Colorado's Legal Weed Is Harming Nearby States So Much They Can Barely Produce Evidence Of Harm

from the 'it's-mostly-an-existential-harm,-I-guess...' dept

When Colorado made recreational marijuana use legal, neighboring states were quick to predict lasting damage would be done by this flouting of federal law. "It's still illegal here," they sued briefly, before being booted back to reality by the Supreme Court.

“In passing and enforcing Amendment 64,” the lawsuit said, “the state of Colorado has created a dangerous gap in the federal drug control measures enacted by the United States Congress. Marijuana flows from this gap into neighboring states, undermining [their] own marijuana bans, draining their treasuries, and placing stress on their criminal justice systems.”

It has turned out to be far less of a "stress" than they imagined. More than a few law enforcement agencies have been happy to place patrol cars at the border and snag alleged pot purchasers as they exit the state. This hasn't always worked out well for them, but nothing about these enforcement actions suggests law enforcement (part of the criminal justice system) was too bothered by the influx of drug busts.

Of course, it's kind of difficult to nail someone for a fully-legal purchase. Buying from an authorized weed dealer isn't like buying from someone 16 degrees removed from a Mexican cartel. The purchase is legal. Any travelling outside the legal boundaries isn't. But the fact that marijuana can be purchased legally in some states has led to shifting attitudes both inside and outside of law enforcement. It's no longer considered de facto criminal activity worthy of punishment.

Court decisions have played a small part in this forced loosening of drug enforcement efforts. One court told cops they couldn't presume everyone with a Colorado license plate was participating in drug trafficking. Another court informed eager locals they couldn't arrest (and seize assets from) people traveling to Colorado, even if they clearly stated they intended to purchase marijuana while there. The criminal nexus actually had to be in the jurisdiction covered by the law enforcement agency involved and "might do something illegal in the future within this jurisdiction" isn't probable cause for an arrest.

Even without these court decisions, law enforcement is finding there's not much point in panicking about Colorado's drug tourism industry. Kansas Attorney General Derek Smith wisely decided to hold off on boarding the Amendment 64 lawsuit bandwagon until he had some evidence of actual harm in hand. Turns out, he couldn't really find any.

[L]aw enforcement was reporting fewer – not more – marijuana-related offenses. This was confusing to Schmidt, who said he’d heard from law enforcement that Colorado marijuana was king.

So he invoked a 19th-century law to survey law enforcement agencies. And he received a huge response: 390 law enforcement agencies and district attorneys painted the first large-scale picture of the impact of Colorado’s legalization on Kansas.

The early results suggest it is having a big impact, but it may not all be negative.

The amount of marijuana being confiscated appears to be dropping quickly. But the potency of the marijuana is increasing.

It's good to know it's no longer just the Drug War increasing drug potency. Legalizing drugs appears to have the same effect, only without the corresponding drain on public funds. Even more interesting is the attitude law enforcement is taking, even with a potentially unlimited number of drug busts available. The issue of legality/illegality may appear black/white, but government employees tend to respect government entities, even when they do something like legalize a drug that often acts as a revenue stream for drug warriors.

In some jurisdictions, law enforcement are no longer enforcing marijuana laws much, and even when they do, it has become difficult to win convictions. Users may receive a fine in one county, probation or jail in another and told to move along in others.

[...]

Some officers won’t issue citations for marijuana possession, according to the report.

“Our local deputies and sheriff tell me they stop at least five cars a day with personal-use marijuana inside and absolutely refuse to issue a citation or report for it,” according to the district attorney’s office in Clark County. “They simply confiscate it and send them on their way.”

Some of this relaxation may be due to diminishing returns. More prosecutions are being undone by local juries composed of people who no longer believe firing up the occasional joint to be a criminal act worthy of jail time.

Some juries are refusing to hand out marijuana convictions.

“I have had a number of potential jurors during voir dire opine their belief that marijuana should be legal,” according to the district attorney in Labette County. “Oddly enough, these statements were made in non-marijuana cases.”

This is true for young and old, black and white, according to the district attorney in Leavenworth County. The elderly say it should be allowed for medicinal purposes, while young jurors tell the DA it’s “less serious than tobacco or alcohol, and they oppose the use of tax funds to prosecute marijuana cases.”

Of course, there are still some district attorneys who wish the rest of the criminal justice system would take their marijuana possession prosecutions more seriously, complaining that lax sentences have resulted in the "absconding" of dangerous pot purchasers to their home states. More pragmatically, those in charge of housing inmates are relieved more cases are dead-ending as they'd rather use their limited space to house actual dangerous felons, rather than Kansans caught on a weed run.

If anything, the information collected shows a more relaxed approach to enforcement would see nearly no appreciable harm come to the state of Kansas. Law enforcement resources aren't infinite and they should be focused on criminal acts with victims, rather than people legally purchasing a drug for recreational use. Unfortunately, despite the lack of evidence supporting theories of harm, state AG Derek Smith still holds out hope that he'll find something to justify a legal weed lawsuit.

“Here you have our sister state – we love them, we get along great with them most of the time,” Schmidt said. “But doggone it, they have done something that federal law says they may not do, and it’s Kansans who are paying a price for that.”

Any price Kansans are paying for Colorado's marijuana sins are being imposed on them by overzealous enforcement. A legal distributor in the next state makes it pretty difficult to build a local, fully-criminal marijuana distributorship that can compete on price or potency. Playing hardball with drug tourists does nothing but blow taxpayer dollars on looking out-of-touch and ineffectual.

Filed Under: colorado, harm, marijuana, weed

The Ridiculous Rush To Try To Patent Pot

from the *sigh* dept

Over the years, we've had a whole bunch of posts demonstrating various industries where there is no direct intellectual property protection -- and yet where we still find tremendous innovation and competition. These include things like the fashion industry (where you can't copyright fashion designs), the restaurant industry and some others. In fact, a few years ago, a couple of law professors wrote an entire book highlighting competitive and innovative industries where there was a lack of intellectual property protection. And, yet, time and time again, we see people who show up in the areas where there's lots of competition and lots of innovation, and insist that those industries need more intellectual property protection.

The latest such industry? Apparently the legalized weed industry.

As you're probably aware, the US has been moving more and more towards legalizing marijuana, starting mostly with "medical marijuana" (and I use the quote marks there very deliberately), and increasingly opening it up for all kinds of recreational use (four states so far...). And, if you've paid any attention to the legalized pot business at all, you'd know that it's (1) a huge business with (2) tons and tons of competition and (3) an incredible amount of innovation. Lots of pot growers are trying to come up with newer and better strains, and there's a ton of other innovation going on concerning ways to ingest the stuff.

But the lawyers are descending... and they're telling people they need to "protect" everything. The article linked above, in the SF Chronicle, is ridiculous on multiple levels. It zips back and forth between patents and trademarks, doing little to explain the (vast) difference between the two. It also presents an entirely one-sided story, insisting (totally incorrectly) that "venture capitalists" require intellectual property protection to invest:

Investors, particularly those coming from the tech world, “are attuned to coming into a company and trying to secure as much intellectual property as they can quickly,” said Timothy Yim, the Startup Policy Lab’s director of data and privacy, who counsels cannabis-related startups.

“They want to make sure that you have as much of your intellectual property secured as possible” before the invest, said Kyndra Miller, an attorney whose San FranciscoCannabusiness Law practice specializes in weed clients, including Blake.

It's true that there are some investors focused on "intellectual property," but they tend not to be very good. Most of the top investors have no problem at all admitting that focusing on intellectual property is a mistake, because good venture capitalists are betting on upside. All intellectual property does is protect your downside risk most of the time. But the article just presents it as fact and keeps repeating the misleading message that locking down intellectual property is "necessary."

“A year and a half ago, we started telling people to think about (intellectual property) because this is what’s coming down the line,” said Reggie Gaudino, vice president for scientific operations and director of intellectual property at Steep Hill Labs, a Berkeley cannabis analytics lab with operations in several states. “Only in the last few months have people started to listen to what we had to say.”

Even worse, the article (again, ridiculously and misleadingly) insists that "open source" is somehow anti-business and a "kumbaya" concept, rather than a good business strategy:

“The reality is that most mature businesses have established the importance of intellectual property,” said Gaudino. “But one of the first things I noticed (in the cannabis industry) is that none of growers and breeders wanted to discuss that. They’d say, ‘No, we’re all open source,’ and the whole cannabis kumbaya stuff. And I’d say, ‘Let me know how that works out for you, because once this is legal, Big Pharma and Big Ag are going to come in here and grab whatever they can.’”

The reality is that big businesses tend to focus on intellectual property because they stopped innovating, so rather than compete, they like to use the law to block competition. And tons of open source offerings are very much about real (big) businesses, and there's no reason that shouldn't be true in other fields as well.

There's nothing wrong with folks in the industry trademarking their brand names and specific designs and such, but the idea that people should start to look to "patent" specific strains is deeply problematic:

To try to bring some order to the industry through science, Steep Hill analysts are using leading-edge technology, like a $1 million DNA sequencer, to “try to establish the genetic map of cannabis” as Gaudino puts it.

He said all of the marijuana strains found on dispensary shelves are blends “from the hand of man,” and he believes that they will be able to be patented once they are definitively mapped. In the last 1½ years, Steep Hill scientists have accumulated 1,000 samples of weed, sifting through some 400 strains that are on the market. Many of them, Gaudino said, share numerous similarities.

In other words -- using patents to limit innovation and competition, which is the exact opposite purpose that the law is intended for -- and in an industry that's already thriving, with tremendous innovation and competition. Once again, we see more evidence of how frequently patents have nothing to do with "promoting" innovation, but are used to stifle innovation and competition.

Filed Under: intellectual property, marijuana, patents, pot, reggie gaudino, weed
Companies: steep hill labs

Apple Pulls Popular Weed-Growing Game From App Store, Ignores All The Unpopular Ones

from the consistent-inconsistency dept

It should be clear by now that Apple sees most of us as the proverbial unwashed masses and is on something of a mission to immolate immoral thought patterns by trying to put everyone's head in the collective sand. That seems to be the only explanation for their app store censoring process, which has in the past removed historical context from games, the human body from consideration, comic books it deems to be immoral, and literature. All, mind you, in the name of a corporate moral code that probably wouldn't hold up under closer scrutiny.

But even if Apple wants to play the morality card, it presents the problem of consistency. Moral stances, after all, don't allow for picking and choosing due to outside factors. Yet that appears to be exactly what is occurring with the latest app store nixing of a popular game about growing marijuana, called Weed Firm.

As you might have noticed the game is no longer available on the Apple App Store. This was entirely Apple's decision, not ours. We guess the problem was that the game was just too good and got to number one in All Categories, since there are certainly a great number of weed based apps still available, as well as games promoting other so-called 'illegal activities' such as shooting people, crashing cars and throwing birds at buildings...If we let hypocrites determine what content is suitable for us we will soon all be watching teletubbies instead of Breaking Bad and playing... oh I don't know… nothing good comes to mind, without some form of 'illegal activity' or other really.

A couple of things to note. First, for those of us that are older than, say, fifteen, the rapid decriminalization of all things marijuana in this country is on a pace that can be described as no less than staggering. If you simply chart out what's gone on over the past decade and extrapolate into the next, it isn't off base to expect marijuana to go the way of tobacco and alcohol within that time. So the morality play is on shaky ground to begin with. Add to that, as Kotaku does, that the only thing consistent about Apple's app removal standards is its astounding inconsistency, and we should probably all begin asking ourselves exactly what the point of any of this is.

You can find places to buy weed on the app store. You can rate different strains of weed. You can download apps that teach you more about marijuana, or get apps that will give you various cosmetic weed changes to your phone. You can even roll fake joints. You can't, however, download a game where you grow marijuana. Other games, such as Weed Farmer and Weed Tycoon, remain active on the app store for now—but these games weren't as popular or as well-rated as Weed Firm was.

What, on the face of it, might have appeared to be a genuine, if misplaced, attempt to apply some kind of moral code suddenly dissolves into a PR response. As long as the marijuana-related games are generating money without being popular enough to draw any kind of wider attention, Apple's moral qualms go by the wayside. They either don't have the interest or the actual capacity to actively police all such offending games. Either answer renders the morality play moot to begin with: either you can enforce your strict guidelines in general or you can't. Apple, in the case of games revolving around marijuana, clearly can't. So what are we all doing here?

Well, we're suffering under Apple's delusion that we're children, of course. Children in need of a firm hand and the guidance of our parents, which apparently somehow became Apple. I suppose it isn't all that different from the old AOL walled-internet days, which I happily note went the hell away over a decade ago when the internet and its average denizen grew up. Maybe it's time now for Apple to stop it with the whole Puritan routine and start trusting their customers a bit more?

Filed Under: app store, apps, arbitrary, drugs, gatekeeper, itunes, morality, weed
Companies: apple

Man Asks For Weed On Twitter, Local Police Tweet Response, Hilarity Ensues

from the high-guys dept

Look, when it comes to illicit narcotics, I don’t know a whole lot beyond the peyote-driven walkabouts my heroin-addicted cult leader sends me on with requests to make sure I pick up all the mushrooms along the way. Still, even in my ignorance, I have to think there’s a better way to score some coolness than putting the pot-signal out on Twitter. I mean, isn’t there a high school or college in the area?

Apparently not for one man in Canada, where I could have sworn enforcement of marijuana crimes was handled in the same way as jay-walking. Unfortunately for him, but very fortunately for the rest of us, the local police were users of both Twitter and humor.

The young man, posting under the user name Sunith Baheerathan, was apparently at work on Tuesday when he wrote, "Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop? Come to Keele/Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff or two to help me last this open to close."

The York Regional Police noticed the post — which has since been removed — and replied: "Awesome! Can we come too?"

While I tend to have some trust issues with police (But not with the local Chicago police! Swear to god, you guys are the dog's bollocks and all that. I haven’t heard a gunshot in hours! Progress!), I can still appreciate when police mix a refusal to overreact to a situation with a little humor. So, apparently, can lots of other people, since the exchange between Sunith and the YRP was retweeted approximately a gazillion times. Guess who happened to be among the YRP’s Twitter followers?

By Tuesday evening, Mr. Lube tweeted, "Thank you to the York Regional Police for your help and great work. The matter has now been handled."
Sunith Baheerathan also tweeted: "Just got the call of termination."

Since then, Sunith has made much noise about how his tweets weren’t serious and how he didn’t know weed-smokers were hated by society more than “shooters and rapists,” two statements which both seem to contradict one another, while also making me wonder how many Canadian police departments are gleefully responding to tweets about shooting and raping folks, but I digress. The lesson here is you shouldn’t try to score drugs on Twitter.

Filed Under: canada, drugs, police, social media, weed, york