“It's an experiment, and it's probably good to have a couple states try it out to see before you make that national policy," Gates said, noting that he did not expect the measure to pass.
Gates, who is the nation's wealthiest individual and is heavily involved in public health causes, said a key effect of the new law would be its impact on illegal drug trafficking.
"[They're] going to make a lot less money, and some of the perverse things about the illegal drug trade will be avoided," he said.
Last year, the Marijuana Policy Project included Gates on its list of the 50 Most Influential Marijuana Users. The group cited Stephen Manes' 1994 biography of the business magnate, which states "marijuana was the pharmaceutical of choice" for Gates. However, in the BuzzFeed interview Gates declined to say whether he has smoked weed.
Washington's marijuana law, which took effect this year, passed in 2012 with 56 percent of the vote.
Since then, recent polls have shown a majority of Americans now in favor of legalizing recreational pot. A Gallup poll released in October found 58 percent of voters saying the drug should be legalized, marking the first time in the poll a clear majority has supported legal marijuana. A CNN/ORC International poll released this month found similar results, with 55 percent in favor of legalization.
President Obama believes the legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado ultimately may open a Pandora’s Box and could lead to calls for cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs to be sold freely and openly.
But more broadly, the president downplayed the dangers of pot, comparing it to cigarettes and arguing it is no more dangerous than booze.
“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” Mr. Obama said in a lengthy interview with The New Yorker. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”
Mr. Obama also took aim at the uneven arrest statistics regarding marijuana, saying poor and minority kids face much stiffer penalties for smoking pot than middle-class children.
The president said it’s important for the legalization of pot in Colorado and Washington “to go forward, because it’s important for a society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”
Still, Mr. Obama said turning weed into a legal product raises serious questions that the U.S. must confront.
“I also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues,” Mr. Obama said. “If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, ‘Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka.’ Are we open to that? If somebody says, ‘We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth.’ Are we OK with that?”
Retired American basketball star Dennis Rodman has checked himself into an alcohol treatment program after returning to the United States from his latest trip to North Korea, where he played an exhibition game for the birthday of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Rodman spokesman Darren Prince said Saturday that Rodman checked into the facility voluntarily. He did not disclose the location of the center and did not say how long Rodman would be there.
While on his self-described "basketball diplomacy" trip, Rodman gave an incoherent, profanity-filled rant during a live interview with CNN, in which he seemed to imply that a U.S. citizen deserved to be imprisoned in the North.
In a statement through a publicist, Rodman later said it had been a "stressful day" and he had been drinking before the interview.
Rodman told reporters at the Beijing airport last Monday that he was sorry he could not do anything to help free imprisoned American missionary Kenneth Bae, who was imprisoned by for 15 years of hard labor on a conviction of trying to overthrow the government. He said he is not a diplomat and asked the world to put away politics for one day.
David Marlow, right, helps a customer, who smells a strain of marijuana before buying it, at the crowded sales counter inside a marijuana retail store in Denver on Jan. 1. (Brennan Linsley / Associated Press / January 1, 2014)
By Matthew Fleischer, guest blogger
January 16, 2014, 5:00 a.m.
With pot now legally for sale in Colorado, and Washington state gearing up to follow suit, marijuana legalization activists across the country are pushing hard to replicate these political successes in other states. Voters in Massachusetts could ratify legalized marijuana as early as 2016.
This is undoubtedly a sign of progress. Our nation has capriciously squandered far too many precious national resources combating a green weed that makes people feel good.
As welcome as a more widespread regulated marijuana industry would be, however, one thing that no one seems to be considering is what to do with those already convicted of marijuana crimes. It’s estimated that 750,000 people are arrested every year on marijuana-related charges and up to 40,000 are currently in prison for marijuana crimes.
When Colorado legalized marijuana via its 2012 ballot initiative, it made no stipulation about the fate of those already convicted of marijuana crimes. If you were sitting in prison for selling pot, you’re still there. If you were ever convicted of a felony marijuana charge, it’s still on your record — and your prospects of getting a decent job are likely still daunting.
The decision by activists not to include leniency for previous offenders in the Colorado marijuana ballot initiative (even if it would have been good policy) made perfect political sense. It’s far easier to sell voters on the financial benefits of creating a lucrative new marijuana industry than it is to persuade them to open up the prison gates and set convicts free.
In most of the world, however, no such political calculus is required.
According to a 2012 report by the Human Rights and Criminal Sentencing Reform Project for the University of San Francisco School of Law, the United States is one of only 22 countries that doesn’t guarantee what’s called “retroactive ameliorative relief” in sentencing. Which means that when a law such as one legalizing marijuana is passed in America, those already convicted of marijuana crimes don’t automatically have their sentences relaxed. This puts us in the company of such bastions of social justice as Pakistan, Oman and South Sudan.
If Germany were to legalize marijuana, on the other hand, those convicted of weed crimes would see their sentences commuted, according to the USF report.
With 55% of Americans supporting marijuana legalization, the tea leaves aren’t exactly difficult to read: Legalized marijuana in America is a matter of when, not if.
But if we’ve wised up to the fact that marijuana prohibition is either immoral, wasteful or both, then we also need to recognize the moral and financial imperative to ease the punishments on those already convicted. Because America does not guarantee retroactive ameliorative relief in sentencing, this won’t happen without a fight.
As more and more states attempt to amend their harsh marijuana laws, the issue of what to do with the previously convicted needs to be addressed by advocates and policymakers. As support for legalizing marijuana soars, surely the majority of us can agree that wasting the criminal justice system’s time and money by continuing to penalize those convicted under the old, misguided drug laws is equally bad policy.
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The federal government has the right to close down medical-marijuana dispensaries in California, an appeals court panel ruled Wednesday.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the contention that dispensaries operating legally under California state law should be protected from prosecution by federal authorities. who consider marijuana sales to be illegal regardless of state laws.
The three-judge panel in San Francisco said in its unpublished opinion that issuing an injunction against the U.S. Justice Department blocking the prosecution of dispensaries "would compromise a governmental interest in enforcing the law."
The Sacramento Bee said the court rejected the constitutional grounds argued by attorneys for dispensary owners, landlords and customers. The judges cited a 2007 opinion from the 9th Circuit as the reason for turning down the challenge.
Medical marijuana is legal in California; however selling pot remains a federal crime. As a result, dispensaries throughout the state have raided and closed down by the Justice Department.
Now that Colorado and Washington state have nullified and defied federal law by re-legalizing marijuana, it is the time to re-legalize all drugs and kickstart the domino effect that will finally put an end to the disastrous war on drugs.
Since marijuana is a comparably safe drug to legal products like alcohol and tobacco while also providing numerous medicinal benefits to people with terminal diseases and those facing excruciating pain, it is easy to see why a growing majority of Americans think that marijuana should be legalized.
But cocaine, heroin and LSD? Surely legalizing these drugs would amount to anarchy, chaos and mass addiction, right?
Well, not exactly. Like nearly all programs, government prohibition — with the supposed goal of reducing the use and access of drugs — has achieved the exact opposite results.
Americans have been forced to cough up at least $2.5 trillion since the drug war began and have incarcerated one in every 100 Americans. Prohibition drives up the price of drugs above market rates, leaving violent cartels as the only suppliers in the same way that alcohol prohibition saw the creation of organized crime.
Despite near-universal criminalization, drug use has skyrocketed. Many current and retired law enforcement officers — who have witnessed the drug war's insanity first-hand — arecalling for drug legalization.
The war on drugs is also incredibly racist, disproportionately harming minorities and the poor.
It may seem counterintuitive, but complete drug legalization would be the best possible way to achieve the goals drug prohibitionists claim to support.
For example, a decade after decriminalizing all drugs, Portugal has witnessed a significant drop in addicts and drug abuse, the number of infections from intravenous needles, and drug-related crimes. Doctors and health experts in Portugal have recently praised the decision to decriminalize drugs, an atmosphere where "the vast majority of problematic users are today supported by a system that does not treat them as delinquents but as sick people."
The war on drugs takes a private and/or family matter and turns it into a national one, wherehighly militarized police are given the authority to ignore constitutional restraints on their power and erect a police state. Proponents of the drug war claim that drugs will ruin your life, and there is obviously some truth to that. But their solution is to use force, fines and cages tomake sure that it will ruin your life.
Image Credit: The Washington Post
However, nearly all of the problems associated with drugs would be solved or highly diminished by allowing them to be sold and regulated by the free market. Pharmacies, not heavily-armed cartels, would provide heroin and cocaine for a fraction of the price. There is a reason why you don't see gun-play between Budweiser and Coors truck drivers. Their disputes are handled in courts because alcohol, despite the addiction and damage this drug causes, is legal and sold openly.
While I would fully support Colorado and Washington (or any state) seizing the momentum from this recent marijuana legalization and ending the drug war in their respective jurisdictions, we may not have to wait for states to take the lead in order to establish some sanity in our drug policy.
Thanks to modern technology, it is becoming easier and easier to circumvent oppressive state laws. Even though the FBI shut down Silk Road, the business model of offering lower-cost illegal drugs to those who want them using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin will undoubtedly be imitated in the future and will be nearly impossible to stop as technology gets better and better. While the state's drug policy is to abolish the Fourth and Fifth amendments and build thousands of prisons to centrally plan and manage our lives, the Silk Road model offers a peaceful, free market alternative.
Jury nullification also represents a potentially fatal blow to the drug war without waiting for legislation. Through this, juries can refuse to deliver a guilty verdict because they think the law is unjust, the law is misapplied or the punishment is inappropriate.
Jury nullification is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment, and although prosecutors and judges don't want juries to know about it, it is a right that goes all the way back to the Magna Carta. InNew Hampshire, jurors have already used it to dismiss cases against people who have technically violated drug laws but did not harm or aggress against anyone. It is one of the most powerful tools we have in protecting civil liberties and checking state power, and if universally adopted around the country, would essentially end the drug war completely.
Fundamentally, we should abolish the drug war because the government has no right to tell individuals what they can or can't put into their bodies in the same way that they can't tell us which books we can or can't read or which religions are legal or illegal. Think about all the damage that has been done by bad ideas, evil books and crazy religions; but does that mean that we should ban free speech?
Same goes for the war on drugs. For the sake of our liberties and public safety, the war on drugs must be abolished.
