Cannabis Legal, Localities Begin to Just Say No #drugpolicy

The New York Times
January 26, 2014

Cannabis Legal, Localities Begin to Just Say No

By KIRK JOHNSON

YAKIMA, Wash. - The momentum toward legalized marijuana might seem like an
inevitable tide, with states from Florida to New York considering easing
laws for medical use, and a full-blown recreational industry rapidly
emerging in Colorado and here in Washington State.

But across the country, resistance to legal marijuana is also rising, with
an increasing number of towns and counties moving to ban legal sales. The
efforts, still largely local, have been fueled by the opening, or imminent
opening, of retail marijuana stores here and in Colorado, as well as by
recent legal opinions that have supported such bans in some states.

At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues from marijuana
sales - promised by legalization's supporters and now eagerly anticipated by
state governments - that could be sharply reduced if local efforts to ban
such sales expand.

But the fight also signals a larger battle over the future of legal
marijuana: whether it will be a national industry providing near-universal
access, or a patchwork system with isolated islands of mainly urban sales.
To some partisans, the debate has echoes to the post-Prohibition era, when
"dry towns" emerged in some states in response to legalized alcohol. "At
some point we have to put some boundaries," said Rosetta Horne, a
nondenominational Christian church minister here in Yakima, at a public
hearing on Tuesday night where she urged the City Council to enact a
permanent ban on marijuana businesses.

Though it seems strongest in more rural and conservative communities, the
resistance has been surprisingly bipartisan. In states from Louisiana to
Indiana that are discussing decriminalizing marijuana, Republican opponents
of relaxing the drug laws are finding themselves loosely allied with
Democratic skeptics. Voices in the Obama administration concerned about
growing access have joined antidrug crusaders like Patrick J. Kennedy, a
Democratic former United States representative from Rhode Island, who
contends that the potential health risks of marijuana have not been
adequately explored, especially for juveniles - and who has written and
spoken widely about his own struggles with alcohol and prescription drugs.

"In some ways I think the best thing that could have happened to the
anti-legalization movement was legalization, because I think it shows people
the ugly side," said Kevin A. Sabet, a former drug policy adviser to
President Obama and the executive director and co-founder, with Mr.
Kennedy, of Smart Approaches to Marijuana. The group, founded last year,
supports removing criminal penalties for using marijuana, but opposes full
legalization, and is working with local organizations around the nation to
challenge legalization.

"If legalization advocates just took a little bit more time and were not so
obsessed with doing this at a thousand miles per hour," he added, "it might
be better. Instead, they are helping precipitate a backlash."

In Washington, the Yakima County Commission has already said that it plans
to ban marijuana businesses in the unincorporated areas outside Yakima city.
Clark County, Washington, is considering a ban on recreational sales that
would affect the huge marijuana market in Portland, Ore., just across the
Columbia River. And the state's second most populous county, Pierce, just
south of Seattle, said last month it would bar recreational businesses from
opening.

Pockets of retrenchment have emerged in other states as well. In California,
one of 20 states and the District of Columbia that allow marijuana use for
medical purposes, a state appeals court said late last year that local
governments could prohibit the growing of medical marijuana. Fresno County
promptly did so, becoming the first county in the state, medical marijuana
advocates said, to ban all marijuana cultivation.

Lawmakers in Oregon are considering a bill that would allow municipalities
to restrict or prohibit medical marijuana. Colorado's recreational marijuana
law opened for business Jan. 1 with retail sales, but dozens of local
governments, including Colorado Springs, the state's second-largest city,
have prohibited marijuana commerce.

National politicians, from Mr. Obama on down, appear just as conflicted.
Mr. Obama said last week that he believed the "experiment" in Washington
State and Colorado should be allowed, and Attorney General Eric H.
Holder Jr. said Thursday that the Justice and Treasury Departments were
developing guidelines to make it easier for legal marijuana businesses to
obtain banking services, currently prohibited under federal law. But at the
same time, a senior federal Drug Enforcement Agency official recently
expressed alarm that marijuana use and access are spreading so rapidly.

Here in Yakima, an agricultural city of wine and apples, population 93,000,
each side in Tuesday's often emotional two-hour Council meeting talked about
risk. Proponents of the ban said they feared that neighborhoods and
cherished patterns of life would be harmed by recreational marijuana
businesses. Opponents, including some marijuana business license applicants,
warned of economic harm and legal liability if the ban passed.

By the evening's end, the vote was not close - 6 to 1 for a complete
prohibition of marijuana businesses.

Yakima's course, council members said, was bolstered by the state's attorney
general, Bob Ferguson, who this month issued a nonbinding legal opinion that
local governments could ban recreational marijuana under I-502, the
initiative legalizing recreational marijuana that Washington voters approved
in 2012. Critics said Mr. Ferguson's reasoning flew against the intent of
the law, which says that marijuana must be available to all state residents.

But even before his opinion, resistance was growing. Across Washington,
local moratoriums or bans covering more than 1.5 million people - about one
in five residents - were in place by mid-January, according to a
pro-legalization research group in Seattle, the Center for the Study of
Cannabis and Social Policy.
http://cannabisandsocialpolicy.org/

On a broader level, some legal experts say the emerging opposition to legal
marijuana could lead to legal challenges that strike at the heart of the
legalization laws in Colorado and Washington - or affirm them.

Experts expect legal challenges to local bans from would-be marijuana
business operators. In anticipation of such litigation, some communities are
already claiming that they have the legal right to ban legal sellers and
growers because the drug remains illegal under federal law.

"Federal law trumps this," said Bill Lover, a Yakima City Council member who
voted for the ban.

"We don't think they win," said Alison Holcomb, the criminal justice
director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, and leader of
2012's ballot initiative. She added that legal precedents for states
ignoring federal law went back at least to the end of Prohibition, when many
states simply refused to enforce federal laws forbidding the sale of
alcohol. "This is essentially how alcohol prohibition was repealed,"
she said.

A deeper engine driving opposition to legal marijuana is anxiety about the
ways that the rapid expansion of marijuana shops and increasingly easy
access to the drug might change communities. None of the new local bans
affect possession of marijuana for personal use, which is legal statewide in
Washington.

"This is not about the adult being able to smoke a joint," said Mr.
Sabet of Smart Approaches to Marijuana. "It's about widespread access, it's
about changing the landscape of a neighborhood, it's about widespread
promotion and advertising, and it's about youth access."

Supporters of legalization say that because voters statewide approved a
system guaranteeing adults access to legal marijuana, they will push state
regulators and lawmakers to meet that mandate, possibly by pushing for
penalties against local governments that enact bans.

But Dave Ettl, a Yakima City Council member who voted for the ban, said he
was willing to risk penalties, saying he considered the promised tax
revenues from marijuana sales tainted.

"There's some money that's not worth getting," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2014, on page
A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cannabis Legal, Localities
Begin to Just Say No.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/us/cannabis-legal-localities-begin-to-just
-say-no.html


--
Drugs & Democracy Info <drugs@tni.org>
Transnational Institute (TNI)
De Wittenstraat 25 | 1052 AK Amsterdam (The Netherlands) Tel +31-20-6626608
| Fax +31-20-6757176 http://www.tni.org/drugs http://www.druglawreform.info/
http://www.undrugcontrol.info/
Twitter: @DrugLawReform
_______________________________________________
Dd-world mailing list
https://lists.tni.org/mailman/listinfo/dd-world