Tag: marijuana

HOW CALIFORNIA COPS EXPLOIT LEGAL GRAY AREAS TO CONTINUE THEIR WAR ON CANNABIS

Years after legalization, the state’s growers say police are taking a “seize first, ask questions later” mentality toward marijuana enforcement, sometimes with heavily militarized operations that allegedly violate their rights.

Zeke Flatten was driving southbound on Highway 101 in Northern California in December 2017 when he was pulled over by an unmarked SUV with flashing emergency lights.

Two officers clad in green, military-style garb and bulletproof vests approached Flatten’s vehicle but didn’t identify themselves. After asking Flatten if he knew how fast he was going, one of the men told him they suspected he was transporting cannabis, according to court documents. Flatten was immediately suspicious.

“He never mentioned anything else about the reason, probable cause, why he stopped me,” Flatten said in an interview with The Appeal.

The officers were correct, however: Flatten, a film producer and former undercover cop who’d temporarily relocated to Northern California, had three pounds of marijuana, including a few rolled joints, in the car—worth over $3,000 at the time. Flatten says he was working on a number of cannabis-related projects and was driving to a lab to test the weed, which he’d hoped to sell legally.

Just over a year before the stop, California had voted to legalize the personal cultivation and possession of up to an ounce of marijuana with the passage of Proposition 64. Under the measure, possession of larger amounts of cannabis was reduced from a felony offense to a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months of incarceration and a maximum $500 fine.

But marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, classified as a Schedule 1 substance alongside drugs like heroin, LSD, and MDMA, known as Ecstasy. When the officers identified themselves as members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a federal agency, Flatten said he started to realize something was off.

“There’s no patches, there’s no badges, there’s no name tags,” Flatten said.

Flatten says he offered to show the officers his medical marijuana card, which should have allowed him to have the cannabis. But they didn’t want to look at the card. He figured if the agents believed the marijuana was illegal, they’d take it and provide him a receipt for the seizure, which would give him a chance to argue his case in court, Flatten said.

Instead, they proceeded to confiscate the cannabis from the back of Flatten’s car without running his name for warrants, or issuing a traffic ticket, court summons, or even documentation of the seizure, Flatten said. The officers did tell him that he might be getting a letter from the federal government. But he never did.

Flatten said he felt like he’d been robbed. He started looking for a lawyer, and a few days later, went to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department to report the incident. The next week, after returning to his home state of Texas, he made an official report at the FBI field office in San Antonio.

He would soon find out that the officers who seized his marijuana weren’t actually ATF agents. Flatten alleges one was a member of the sheriff’s department. The other was from the Rohnert Park Police Department, and has since been indicted on federal charges including extortion and conspiracy in connection with cannabis seizures.

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New York City Should Have Always Smelled Like Pot

“​​The degree to which Manhattan air is now just saturated with the aroma of marijuana is frankly absurd,” tweeted writer Thomas Chatterton Williams back in January. “New York Smells Like a Declining City,” declared The Wall Street Journal last month. “It’s like everybody’s smoking a joint now,” New York City’s own mayor, Eric Adams, commented last year.

Though New York state legalized recreational weed in 2021, it’s taken two years for the cannabis industry to actually get it off the ground. Just a few dispensaries have opened up in the city so far, but much has been made about its alleged transformation into either a Reefer Madness hellscape or a stoner Xanadu, depending on who you ask.

“Let’s be blunt—legal weed is turning New York workers into zombies,” wrote Steve Cuozzo for the New York Post just days ago, complaining of worse customer service than he encountered yesteryear. “the weed / garbage / piss cocktail of smells in parts of manhattan is truly nauseating,” one Twitter user chimed in. “The biggest change is the smell of marijuana. It’s EVERYWHERE. Inescapable. It’s made the city a lot grimier, and much more unsafe,” added another.

Now that they no longer have to fear arrest, more people may indeed be lighting up in public. As with many things in New York, private behavior—a couple’s fight, a parent disciplining their child, a group of friends who are too boisterously drunk—spills into public spaces. We’re tasked with learning how to tolerate, or at least look past, the low-grade deviancy and etiquette missteps we encounter in streets and subway stations, shared hallways and stoops. “For the record, I don’t care if people smoke (or drink!), but the imposition of the odor all over public spaces is weird and feels deeply unserious,” Chatterton Williams (one of the more reasonable pot critics) added.

Still, many of the tweets and articles in this genre clumsily attempt to underscore the same idea: New York is getting worse by the day—and pot must be to blame.

But the aroma of weed in the air ought to be interpreted as people relishing their newfound freedom, a sign that tolerance toward people’s mind-alteration preferences has rightfully prevailed.

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The United States of Weed

IF IT SEEMS like a new state is legalizing cannabis nearly every week, don’t worry, you’re not high — states are indeed allowing adult-use of the drug at an unprecedented pace. If the wave of green legislation is slowing to some degree now, that’s only because so many states have already taken action. That doesn’t mean the wave will stop. Since our last update two years ago, numerous states have passed recreational or medical laws. At the same time, setbacks have come as ballot initiatives have been rejected. In other instances, lawmakers and certain governors remain steadfast in their opposition to pot. 

It’s now a question of when, not if, politicians in Washington, D.C., will get with the program and decide to do what the majority of Americans support by passing legislation to end federal prohibition once and for all. In 2022, Politico reported that over 155 million Americans lived in a legal cannabis state after the November 2022 Election Day results — inching closer to 50 percent of the population. In the meantime, states are continuing to prime themselves to legalize the drug, either for medicinal use, recreational use, or both. Here’s where things stand is all 50 of them.

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Another Federal Judge Rejects the DOJ’s Argument That Cannabis Consumers Have No Second Amendment Rights

A federal judge in Texas recently agreed with a federal judge in Oklahoma that the national ban on gun possession by cannabis consumers violates the Second Amendment. Kathleen Cardone, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, also concluded that the federal ban on transferring firearms to an “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance,” first imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968, is unconstitutional.

The case involves Paola Connelly, who was charged with illegal possession of firearms under 18 USC 922(g)(3) after El Paso police found marijuana and guns in her home while responding to a domestic disturbance in December 2021. Connelly, who said she used marijuana “to sleep at night and to help her with anxiety,” also was charged with violating 18 USC 922(d)(3) by transferring guns to her husband, a cocaine and psilocybin user. Both gun offenses are punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

As a preliminary matter, Cardone held that Connelly’s Second Amendment claims were not precluded by prior decisions in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which includes Texas, upheld Section 922(g)(3). Those decisions, she noted, preceded the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which said gun control laws must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

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Gov. Hochul Proposes Heavy Fines for Illicit Cannabis Shops

Illegal cannabis sellers could see sky-high fines under new legislation proposed by Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, giving state officials greater power to crack down on New York’s illicit pot market.

The bill would set fines up to $10,000 a day for shops that sell cannabis without a license, and businesses found possessing illegal marijuana plants or products could be hit with penalties as high as $200,000, according to the proposed rules.

It would also give the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM), the state agency overseeing marijuana retail licensing, the authority to seize illegal products and allow OCM to shut down unlicensed cannabis retailers. 

“The continued existence of illegal dispensaries is unacceptable, and we need additional enforcement tools to protect New Yorkers from dangerous products and support our equity initiatives,” Hochul said in a statement.

Under the proposed law, OCM could investigate any location growing, distributing or selling cannabis that has not been sourced from a legal distributor and taxed. OCM, the attorney general or local police would be able to enforce a preliminary injunction to stop businesses suspected of selling cannabis without a license, according to the bill.

Hochul’s proposal is the latest move in a state and city effort to shutter the thousands of illegal pot shops that have cropped up in New York City, threatening its fledgling legal market. 

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New Hampshire House Passes Bill to Legalize Marijuana With No Taxation or Regulation

Last Thursday, the New Hampshire House passed a bill that would legalize marijuana for adults in the state, despite ongoing federal cannabis prohibition. Unlike most legalization efforts, the bill would not create any tax or regulatory program.

Rep. Kevin Verville (R) and three fellow Republicans introduced House Bill 360 (HB360) on Jan. 9. The legislation would remove marijuana from the state’s list of banned substances and strike provisions in current law that refer to criminal penalties for cannabis-related offenses. The proposed law would not create any kind of tax or regulatory program for marijuana. It would effectively become legal to possess, cultivate, buy, and sell cannabis just like tomatoes.

People under 18 in possession of marijuana would be subject to a substance misuse assessment. People between 18 and 21 would face a violation for simple possession, effectively decriminalizing marijuana for that age group.

The bill includes provisions to allow people with past marijuana convictions to have their records expunged.

On March 16, the House rejected the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee’s “inexpedient to legislate” report by a 210-160 vote, and then passed HB360 on a voice vote.

The House has also passed a bill that would legalize marijuana with a regulatory and tax structure for commercial sales and cultivation.

Verville called his approach “simple” and “short.”

“When bills get complicated and they get long and they get confused, people vote against them,” he told Marijuana Moment. “This is the shortest, easiest way to affect the change that the majority of our constituents want—and that is the legalization of cannabis.”

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The growing Chinese investment in illegal American weed

A few days before Christmas, a joint law enforcement task force found nearly 9,000 pounds of cannabis worth almost $15 million during a raid in a suburban neighborhood in Antioch, Calif.

The California Department of Cannabis Control believes that the four houses searched in the bedroom community 45 minutes outside San Francisco were linked to China.

Mexican cartels have a long history of importing, growing and redistributing illicit cannabis in the United States. But Chinese investors, owners and workers have emerged in recent years as a new source of funding and labor for illegal marijuana production.

What is known — from interviews with state law enforcement officials, experts on the international drug trade, economists and lawmakers — is that the number of farms funded by sources traceable back to Chinese investors or owners has skyrocketed. Chinese owners and workers have become a larger presence at illegal grows in Oklahoma, California and Oregon, they say.

In Oklahoma, close to 3,000 of the state’s nearly 7,000 licensed marijuana farms have been flagged for suspicious activity by law enforcement over the last year. Those operations are now being investigated for obtaining their licenses fraudulently and/or for selling into the illicit market, according to Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

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The DOJ Says Marijuana Use, Which Biden Thinks Should Not Be a Crime, Nullifies the Second Amendment

President Joe Biden thinks it is unfair that people convicted of simple marijuana possession face lingering consequences for doing something that he says should not be treated as a crime. Biden cited those burdens last October, when he announced a mass pardon of low-level federal marijuana offenders, which he said would help “thousands of people who were previously convicted of simple possession” and “who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result.” Yet the Biden administration, which recently began accepting applications for pardon certificates aimed at ameliorating those consequences after dragging its feet for five months, is actively defending another blatantly unjust disability associated with cannabis consumption: the loss of Second Amendment rights.

Under federal law, it is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for an “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance” to possess firearms. The ban applies to all cannabis consumers, even if they live in one of the 37 states that have legalized medical or recreational use. That disability, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled last month, is not “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the constitutional test established by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The Justice Department recently filed a notice indicating that it intends to appeal the decision against the gun ban for marijuana users.

The Biden administration’s defense of the ban relies on empirically and historically dubious assertions about the sort of people who deserve to exercise the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Among other things, the Justice Department argues that “the people” covered by the Second Amendment do not include Americans who break the law, no matter how trivial the offense. It also argues that marijuana users are ipso facto untrustworthy and unvirtuous, which it says makes them ineligible for gun rights.

According to the Biden administration, the original understanding of the right to arms included exceptions broad enough to encompass people who consume any intoxicant that legislators might one day decide to prohibit. It says the law criminalizing gun possession by cannabis consumers is analogous to laws targeting “intoxicated” people who carry guns in public places.

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Studies Link Marijuana Legalization to All Sorts of Positive Public Health Outcomes

Legalization linked to fewer suicides, traffic fatalities, and opioid deaths. A new paper on the public health effects of legalizing marijuana finds “little credible evidence to suggest that [medical marijuana] legalization promotes marijuana use among teenagers” and “convincing evidence that young adults consume less alcohol when medical marijuana is legalized.” And that’s just the start of the positive pot news contained in the paper, which was published this month in the Journal of Economic Literature.

The paper reviews previous research on the public health effects of legal weed, including studies published between 2013 and 2020.

These days, 36 states have legalized medical marijuana and 18 states have legalized recreational marijuana, study authors D. Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees note. This has spawned all sorts of concerns about potential public health issues, from promoting the use of marijuana—or other substances—among teenagers to worry about crime, traffic fatalities, and more. But across a range of measures, the evidence is inconclusive at worst and very often quite positive.

For instance: it becomes clear that medical marijuana laws aren’t driving an epidemic of marijuana use among minors. In fact, some researchers have even “found a negative association between [medical marijuana laws] and youth marijuana use.”

Likewise, a 2019 paper found recreational marijuana legalization associated “with an 8 percent decrease in the odds of any marijuana use among high school students and a 9 percent decrease in the odds of frequent marijuana use among high school students.”

Anderson and Rees suggest one possible explanation for the decreased use findings is that “it is more difficult for teenagers to access marijuana when drug dealers are replaced by licensed dispensaries that require proof of age.”

But some small studies have shown a correlation between recreational marijuana legalization and increased teen use. “Researchers will have to wait until more years of post-legalization data become available before drawing firm conclusions about the relationship between [recreational marijuana laws] and youth marijuana use,” the authors say.

The effect of legalization on adult marijuana use is also inconclusive. Using surveys that asked adults about their use, one study found “no evidence of a relationship between [medical marijuana laws] and marijuana consumption among adults,” while another found them associated with a 4–7 percent increase in past-month adult use and recreational legalization linked to a 30 percent increase in use.

Of course, data about the effect of legalization on adult use is complicated by the fact that legalization might make more people comfortable admitting marijuana use in surveys.

Anderson and Rees also say that it’s “difficult to gauge” the effect of marijuana legalization on opioid deaths and on several other public health measures, including mental health, traffic fatalities, workplace health, and crime. Still, there are a lot of positive indicators in the research.

The authors note that “several studies have produced credible evidence” that medical marijuana legalization may reduce the number of opioid-related deaths. However, one 2019 study “confirmed the negative association between legalization and opioid-related mortality…for the period 1999–2010, but found that this association became positive when data for the years 2011–17 were added to the analysis.” The authors suggest that this could be “due to the changing nature of the opioid epidemic. Perhaps marijuana and prescription pain medications are substitutes, but marijuana and heroin are not.”

Recent research on recreational marijuana legalization and opioid deaths has been promising. Another 2019 study found recreational legalization associated with a 14 percent decline in opioid-related deaths, and a 2020 study “found that the legalization of recreational sales was associated with a 16–21 percent decrease in opioid-related mortality.”

In addition, there is “strong evidence that legalizing marijuana discourages the use of alcohol, especially binge drinking.”

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