Showing posts with label Marijuana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marijuana. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2015

CA Congressmen Urge Federal Reform of Marijuana Laws

marijuana
The federal government’s understanding of its own marijuana regulations are willfully “tortuous” and “an obvious stretch,” warned a bipartisan duo of California Congressmen in a sternly-worded letter to the Department of Justice.

An abuse of power

In the letter, obtained by the Huffington Post, Reps. Sam Farr, D-Calif., and Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., requested that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz open an internal investigation into the department’s continued prosecutions of marijuana dispensaries, against what they said was the clear letter and intent of the law.
In its Appropriations Act for 2015, Congress had passed a provision introduced by Rohrabacher and Farr designed and intended to ward off federal interference with marijuana-related businesses operating legally under state law.
“We, the authors of the language, and our many colleagues — including those who opposed the amendment — laid on the record repeatedly that the intent and the language of the provision was to stop DOJ from interacting with anyone legitimately doing business in medical marijuana in accordance with state law,” wrote the Congressmen.
Signed into law by president Obama, the amendment received a second vote of approval from Representatives this summer. “As the marijuana provision is part of an annual funding bill that will expire,” noted the Huffington Post, “the lawmakers introduced an identical version again in June, which was reauthorized by the House of Representatives.”
In April, Farr and Rohrabacher had also demanded that Attorney General Eric Holder “stop prosecution of state-authorized medical marijuana dispensaries” in observance of the same provision, as the Orange County Register reported.

Federal legalese

But the Department of Justice chose to interpret the law in the most hostile manner possible, the lawmakers suggested, citing an April statement by DOJ spokesman Patrick Rodenbush. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Rodenbush said Rohrabacher-Farr, as the appropriations amendment was known, didn’t apply to prosecutions directed at persons or groups:
Rather, he said, it stops the department from “impeding the ability of states to carry out their medical marijuana laws,” contrary to some claims from people being prosecuted that the amendment blocks such prosecutions.
As the Times then observed, this “narrow interpretation of the law” had particularly strong implications in the San Francisco Bay Area, “where the Justice Department has initiated forfeiture proceedings against three medical marijuana dispensaries it considers to be in violation of federal law.”
Outgoing U.S. Attorney for Northern California Melinda Haag had become notorious among pro-pot advocates and business people, joining “the three other regional U.S. attorneys in California in cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries perceived to be large-scale commercial enterprises,” as Pleasanton Weekly recounted. One dispensary facing the brunt of Haag’s crusade, Harborside Health Center, met the news of her departure with what executive director Steve DeAngelo called “great relief and great satisfaction.”
“In Ms. Haag’s parting statement she said she felt her office had ‘accomplished most of our goals’ during her tenure,” DeAngelo said in a statement. “The one goal she most assuredly has not accomplished is closing down Harborside Health Center. We hope her successor will have a more finely tuned understanding of compassion and justice than Ms. Haag has displayed, and allow Harborside to focus on serving our patients instead of battling a court case that should never have been started.”

Conflicting actions

Although the Department of Justice could opt to ignore the mismatch between its conduct and the law, the law itself would hold them to account for doing so. At stake is the applicability of the Anti-Deficiency Act, as Farr and Rohrabacher argued; as Reason indicated, that law “makes it a crime to use federal money for purposes that are not approved by Congress.”

Sunday, July 26, 2015

CALIFORNIA: POT TAX: SACRAMENTO POLITICIANS ‘JONESING’ FOR A SPENDING FIX

With Sacramento politicians desperate to find a new source of continuous tax revenue, the state’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy has just published a study, “Pathways Report Policy Options for Regulating Marijuana In California,” as a precursor to sponsoring a 2016 ballot initiative to legalize recreational pot use.

However, it seems that underground farmers of California’s largest cash crop have no intention of going legit and paying taxes.
“One of the major findings of the Blue Ribbon Commission’s work is that the legalization of marijuana would not be an event that happens in one election. Rather, it would be a process that unfolds over many years requiring sustained attention to implementation,” the report says.
In perhaps the most hilarious section of the report, under the heading “What to do with all that new tax money,” the Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom-led group of academic and law enforcement experts suggests that the expected cash hoard from taxing marijuana should not go to back-fill the State General Fund: “We do not believe that making government dependent on cannabis taxes makes for sound public policy, nor do we believe cannabis tax revenue will be very large in relation to the total budgets of state and local government.”
Sacramento politicians have been clear that they hope marijuana can provide a stable tax revenue base for the perpetually insolvent state. After passing Proposition 30‘s“temporary tax increase” in 2012, the Golden State saw its top marginal tax rate jump by 33% and capital gains taxed at the same rates as income, up to 13.3 percent.
The media have been full of stories about companies moving to lower-taxed states, but tax collection was up by $11 billion in the 2015 fiscal year, mostly due to huge capital gains taxes from Silicon Valley. California’s collection of capital gains jumped from $4.7 billion in 2010 to 11.9 billion in 2014, and may have hit $15 billion for 2015.
Yet with the annual cost for state employees’ salaries and benefits at $10 billion, any fall in capital gains collections would create the same type of disaster for public employee unions that happened in the Great Recession, when capital gains income to the state plunged from $10.9 billion in 2007 to $2.3 billion in 2009. In that crash, 6.7 percent of the state’s public employees were terminated; K-12 and early education were slashed by 8 percent; and public health and welfare were slashed.
The 93-page Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy report makes 58 recommendations essentially suggesting that marijuana “licensing” should shadow the policies used to maximize tax collection in regulating alcohol distribution and consumption in California.
Licensed and taxed entities would include: cultivators who grow cannabis; distributors and wholesalers; manufacturers who make specific products for retail sale; retailers who sell to individuals; transporters who are responsible for delivery between any two points in the system; suppliers of seeds; product testing; training providers and any other entities involved in supply chain monitoring; and product safety testers.
Separating alcohol manufacturing, transportation and distribution has been the key to maximizing tax collection in the U.S.. The weight and size of alcohol liquids make them much easier to identify in illegal transit and storage.
But the bad news for tax-hungry Sacramento politicians is that the current drug business is highly integrated with criminal gangs controlling all levels of production, transportation and distribution. Recognizing that the only way to bring the illegal pot trade into regulation, the Newsom report suggests that marijuana regulation would have to allow a higher level of integration than alcohol:
Alcohol regulation clearly separates manufacturer, distributor and retailer, with few exceptions. Prohibiting all vertical integration would have the effect of breaking up some current responsible players in the medical marijuana industry who engage in cultivation and sales, while requiring vertical integration of cultivation and sales could force large numbers of small incumbent growers into rushed and perhaps unwanted “shotgun marriages” with retailers.
The report also seems to suggest concessions to labor unions as a way to add political support: “The workforce involved in marijuana cultivation and processing should be afforded the same protections and rights as other workers in the agriculture and processing industries. This includes the right to collective bargaining, as well as other worker safety protections.”
As Breitbart News recently noted, in “California Is Greece, but with Capital Gains,” the state’s failed experiment in liberalism has resulted in the highest poverty rate in the U.S. at 23.4 percent. The grossly insolvent Gold State, with about $500 billion in debt, has survived–on life support–from billions of dollars of inconsistent revenue from capital gains taxes.
Desperate to keep the game going, Sacramento politicians are pushing to legalize marijuana for the tax revenue. They are likely to be disappointed.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Feds won't sue to stop marijuana use in Colorado, Washington state

marijuana_baghemp.jpgThe federal government said Thursday that it won't sue to stop the states of Colorado and Washington from allowing recreational marijuana use. 

In a sweeping policy announcement, the Justice Department outlined eight top priority areas for its enforcement of marijuana laws. 

They range from preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors to preventing sales revenue from going to criminal enterprises, gangs and cartels and preventing the diversion of marijuana outside of states where it is legal under state law. 

Other top-priority enforcement areas include preventing state-authorized marijuana activity from being used as a cover for trafficking other illegal drugs and preventing violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana. The top areas also include preventing drugged driving, preventing growing marijuana on public land and preventing marijuana possession on federal property. 

The announcement follows the first-in-the-nation legalization of recreational marijuana use by the states of Colorado and Washington. 

Last December, President Obama said it does not make sense for the federal government to go after recreational drug users in a state that has legalized recreational use of small amounts of marijuana.
Via: Fox News Politics

Continue Reading....

Monday, October 22, 2012

CA: FLIERS OFFERING VOTERS FREE MARIJUANA LEADS TO HIGH TURNOUT

Fliers offering voters $40 worth of marijuana led to increased turnout in an October 13 Neighborhood Council election in Eagle Rock, California. 
Voters in Eagle Rock reported they saw fliers with names of candidates running on the "Progess and Collaboration" slate that offered them free marijuana if they voted in the Neighborhood Council elections. 
According to CBS Los Angeles, "nearly 10 times as many voters – 792 residents – turned out to the polls during the recent Neighborhood Council elections than last year" and residents were able to collect enough signatures to put the issue of whether pot dispensaries should be banned in the city on the ballot. 
“You can’t pay your way like that, that’s not cool,” resident Danielle Sargent told CBS Los Angeles.
Yet, the fliers did not lead to victory for the Progress and Collaboration slate -- only two of the eight "Progress" candidates won.  Residents accused a local marijuana dispensary of distributing the fliers. 

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