school year.

  11. 11

    In any event, we can all agree that cannabis has been made legal in this state as a matter of individual liberty. Prohibition simply does not work, but adults who choose to use cannabis now that we’ve legalized in in WA should do so with restraint and caution. Remember, the government’s mad dog agency, the DEA, is highly pissed-off right now. They are so mad at having their power threatened that they will harm or kill people who flaunt the new cannabis laws in our state.

    I advise extreme discretion for those adults who choose to use cannabis. Don’t do it around children or in public, and, for Pete’s sake, don’t get caught driving down the street with a doobie between you thumb and index finger! Let’s not be stupid about this folks! If we’re responsible, cannabis will eventually become legal everywhere in the US and individual liberty will triumph over government oppression.

  13. 13

    Very interesting article on the hippest craze in corporate America since offshoring:

    “Insourcing”

    I swear, you live long enough, you get to see it all.

    The Big Picture:

    You can see this shift in America’s jobs data. Manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 at 19.6 million. They drifted down slowly for the next 20 years—over that span, the impact of offshoring and the steady adoption of labor-saving technologies was nearly offset by rising demand and the continual introduction of new goods made in America. But since 2000, these jobs have fallen precipitously. The country lost factory jobs seven times faster between 2000 and 2010 than it did between 1980 and 2000.

    Until very recently, this trend looked inexorable—and the significance of the much-vaunted increase in manufacturing jobs since the depths of the recession seemed easy to dismiss. Only 500,000 factory jobs were created between their low, in January 2010, and September 2012—a tiny fraction of the almost 6 million that were lost in the aughts.

    What eventually dawned on management suits:

    Business practices are prone to fads, and in hindsight, the rush to offshore production 10 or 15 years ago looks a little extreme. The distance across the Pacific Ocean was as wide then as it is now, and the speed of cargo ships was just as slow…

    “There was a herd mentality to the offshoring,” says John Shook, a manufacturing expert and the CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And there was some bullshit. But it was also the inability to see the total costs—the engineers in the U.S. and factory managers in China who can’t talk to each other; the management hours and money flying to Asia to find out why the quality they wanted wasn’t being delivered. The cost of all that is huge.”

    some of those shipping containers will be opened to reveal damaged or substandard goods, and some of them won’t have the number or variety of goods a company needs at that very moment. “All you need is to have to hire one or two 747s a couple times to get product here in a hurry,” says Shook, “and you lose those savings.

    And:

    Oil prices are three times what they were in 2000, making cargo-ship fuel much more expensive now than it was then.

    The natural-gas boom in the U.S. has dramatically lowered the cost for running something as energy-intensive as a factory here at home. (Natural gas now costs four times as much in Asia as it does in the U.S.)

    In dollars, wages in China are some five times what they were in 2000—and they are expected to keep rising 18 percent a year.

    Of course the worst part is that these new manufacturing jobs pay maybe $13.50/hour. Wow! Full time work in manufacturing and you look forward to a small EITC bonus from the federal government that the Republicans you vote for will try their utmost to take from you so millionaires and billionaires tax rates drop..

    Only in America!

  14. 14

    8)At EWU, back when I was going there, the rule was, you could have alcohol in your room, provided the door was closed when it was being consumed.(It was considered a private area with the door closed). I forget the container size limit, I only had a six pack of beer once in it, anyway. Most of Dryden Hall, where I stayed, was for people 21 or over, we still had to abide by that rule previously mentioned.

    On a side note, the Eastern Washington University Eagles beat the Wagner Seahawks last week. I was worried, we were up against a hard-luck school, I mean they were pretty good to get into the NCAA Division 1-Football Championship Subdivision tournament, but Wagner is on Staten Island, and they were affected by the Hurricane, and had to travel all the way to the Inferno of Roos Field in Cheney.(The Inferno is the name given to the red turf of the stadium, our little version of the Smurf Turf of Boise State).

  15. 15

    Oil prices are three times what they were in 2000, making cargo-ship fuel much more expensive now than it was then.

    The natural-gas boom in the U.S. has dramatically lowered the cost for running something as energy-intensive as a factory here at home. (Natural gas now costs four times as much in Asia as it does in the U.S.)

    There’s the key↑.

    Manufacturing jobs are coming back and those employers, for a wide variety of reasons, are having a hard time finding employees. As things progress those wages will go up and people will return to working in manufacturing jobs.

  17. 17

    From the same article:

    Many offshoring decisions were based on a single preoccupation—cheap labor. The labor was so cheap, in fact, that it covered a multitude of sins in other areas. The approach to bringing jobs back has been much more thoughtful. Jobs are coming back not for a single, simple reason, but for many intertwined reasons—which means they won’t slip away again when one element of the business, or the economy, changes.

    It’s too easy to conclude from this that cheap labor conservatism is on the wane as well. No, cheap labor right wing idiots will always be with us but manufacturers will be making too much money, working too hard at turning quicker product cycles to pay them any mind.

    I love it!

  18. 18

    Instead of continuing the Federal Prohibition against Marijuana, the Federal GOvernment should be looking into how to make it nationwide decriminalization/legalization. The tough sentences for possession going after the user, and the effort put into stemming the flow. The last couple years, decisions made in both Washington D.C. and Mexico City on the War on Drugs have destabilised Mexico, especially border towns like Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, and Nuevo Laredo, as the cartels fight over the main smuggling routes into the United States. With honest cops few and far between, the Mexican Army and Marines seem to be the only ones having any success against the Cartels, and perhaps, since the cartels have used their money gained from smuggling their product here into buying firepower that outguns the honest local cops and Federales in Mexico. I am a fan of the show Border Wars, and it just seems that the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security are fighting a tough battle that seems no end in sight. The cartels are coming up with new ways of getting past the border fence, border guards, even the manned and unmanned assets of the Border Patrol’s Office of Air and Marine Operations. The smugglers that try to get through the ports of entry, they are doing everything from having unwitting people act as mules for quick cash, all the way up to smuggling stuff in semi-trucks. I was thinking, since Marijuana was illegal when NAFTA was negotiated, could Federal Legalization be accompanied by high tariffs, and maybe take these guys down for not paying that? Then again, as I said, these guys have a lot more firepower than Capone ever had.

  19. 19

    I know of many co-working executives making $150,000 plus that partake in recreational use of pot, and I think they pay taxes too. Not sure if they would condone legalization but they are users, kind of funny.

  20. 20

    Wow. Latest fun fact about Republicans:

    49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

    BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

    Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren’t sure.

    But.. but.. WHY????

    One reason that such a high percentage of Republicans are holding what could be seen as extreme views is that their numbers are declining. Our final poll before the election, which hit the final outcome almost on the head, found 39% of voters identifying themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans. Since the election we’ve seen a 5 point increase in Democratic identification to 44%, and a 5 point decrease in Republican identification to 32%.

    http://www.publicpolicypolling.....-well.html

    Hallelujah! Thank our lucky stars!

  21. 21

    So trolls…

    Do you believe ACORN stole the election for Obama?
    Do you believe the Earth is 6000 years old?
    Do you believe in Scientific Creationism?
    Do you believe Climate Change is a hoax?

  22. 22

    @20

    some other things PPP found about Republicans:

    37% access the internet via Prodigy.
    40% thoroughly enjoyed their Thankgiving Dodo dinner.
    51% nearly have enough Green Stamps for the canoe.
    67% plan to order all their Christmas gifts from the Sears & Roebuck catalog.
    48% fell the Soviet Union is an unsafe vacation destination.
    53% of Puget Sound Republicans are celebrating New Years luncheon at The Twin Teepees after cocktails at Frederick & Nelson.

    I speak the truth. You can look it up.

  23. 23

    80% of Republicans believe that all women who get raped do so because they’re “asking for it”, and therefore should be made to bear the consequences of their sin

  24. 24

    @ 23

    It’s terribly interesting how similar the American Conservatives are to the Afghanistani, Kazakhistani and Iranian conservatives. You could say their nearly identical in everything except for their claimed sectarian allegiance.

    Hell, I’m surprised they don’t run around praising Kim Jong Il. He’s already got in place what they’ve been demanding the US should become.

  25. 25

    @10 Im not sure. An off campus party with marijuana would be a question mark. I guess we will find out soon since it becomes legal right before the weekend, and many students dont have Friday classes, either. I was thinking that they could let it go off campus, but campus PD works for the funded by US government UW. My guess is that they will arrest people off campus at first, but backlash will cause them to limit patrols to on campus. Then they can tell the feds, “we havent arrested anyone off campus because thats not our territory.”

  26. 26

    @25
    I’d imagine that even though they receive federal funding, they still have to follow state law, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to say otherwise.

    You’re right, this weekend we’ll probably find out!

  27. 27

    @21,

    No, I don’t believe ACORN stole the election for Obama. Since I voted for Ron Paul, I really have no opinion of the Mittster or the Milk Chocolate Messiah.

    I don’t believe the world is 6,000 years old. I believe it is actually billions of years old and that the religions that say it’s only 6,000 years old are wrong. but, then again, all they’re trying to do is come up with an explanation of the unexplained.

    I don’t believe in Scientific Creationism, but I really have no idea where the universe and the earth came from. The Big Bang is as good a guess as any.

    No, I don’t believe climate change is a hoax. I believe the earth does what is does without our direction, however. We’re probably part of the reason the earth is getting warmer, but only a small part of the trend towards higher world temperatures. We could cease all temperature-increasing activity tomorrow, and the earth will continue to get hotter.

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