1ac

[Martin, Associate Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University;
J.D., University of California, Hastings; Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara,”
OBAMA, THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT, AND THE DRUG WAR”, 44 Akron L. Rev. 303 p. lexis]
As we enter 2011, progress on marijuana law reform in the U.S. is mixed.
At the state level
, on the one hand,
there is momentum.
Following
California's lead in 1996, fifteen states now allow the medicinal use of marijuana. n2 As for recreational use, although California recently rejected Proposition 19 by a 54% to 46% margin, n3 this ballot initiative thrust the issue to the forefront of national and international political debate. n4 Indeed, plans are already underway to place similar yet refined measures on state ballots in 2012. n5
As Richard Lee, founder of Oaksterdam University
and author of Proposition 19, thus remarked, "over the course of the last year, it has become clear that
[*305] the legalization of marijuana is no longer a question of if but a question of when."
n6
Notwithstanding such momentum at the state level, however, the prospects for reform at the federal level
for the near future.
For its part, Congress has consistently refused even to instruct the DEA not to harass sick patients
in states with medical marijuana laws. n7
For his part
, President
Obama has sent mixed signals on marijuana policy.
On the one hand, he announced in 2009 that so long as state medical marijuana laws are faithfully observed, there would be no DEA intervention. n8 In 2010, by contrast, when polls leading up to the election indicated that Proposition 19 might succeed, Attorney General Eric
Holder threatened to enforce federal marijuana prohibition if it did. n9 With Proposition 19's defeat, of course, the Administration dodged a bullet. Yet Obama almost certainly seeks reelection, and few politicians of either party will touch the marijuana issue. n10
Especially since the new Republican-controlled
House
of Representatives is even less likely to spur reform in this area than did the recent Democratcontrolled House, it seems clear that for the time being, federal marijuana prohibition
n11 marches on.
[David, Foley & Lardner-Bascom Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin
Law School, “High Federalism: Marijuana Legalization and the Limits of Federal Power to
Regulate States” 35 Cardozo L. Rev. 567, Lexis]
Marijuana legalization by the states presents the most pressing
and complex federalism issue of our time.
Congress has undisputed power to regulate individuals within a state, even if it creates rights or duties contrary to that state's laws. The power of Congress under the Commerce Clause to prohibit the manufacture, distribution, and even simple possession of marijuana, whether or not the offending conduct crosses state lines, is clearly established. n1
In the
Controlled
Substances Act (
CSA
) n2,
Congress exercised
that regulatory power
directly on the people of the states. But since
1996, several states have legalized medical or even "recreational" marijuana.
The obligation of
those states'
legislatures, executive officials, and courts to cooperate with the federal
marijuana prohibition is extremely unclear
.
Internal state governmental processes have been thrown into confusion by apparent conflicts between their state's legalization laws and the CSA.
State governors have refused to implement duly enacted state laws for fear that their subordinates will be prosecuted by federal authorities. n3 County bureaucrats are suing their states for injunctions to block enforcement of state laws that they deem to conflict with federal policy. n4 State courts are uncertain whether to revoke state law probationers or parolees for [*570] engaging in conduct that is affirmatively legal under state law. n5 Local police officers are concerned that they may be committing federal crimes by returning seized property to individuals who have committed no state law offense - and wonder whether they are obligated by federal law to make arrests for conduct expressly legalized by their state. n6
Rarely in our history have the obligations of officials of all branches of state government to conform to federal law been more uncertain - and rarely has federal law so sweepingly

intruded into state policy choices.
It is not an exaggeration to say that state marijuana legalization presents a federalism crisis.
n7 ¶ Current federalism doctrine offers three possible resolutions to this crisis, all of them unsatisfactory. To see this, we can boil the marijuana federalism problem down to a single question. Suppose a state or local police officer encounters a person who is in possession of marijuana in conformance with the state's legalization law. Must the officer arrest the person and seize the marijuana, or let the person go and keep the marijuana? This question is the most fundamental and commonplace of all the scenarios presenting conflicting duties of state officials in the marijuana federalism crisis.
Any doctrinal solution that cannot answer this basic "arrest and seizure" question in a satisfactory manner - one that is consistent both internally and with the broader fabric of federalism doctrines - necessarily fails to resolve the crisis.
Rauch 13—guest scholar in Governance Studies at Brookings
(Jonathan, “”Washington Versus Washington (and Colorado): Why the States Should Lead on Marijuana Policy”, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2013/3/26%20marijuana%20legalization%20localism%20rauch/Was hington%20Versus%20Washington%20and%20Colorado_Rauch_v17.pdf, dml)
In short, there is no alternative to the exercise of political judgment
. Mature people will have to make conscious choices about how to manage social change and conflict with a minimum of unnecessary pain and disruption.
The stakes transcend drug policy proper: marijuana legalization, far from standing alone, is an installment in a series
. In the past several years, state-federal conflict has become a running theme of the national debate, on multiple hot-button issues and in multiple permutations
:
• On immigration
, the federal government demanded that the states follow federal policy. Arizona claimed a right to independently enforce federal law, even if its enforcement priorities differed from those of the federal government. It also asserted a right to supplement federal policies with its own more stringent ones. The federal government objected, and the Supreme Court delivered a mixed ruling which mostly favored the federal government.
• On
Obamacare
(the 2010 Affordable Care Act), states demanded the right not to follow federal policy. They challenged the law’s expansion of Medicaid and its mandate to buy health insurance. The Supreme Court again delivered a mixed ruling, this time leaning toward the states.
• On gay marriage
, states demanded that the federal government follow state policy. In suing to overturn the U.S. Defense of
Marriage Act, they claimed that Washington, D.C., had to follow states’ definitions of marriage rather than establish a separate definition of its own. The Supreme Court, at this writing, has yet to rule.
Unlike the cases of immigration and Obamacare and the Defense of Marriage Act, marijuana involves not merely friction between state and federal policy but
something closer to
outright defiance. Even in a context of growing agitation in federal-state relations, this was putting a cat among the
pigeons. Avoiding conflict
or even chaos is not going to be easy, and the outcome will affect not
only drug policy but
sure to emerge.
[Emily Crick - Research Assistant, Global Drug Policy Observatory, Heather
J. Haase - Consultant, International Drug Policy Consortium/Harm Reduction Coalition, Dave
Bewley-Taylor - Director, Global Drug Policy Observatory, “Legally regulated cannabis markets in the US: Implications and possibilities,” November, http://konyvtar.eski.hu/tmpimg/378746103_0.pdf]
Furthermore, the CSA calls on the federal government ‘to enter into contractual agreements… to provide for cooperative enforcement and regulatory activities.’151 This means that in theory the federal government could come to agreements with the individual states on their cannabis regulation policies, which may be exactly what the Department of Justice is seeking to do in issuing its guidance. Indeed, some have argued that it would be preferable for them to do so rather than let the states merely give up enforcing the federal prohibition on marijuana.152 It has also been argued that despite the recent Department of Justice guidance there are no guarantees that state attorneys will cease to prosecute those who work in the marijuana industry especially in the light of federal crackdowns on the medical marijuana industry.153 In a recent hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the issue, James M.
Cole
, US Deputy Attorney General (and author of the memorandum) attempted to put many
of these

concerns to rest.
154
Needless to say, the situation is evolving gradually and it remains to be seen how this guidance is applied in practice.
Moreover, these state-federal tensions must be considered in a wider context
, and it has been argued that allowing states to determine their own cannabis
policy may result in other states demanding further independence with regards to other aspects of federal policy such as gun control, immigration and health care.
155
[Matthew, judicial law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the
Fifth Circuit, Joint Authority? The Case for State-Based Marijuana Regulation Winter,
Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy, http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1135&context=tjlp]
The origin of today's "War on Drugs" emanated from Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, where he cited growing drug use as the next great problem facing the nation.8 Just a few years later, the Nixon Administration created the federal Drug Enforcement Administration ("DEA") and increased the drug enforcement budget to nearly $800 million.9 Though Nixon was primarily concerned with the more potent and destructive heroin epidemic,10 marijuana use was easily subsumed into the United States' drug war following three decades of haphazardly implemented anti-marijuana criminal and tax laws." The "War on Drugs" fire was stoked once again by a republican presidential campaign in 1980.12 Backed by the powerful
"parents' movement,"l 3 Ronald Reagan re- established the "War on Drugs" through the "Just Say No" campaign and increased the federal drugenforcement budget to nearly $6 billion within the next three years.14 The anti-drug establishment continued to escalate through the 1990s, enlisting almost $20 billion in federal anti-drug coffers by 1998.15 The 21st century has seen little retreat from the legalist regime of the past three decades as the political ante continues to intensify. A modern example is exemplified by the Bush Administration's National Drug Control Strategy, aimed at "healing
America's drug users."l6
Most relevant to today's marijuana legalization debate is the
Controlled Substances Act
("CSA"),
which incorporates marijuana among its many listed illicit substances.' 7 Maximum penalties for marijuana possession, cultivation, and distribution range from one year to life in prison, with maximum fines from one thousand to eight million dollars depending on the amount of marijuana at issue and the circumstances underlying the conviction.'8
The CSA is undoubtedly one of the most salient consequences of current Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding
Congress' interstate commerce power.
No tably, the Court found in Gonzales v. Raich that Congress did not overstep its Constitutional authority by regulating the trade of illicit substances, including marijuana. 19 Relying on Wickard v. Fillburn2,0 the Court held that even purely intrastate cultivation and distribution of marijuana is subject to federal regulation under the interstate commerce clause-and hence constitutionally controlled under the CSA.21 Even before Supreme Court jurisprudence dramatically extended Congress' ability to regulate illicit substances in interstate commerce, several commentators decried a federal "monopoly" over drug policy.
22 Though the federal government has always possessed "an impressive array of tools to influence policymaking at lower levels of government," 2 3 recent developments in academia and state-based drug policies, suggest that state authority and policy innovation has established a solid footing in the marijuana law paradigm
, ranging from medical-use licensing to decriminalization. While recognizing the federal government's oversight role in drug enforcement policy, this article ultimately argues for horizontal competition-at the expense of federal supremacy25-in marijuana policy for several reasons.
First, it is not clear that the federal government has constitutional authority to mandate state drug policy.
2 6 Though preemption, through properly enacted federal law, plays an important role in drug enforcement, the federal government cannot require a state to enforce federal laws.27
Second, though the mere presence of federal enforcement undoubtedly affects state policymaking
, the lack of federal enforcement resources strongly limits the feasibility of effective wide-scale federal enforcement.
To be sure, drug laws are almost exclusively implemented and policed by state and local governments. As such, likelihood of vertical competition from the federal government is reduced.29 lastly, federal regulation is inefficient and burdensome
, diminishing citizen autonomy, while hindering
innovation and consumer choice.
30 Regardless of the federal government's involvement in drug policy, current state innovation in marijuana legislation is undoubtedly significant
. Presently, sixteen states as well as the District of Columbia have enacted legislation legalizing the possession, cultivation, and use of marijuana for the treatment of certain illnesses.3 1
Against this state regulatory backdrop loom the CSA and the potential for DEA and FBI enforcement. As previously mentioned, however, the federal government plays a very small role in the enforcement and prosecution of marijuana users, growers, and dispensaries-the United States Attorney only manages about one percent of all marijuana cases, leaving the rest to state enforcement. 3 2 Given that federal resources are unable to manage the overwhelming drug caseload, and that many states have already shown their unwillingness to cede power over drug regulation and enforcement, there is significant room for states to implement and experiment with new marijuana laws.
With state experimentation comes the possibility for competition between states in the enactment of innovative marijuana regulatory schemes
and legalization policies.
This dynamic is known as jurisdictional

competition
, or
more simply, the market for laws
. 33 The basic premise of the jurisdictional competition paradigm is that governments compete to supply laws in order to support the influx of business and economic benefits, taxes, and citizenry. 3 4 This legal market concept has been applied most extensively in the corporate law context, focusing on Delaware's market dominance. The market concept has, however, found a receptive audience in the fields of environmental law, tax, bankruptcy, trusts, and family law.35
This article
embarks on an analysis of the competitive framework over drug lawmaking authority and enforcement. While recognizing the historic dominance of federal authority in the field,36 it argues against the efficacy of federal authority and in favor of decentralized regulation over marijuana policy
. Using alcohol regulation as a guiding example, this article argues for state authority over marijuana regulation, with
localized enforcement and state discretion
over local policymaking authority. Notwithstanding the ban on possession, cultivation, distribution, and use, there are a number of regulatory mechanisms states can implement outside of absolute illegality. For instance, states can institute penalty schemes, by varying sentencing guidelines or establishing statutory penalty frameworks that differentiate between misdemeanor and felony violations. 3 7 In addition, some states have employed alternative sentencing schemes, experimenting with drug treatment courts and probation dependent upon the successful completion of a rehabilitation program. Outside of varying penalties, states have an array of legalization options, ranging from 39 40 to marijuana licenses for medical use. Not to mention, several states have instituted decriminalization laws wherein possession and use is either legal or considered a misdemeanor, while distribution and 41 trafficking remains criminal. Enhanced forfeiture is also an interesting option for reform that has potential incentive effects not only for criminal possessors but for state coffers. laws currently stand, asset forfeiture "provides a significant incentive for state and local governments both to allocate substantial resources to drug enforcement and to cooperate with federal agencies."4 3 On the other hand, from a marijuana user's perspective, reform initiatives aimed at limiting state and federal ability to confiscate property in conjunction with drug seizures may be a considerable incentive to relocate.4
Given the myriad of potential decentralized alternatives for marijuana regulation
, there is significant room for jurisdictional competition
among state and municipal governments for citizens, businesses, tax revenues, and reduced violent crime. On the other hand, the drug debate is never quite so clear-cut; there are significant political45 and moral considerations-e.g. addiction, rehabilitation, and health care expenditures, as well as the potential for decreased economic productivity in the wake of potentially rampant drug abuse. Given the complex considerations involved, the next Part will introduce a new theory of decentralized marijuana regulation modeled partly after state alcohol regulation, while accounting for possible spillover effects, interest group influence, and political incentives unique to the market for marijuana. II. Invigorating the Market for Marijuana Laws - Embracing a Decentralized Role for Regulation With fundamentally different individual and political viewpoints in the marijuana debate, citizen autonomy should be at the forefront of the regulatory policymaking agenda, providing an avenue for increased individual choice and more efficient and innovative lawmaking.
Accordingly, the core argument in this article promotes the redistribution of marijuana regulatory authority away from the federal government and into the hands of the states and local authorities.
After first outlining the current regulatory framework, this Part argues for the rejection of federal control over marijuana policymaking. Noting the federal government's failure to account for state innovation and autonomy, the first section utilizes public choice theory to establish a state-based framework akin to alcohol regulation following the Twenty-First Amendment. The following section explains criticisms of such a position, but ultimately dispels these analyses in favor of the state as central decision-maker. The following section, however, points out, and expands upon, two well-founded critiques of consolidated state control so as to build on the decentralization framework; placing state and local politics at the forefront of the marijuana regulatory regime. A. Federal Involvement in
Drug Policy Ironically, current drug policy can best be described by the "Cooperative
Federalism" framework.
This
regulatory depiction is "a combination of federal policy mandates and inducements (such as conditional grants) that require or provide
strong financial incentives for states to implement the federal policy."
4 6 National policy issues that are not only resource intensive, but also respond to hypothetical state-to-state externalities further buoy the federally dominated regulatory regime.47 Sparked by states enacting reactive policies to a particular problem, the federal government responds at the behest of states and - 48 interest groups most invested in the issue. On one hand, states concerned about the capacity to fund these programs and the ability to successfully implement the program if other states do not conform push the federal government to enact a national program. On the other hand, federal politicians can garner the political support of vocal interest groups,50 while only paying for part of the overarching program. ' In the context of drug policy, "Cooperative Federalism" is illustrated by the pioneer states that first prohibited marijuana, and the resulting federal program, implemented through the CSA and the "War on Drugs."
As the "Cooperative
Federalism" framework predicts, the drug regulation dynamic balances "federal desires for control
(and hence political support) and . . . engagement of state and local law enforcement in the war on drugs
(and hence minimization of costs to the federal budget)."52
Extensive federal involvement
, however, does not leave adequate room for state innovation in the drug policy arena.
5 3 Rather, this paradigm is only responsive to the dynamic wherein states and the federal government express views that are in agreement, or at the very least, that can be squared through political compromise. 5 4 As a result, states are left to either venture on their own, in defiance of federal policy initiatives, or maintain some complicity with the "War on Drugs." B. Federal Drug Regulation is Hampering the Marketfor MarijuanaPolicy Amidst the federal drug policy debate, there are abundant theories for optimal policymaking and response to population preferences. These theories are based on principles of federalism, public choice, and efficient competition, and range from strong federal control to variations of hybrid state-federal policymaking that either attempt to explain the current dynamic or argue for a shift in regulatory policy to better engender efficient drug policy.
This article advocates for decentralized drug policymaking in an effort to promote democracy,
autonomy, and efficiency. The federal government has instituted a "War on Drugs," stemming from political and moral opposition that predominantly began in the 1970s. Out of political necessity and increasing violence attributed to drug trafficking, the federal executive branch invested ever-increasin resources into drug regulation and enforcement. Rather than promoting uniformity, curing hypothetical negative externalities, or stemming drug-use, the federal drug

regime led to divergent state drug policies
56 and an Executive Order that retreats from the strictures of the CSA.
57
This drug regime also confuses the citizenry and retail merchants as
to how the federal government will react to marijuana use, possession, and distribution.
In contrast to federal marijuana laws, alcohol policy covering use and distribution is largely left to the states. 60 it is relevant, if not absolutely necessary, to compare the maladies documented from alcohol prohibition in the 1920s in an effort to engender a new era of efficient and autonomous marijuana policymaking in the hands of state and local governments. 1.The Pitfalls of Prohibition The federal government has three basic positions it can take in response to a given state policy: active support, neutrality, or active discouragement. In the drug regulation arena, the federal government's traditional stance has been based almost entirely on how closely state policy resembles the "War on Drugs" paradigm. 6 2 In contrast, the federal government's role in the alcohol arena strongly supports state efforts at policymaking, 6 3 where the only inde endent roles for the federal government lie in labeling, taxation, and interstate distribution.6 6 Current United States alcohol policy is hardly surprising given Prohibition's sordid past. On
January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect and prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors . . . for beverage purposes. . . ."67 Within a few short years, alcohol use once again became rampant, but was now unregulated, dangerous, and controlled by organized crime; prisons were overpopulated, and corruption in public officials was 68 unprecedented.68 Prohibition's failure is distinctly ironic, given its lofty social and public health goals. Indeed, the "noble experiment" as it came to be known, "was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in
America."69 These goals are similarly idealized by the CSA,70 which has been espoused as no less than the protector of the nation's health and public welfare.7 1
Ignoring the pitfalls of Prohibition
and the social ills befalling blind adherence to rigid moral high ground not only ignores potential economic boons
due to product taxation and retail sale, but also leaves "controlled" substances to be bartered for in the underground market, adulterated by drug dealers, and subject only to regulation
72 noble ideals pushed by
Prohibitionists in an effort to rid through the criminal underworld. society of the social ills created by alcohol, the homicide rate increased by seventyeight percent during Prohibition, all other crimes increased by twenty-four percent, and arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct increased by forty-one percent.73 In essence, "[m]ore crimes were committed because [P]rohibition destroy[ed] legal jobs, create[ed] black-market violence, divert[ed] resources from enforcement of other laws, and greatly increase[d] the prices people ha[d] to pay for the prohibited goods."74 The analogy to marijuana is striking considering the enormous rate of violent crime attributed to drug trafficking, yet the exorbitant number of inmates in United
States prisons are incarcerated as a result of simple drug possession7.5 2. A State-Based Solution to Federal Marijuana Prohibition In response to the historically apt analogy to Prohibition and the arguable shortcomings inherent in the current federal drug regime, some commentators argue for adoption of the "Constitutional Alternative."76 Finding support in basic public choice theory, supporters of the "Constitutional
Alternative" argue for a basic reversion of authority to the states
, wherein "the power to control the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of all psychoactives" would be under state control. Strongly resembling the current federal-state dynamic over alcohol distribution, this dynamic, however, would leave the regulation of interstate drug distribution to the federal government. 7 9
Rather than purporting to legalize marijuana distribution, this power-shift is "intended to provide states with greater autonomy by 'permitting the states to choose drug-control strategies more in line with the preferences and circumstances of their citizens."' 80 This state-based framework is supported by two overarching policy rationales: 1) citizen choice; and 2) policy innovation. 1 Decentralization would promote more autonomy among the United States population to choose the laws and regulations that fit their lifestyle preferences so that if a "resident of one state does not like the rules imposed by the majority there, he is free to move to a state whose laws better suit his preferences or circumstances." 82 For example, if a nation consisted of one hundred people, forty of whom want marijuana to be legalized and sixty who would opt to retain the status quo, the ban on marijuana possession will remain in place-as it is in the CSA-leaving forty citizens unhappy with the law.83f, however, the nation were divided into separate states, each with the power to enforce its own laws, then more citizens would be content with the nation's regulatory policy.84 For instance, if one state contains fifty residents who favor the status quo and ten residents who would opt for legalization, while another state contains ten residents favoring continued illegality, and thirty who would opt for legalization, then one state will opt to maintain marijuana's illegal status, while the other will opt for some form of legalization. Simple arithmetic provides that eighty of the nation's citizenry will be satisfied, while twenty are still unhappy with the policy. 8 6
Adding in the option for citizen mobility and minimal transactions costs, the net benefits could be even greater.87
Decentralization
also
promotes policy innovation where states with divergent political considerations experiment with new-and possibly more optimal- regulatory policy.
In stark contrast, a purely unitary federal policy only gives the political process one shot to respond to social needs.
89 As Justice Brandeis' famous dissent points out, "[i]t is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." 90 The simplistic example above shows us how the policy innovation rationale easily fits into the public choice model wherein two states adopting different policies can adapt, amend, or reject their own policies in response to the consequences-both positive and negative-displayed by their peer state's policy choices.91 Policymakers should take heed; just as Prohibition failed to cure, and even exacerbated, the social ills it attempted to curtail, the federal reign over marijuana law
could do the same; it has already created an enormous taxpayer burden while leading to increased violent crime and addiction.
9 2 Though federal legislators may lose the political soapbox federal regulation so conveniently provides,
will lead to the same benefits we saw following enactment of the Twenty-First Amendment
:9 3 reduced corruption and organized crime, job creation, and invigorated addiction support programs.
III. Spillover Effects and
Negative Externalities: Evaluating the Criticisms of Consolidated State Control Commentators have not unanimously rejoiced at the prospect of bolstering state power in drug policymaking. Rejecting the "Constitutional Alternative" approach to United States drug policy, Michael O'Hear argues that the federal government must "adopt a clear, coherent policy towards state innovation"9 5 through the adoption of a theory of government control he labels the "Competitive Alternative." 96 O'Hear critiques the purely state-based policymaking approach, arguing that it may actually "reduce the

degree of decentralization in national drug policy by consolidating state control, and . . . [producing] perverse incentives that warrant federal intervention."97 The first section to this Part outlines O'Hear's concerns with an outright reversion of federal power to state regulatory authority. The following section attempts to rebut O'Hear's most salient critiques by utilizing traditional theory in the field of jurisdictional competition. The next section follows with an analysis of the focal points of O'Hear's "Competitive Alternative," evaluating the federal media machine and asset forfeiture laws. Finally, this Part attempts to reconcile and incorporate some of O'Hear's most salient and practical points with this article's approach to state control over marijuana regulatory policy. . O'Hear'sCritique
Perhaps counter-intuitively, O'Hear argues that carte blanche state control could lead to less local autonomy than under the "Cooperative Federalist" regime.
This is so because much of the support for federal drug control goes directly to localities-e.g. monetary grants, referral for federal prosecution, and equitable sharing statutes that allow local enforcement to keep some of the proceeds of drug confiscations. 99 Local autonomy may be engendered due to federal prosecutorial incentives as well, where United States Attorneys are subject to political pressures and must address local needs. 00 At the very least, O'Hear argues that state regulatory control would not clearly do a better job of regulatory policymaking than the current regime by stating that, "[n]otwithstanding the benefits of decentralization, federal control may still be justified on the basis of 'Race to the Bottom' pressures or spillover effects."' 0' He argues that dominant state regulatory authority may create a "Race to the Bottom" market failure wherein states will create continually relaxed marijuana regulation laws in an effort to garner tax revenues from legalized sale and distribution.10 2 The critique further predicts that "spillover effects" may undermine the workability of such a decentralization framework because states that relax their drug policy may create problematic negative externalities in "neighboring get-tough states." 03 O'Hear points out that a significant part of the cost of marijuana lies in the risk and subterfuge involved in the illegal trafficking regime, which inflates the price.104 Consequently, when states legalize the process, prices will deflate, attracting potential users in neighboring states-states that maintain the illegality of marijuana use, possession, and distribution.'0 5 In response to the alleged failings of state regulatory dominance, O'Hear argues for implementation of his own "Competitive Alternative." Though still grounded in a presumption of decentralized policymaking, O'Hear additionally focuses on reducing federal distortion of drug policy information, increasing local political control over federal drug enforcement decisions, and increasing local law enforcement accountability.106 B. Counteringthe
Critique
Despite O'Hear's reasoned criticisms, state-based regulatory authority is in many ways hard to dispute
.
Moreover, hypothetical fears can be assuaged, and state- based authority validated
, by analogy to the current alcohol regulation framework
, which would take nothing more than repeal of the CSA as it relates to marijuana control.
Further, the main argument for federalization
-
07and one recognized by O'Hearl
0 8often lies in an attempt to curtail negative externalities and potential "races to the bottom" among states
.109
It is unclear, however, that federal regulation would be the answer, even if these market failures existed
. More relevant to this discussion is the uncertainty that state-based marijuana policy is likely to lead to the problems highlighted in O'Hear's critique. 1. Federal Regulation
May Not be the Answer to a Race to the Bottom for Marijuana Laws As previously discussed, O'Hear points out the likelihood of a "Race to the Bottom," and potential spillover effects resulting from the decentralization of drug policy.' 10 A common solution to these state-based market failures is preemptive federal regulatory authority." Picking up, however, on Richard Revesz's work in the environmental market for laws, federal regulation is not alwa s the quick fix to market failure that it is presumed to be."
The typical argument for federal authority is simple; where federal regulation preempts state policymaking in the field, states will no longer be able to engage in an inefficient policy battle with negative social utility." 3 Revesz used federal authority in environmental policy to rebut the preemption rationale
: [Flederal environmental standards can have adverse effects on other state programs.
Such secondary effects must be considered in evaluating the desirability of federal environmental
regulation. Most importantly, the presence of such effects suggests that federal regulation will not be able to eliminate the negative effects of interstate competition.
Recall that the central tenet of race-to-the-bottom claims is that competition will lead to the reduction of social welfare; the assertion that states enact suboptimally lax environmental standards is simply a consequence of this more basic problem. In the face of federal environmental regulation, however, states will continue to compete for industry by adjusting the incentive structure of other state programs.
Federal regulation thus will not solve the prisoner's dilemma
.
114 Revesz simply points out that regulation and social welfare are not created in a vacuum. The government should, and does, regulate in a complex matrix of policies involving a number of different variables that all impact each other.
To take one of the variables that suffers from market failure and impose a uniform federal standard upon it does not necessarily lead to increased social welfare on the whole
.
In essence, desirable regulation is too complex to achieve through piecemeal centralization; it is akin to plugging the dam with a federal forefinger while watching the wall fissure just out of reach. Unfortunately for federalism and state autonomy
, the theoretical result from such an approach is complete centralization in the federal
115 government
. So what is to be made of the environmental- marijuana analogy? Revesz points to competing regulatory variables in the environmental arena, like workers' rights and corporate taxation, which are inevitably tied to industry location decisions.116 Thus, when several variables play into corporate decision-making, one state-based regulatory change is unlikely to provide the incentives necessary to propagate a "Race to the Bottom." A possible counterargument to the application of this analogy here may elucidate a number of distinctions in marijuana regulation. For example, political decisions in the environmental arena are often aimed at maintaining the status quo-keeping industry in place or simply combating more stringent environmental policies-while progressive marijuana regulation runs against the status quo. Thus, rather than Revesz's world of environmental regulations playing a small factor in business incentives, marijuana regulation may play out differently. To be sure, political inertia is undoubtedly an important consideration when confronting change. Here, however, it is less than certain that the pivotal "status quo" distinction makes a difference in the theoretical argument; or practically whether it creates a barrier at all. Rather, it seems that the anti-drug status quo is less of a political fallback and more of a public perception and interest group driver that

would be balanced in a jurisdictional competition framework. In fact, it is more likely that the complexities of regulatory dynamics would be more robust in the market for marijuana than contemplated in Revesz's critique of federal oversight in the environmental arena. Comparing the market for marijuana laws to the environmental law patchwork, there are several apparent variables in a complex regulatory scheme that would play against a centralization argument. Simply speaking, one such variable lies in economic growth itself. Much like pollution, if a state is not allowed to provide for legal marijuana sales-and hence benefit from economic growth and taxes-the state may loosen standards in other areas to compensate. Further, drug tourism is not an unheard of phenomenon; it is seen internationally, as well as in states that allow for purchase without local citizenship." 7 Federalized drug prohibition could thus lead to overly lax enforcement in tourism related to other vice goods like gambling or prostitution. Furthermore, it is plausible that, given the extensive prison overpopulation and the overwhelming burden faced by enforcement authorities, policymakers will institute overly lenient penalties for non- drug crimes or prosecutors may simply not enforce crimes to the extent of the law. In sum, just as Revesz argues that federal oversight is an unwise option for corrective regulation in the environmental arena, preemptive regulation in marijuana regulation is similarly disjunctive.
Even if a "Race to the Bottom" does exist for marijuana laws, federal oversight may lead to inefficient regulation in other economic areas, especially tourism, in addition to penal laws and their enforcement
. 2. It is Not Clear that Jurisdictional Competition for Marijuana Laws Will Lead to a Race to the Bottom Among
States The preceding discussion may be largely irrelevant, however, if marijuana policy is not conducive to "Race to the Bottom" or
negative externality market failures.
In fact, there are several reasons we would not expect to see these economic failures play out in the realm of marijuana policy.
In the criminal justice arena, scholars focus extensively on the effects of penalties on crime displacement and jurisdictional infighting that may lead to inefficient collective-action problems. This market failure contemplates peer jurisdictions "spending increasingly high resources on their criminal justice system[s] simply to deflect crime to their neighbors.""8 Indeed, "in recent decades [states] have shown increasing awareness of the criminal justice policies of their sister states."1 9 Scholars utilizing this approach are apt to recognize the need for federal oversight to eliminate the state "race" to overly harsh criminal penalties.'20 As previously discussed, a similar argument has been heavily cited and remarked upon in the environmental field; noting the argument for federal regulation to circumvent a state-industrial "Race to the Bottom" over pollution standards. 12 1 The clearly established
"Race to the Bottom" argument in other areas can certainly be applied to criminal justice standards, wherein criminals are assumed to be rational actors and will commit crimes in the jurisdictions where the costs associated with illegal activity are the lowest.122 When one state implements stricter criminal laws or penalties, it is posited that criminals will at least consider relocating to a jurisdiction with more lenient standards. 12 3 In the face of criminal displacement, recipient states that presumably do not want the social ills associated with more criminals among its populace will respond inkind and institute even harsher penalties in an effort to displace the criminal population within its borders.1 This established model, however, only reasonably applies to criminal activities with little to no societal benefits; for instance, violent crimes, sex crimes, and larceny. In contrast, regardless of the negative effects of drug-use itself, a large proportion of the negative societal consequences of criminal drug activity are due to the nature of illicitness itself. To be sure, while drug use may lead to community costs in the form of increased health care outlays, rehabilitation, and reduced economic productivity, the overwhelming demand for drugs creates an enormous underground market,
125 policed by drug dealers, street gangs, organized crime syndicates, and drug cartels.
Whereas government-sanctioned markets are transparent and regulated, underground "shadow economies
"1 26 lead to regulation by the hand of distribution
, the criminal underworld and organized crime syndicates.
The end
result is a drug trade that leads to overwhelming violence,
not just in manufacturing countries, but also in developed countries, which fuel the demand for these illicit substances. 127 On one hand, federal regulation of drug markets has led to remarkable societal consequences in the form of crime and violence
. On the other hand, criminal justice theorists suggest a potential "Race to the Bottom," leading to overly harsh criminal penalties. It is not clear, however, that a "Race to the Bottom" will occur in the marijuana market. Empirics and logic suggest a successful and societally beneficial market for drug legalization.128 For example, in contrast to state exile of pedophiles and violent criminals, states stand to benefit from increased tax revenues,129 less violent crime,130 and significant economic growth by taking an already existing market aboveground.1 3 1 In order for the "Race to the Bottom" theory to attach, there must be negative externalities sufficiently realized to incentivize states to change their laws in an attempt to remedy those externalities. First, consider Teichman's theory of overly strict regulation to effectively exile criminals from within a jurisdiction. This is hardly a far-fetched theory. Rather, state and local policies regarding ex-convicts have shown just such an effort to exile criminals through bussing and relocation efforts. 13 2 Taking the next step, altering penal laws to move criminals to other jurisdictions is also plausible. However, this theory's application in the realm of marijuana laws is less than certain and seemingly far- fetched. The negative externalities associated with criminal activities seemingly stem mostly from violence and economic losses through theft. Though addiction, medical problems, homelessness and vagrancy undoubtedly contribute to the attacks against legalization, these factors exist whether marijuana is legal or illegal, as we have seen for decades. But if a jurisdiction legalizes marijuana, the violent crime variable will presumably be eliminated as the market moves out of the hands of organized crime and into retail outlets.' 33 The more relevant question is whether marijuana use will increase with legalization; and if it does, whether the negative impacts of citizen use will outweigh the benefits, such that the jurisdiction will seek to move users outside its boundaries. Even assuming that most of the populace will begin to use, or even abuse, marijuana, it does not necessarily follow that there will be far-reaching negative public impacts. Though it is certainly possible that worker productivity may decrease, while accidents,
DUIs, and addiction rehabilitation needs increase. It is also necessary to consider moral stigma and negative externalities associated with interjurisdictional trafficking. 134 Policymakers must balance these negative implications with the possible benefits of taxation, reduced prison populations, increased citizen autonomy and happiness, and reduced violent crime through elimination of the drug underworld. In contrast to the unsavory criminal activities noted by Teichman, where the criminal element moves from one jurisdiction to another, unwanted by all, marijuana users and would-be distributors would bring both benefits and possible detriments to a jurisdiction, leaving state and local government to make the decisions jurisdictional competition theorists argue should be made by decentralized government in order to further efficient and innovative lawmaking. Even if Teichman's
"Race to the Bottom" for overregulation does not apply to the market for marijuana laws, an argument could be made that the opposite may be trueunder-regulation incited by jurisdictions competing for tax revenues, drug tourism, and economic growth. But just as liquor laws faced the Teetotalers in the early 20th century, progressive drug policy faces a strong check through opposition in the religious right and parent advocacy groups, among many others. The marijuana policy battlefield offers a multitude of variables for policymakers to balance as they attempt to appease and attract a presumably mobile populace. As they have been in the federal regulatory framework, interest groups will be at the forefront of marijuana policymaking instituted by the states, with constituencies influenced by a variety of considerations including corporate, retail, and direct taxation; citizen autonomy and happiness; economic growth; and reduced crime and prison populations.135 Driving anti-marijuana legislation are various interest groups intent on entrenching the status quo. For example, the biggest contributors to Partnership for a Drug-Free America are the Prison Industrial Complex, Big
Pharmaceutical, Big Tobacco, and the alcohol manufacturing industry.' 36 If under-regulation is the concerning factor in a "Race to the Bottom"

analysis, these major interest groups will play a strong role in combating increasingly lenient marijuana policy. Considering a "Race to the Bottom" may end in overly restrictive or overly lenient lawmaking depending on the interests, the aforementioned competing interests should be robust enough to avoid a "race" in either direction. Given the extent of politically salient variables in play, state autonomy in policymaking
would seem particularly apt in the context of marijuana policy.
Indeed, principles of federalism suggest that states be able to choose the laws most applicable to the characteristics of the jurisdiction "thereby giving mobile citizens many different regulatory regimes from which to choose when selecting a place to live."l 37 Stepping outside the realm of theory, reality has similarly not played out the way an under-regulating "Race to the Bottom" would dictate. Only sixteen states138 have made progressive marijuana regulation in the face of the current administration's tolerant Executive Order' 39 and general federal reliance on state enforcement.140 Though this article's proposed solution would remove the supposed federal barrier,
possibly giving hesitant states the last push necessary to enter the "race" to legalization
, a map of current drug laws indicates that the impetus for progressive marijuana laws is likely more strongly tied to geographical ideologies and preferences than fear of the federal government's stance on drug laws.141 For instance, the most progressive laws tend to be on the West Coast: California, Nevada, Oregon,
Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, and Colorado.14 2 In contrast, southern "bible belt" states have the strictest stance on marijuana with essentially zero- tolerance laws in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. 143 While hardly conclusive evidence of ideological preference influencing marijuana policymaking, the religious, tobacco, and prison industrial interest groups' stranglehold over the Southeast may well keep states in this region from entertaining progressive legalization laws, even if the federal government leaves the picture. This is not surprising given that analogous alcohol bans in counties and municipalities lie almost exclusively in the Southeast.'"
Despite the uncertainty inherent in jurisdictional competition for marijuana laws, state autonomy seems to be the best alternative in an effort to achieve the greatest public welfare
. In the absence of over-burdensome negative externalities and a race to overly strict or overly lax marijuana laws, the federal government's role should be limited to international traffic cop and interstate referee.
Even if the aforementioned market failures do exist in a competitive framework for marijuana regulation, it is wholly unclear that the federal government's role as uniform legislator is the proper solution where states have other regulatory avenues to exploit in an effort to establish economic growth and constituent appeasement. Even Teichman concedes that "the U[nited] S[tates] government has a dismal track record when it comes to criminal justice, very often manifesting an irrational 'tou h on crime' attitude irrespective of legislative context."1 4
Prohibition's catastrophic failure should give policymakers keen background insight into marijuana's current federal regulatory future, opening the door for state and local authority with the repeal of the CSA's prohibition on marijuana use, possession, and distribution.
C. The Competitive Alternative's
Practical Concerns Though the market for marijuana policy likely includes the competing interests necessary to avoid the problems encountered in state-based market O'Hear nonetheless makes several salient suggestions for creating an efficient model for decentralization of marijuana policy and enforcement, regardless of the federal government's ultimate policymaking role. The "Competitive Alternative" first highlights federal policies and practices that distort the political debate over drug policy, hampering state and local efforts that conflict with the federal "War on Drugs." 46 Federal control inhibits state-based policy on a number of fronts. For instance, the federal marketing machine places an overwhelmingly negative spin on marijuana and progressive drug enforcement policy.14 7 This federal message stifles alternatives to the current status quo, including decriminalization or medical marijuana programs.148 In response, the "Competitive Alternative" posits that federal funds for advertising and marketing might be decentralized and turned over to the states to use at their discretion, or at the very least, with minimal federal funding conditions attached.14 9 In addition to revamping the federal media machine, O'Hear articulates a need for local oversight over federal enforcement.o50 This point harkens to the limited federal resources for drug policy implementation, yet acknowledges the overarching need for occasional federal enforcement and prosecution.
O'Hear proposes a possible reform, requiring a local official, such as a District Attorney, to approve federal prosecutions within municipal boundaries so as to establish "systematic checks on federal 5 enforcement discretion."'1 While O'Hear maintains some federal control, he does not discount the need for local policymaking and enforcement. The "Competitive Alternative" keenly looks to the incentives driving municipal actors who forge drug
O'Hear and the "Competitive Alternative" model. Highlighting the danger of spillover effects or a potential "Race to the Bottom," the "Competitive
Alternative" calls for continued federal supremacy, with local control in the political and enforcement regimes, while systematically overhauling the federal media machine. In the end, there may be no perfect regulatory scheme, but if the past several decades of drug regulation have shown us anything, the United States fosters a vastly inefficient and over-budgeted federal drug regime imposed at the expense of state innovation
. Recent state reforms have shown expansive state-based marijuana law reform and the federal government should respond in turn, ceding regulatory authority to the states and local governments. D. The Give and Take - Putting the
Competitive Alternative to Work "[W]ithin our system of government, state control stands not as an endpoint on the decentralization spectrum, but as a midpoint between federal and local control."' 5 7 Indeed, O'Hear argues that the same tenets justifying decentralization to the states support further reversion to local governments.' 5 8 For example, citizen mobility is greater at the local level than across state lines and, rather than fifty state-level policy innovators, localities would provide tens of thousands of opportunities for experimentation.1 5 9 O'Hear's "Competitive Alternative" makes local authorities the gatekeepers to federal enforcement authority.160 Further, disassembling the federal media machine and eliminating the misaligned forfeiture laws are central propositions of the "Competitive Alternative."'61 While the previous section made the case for the "Constitutional
Alternative," supporting a strong decentralization framework, this section analyzes the applicability of O'Hear's "Competitive Alternative" in an attempt to improve the state-based framework and respond to some of the likely shortcomings inherent in over- expansive decentralization. 1. Questioning the
Localist Paradigm The "Competitive Alternative" pushes strongly for extensive decentralization, past the state level and on to local authorities, while maintaining a co-extensive federal regime.162 Local governments, however, lack the financial resources of states and have insufficient economies of scale to justify expensive enforcement mechanisms.163 In addition, while it is easier for criminals to cross municipality lines, local enforcement jurisdiction only extends to local boundaries.164 Most importantly, local governments rely on the state to provide an overarching criminal code and prison system. In O'Hear's defense, he does acknowledge these problems, and notes a possible solution of state funding, while allowing for local implementation at municipalities' discretion. 16 6 O'Hear argues that municipal decentralization accounts for local implementation instead of the state in the same way it does for state authority vis-A-vis the federal government; essentially the argument is that if some decentralization is good, then more

is better.167 The consequences, however, of policymaking authority may not affect local governments in the same way they do state governments.
Indeed, citizen autonomy is undoubtedly benefited by even more localized policymaking, increasing the policy choices of United States citizens from fifty states to tens of thousands of counties or municipalities. But the ultimate answer may lie in the incentives already encountered by the entrenchment and proliferation of the federal "War on Drugs" in the first place; policymakers seek to gain political clout with their constituencies while paying for as little of the program as possible.168 Just as federal legislators do not want to foot the bill for drug enforcement without the political windfall that comes with it, state legislators do not want to provide the implementation funds for policies that they may not agree with. Given that the states currently enforce the majority of marijuana violations, implement and fund the penal institutions, and would be the main beneficiaries of state corporate, sales, and direct drug taxes, the lawmaking authority and implementation should remain with the states, rather than localities that do not have the means to implement their own policy choices. This is not to say that states could not relinquish exclusive control, leaving authority with the local government, just that they would not be forced to do so, as O'Hear seems to argue. Just as the Twenty-First Amendment places plenary control in the hands of the states, repeal of the CSA's marijuana restrictions would leave authority and implementation solely to state discretion. While some states may pass policymaking authority down to localities, such an outcome would not be required
, allowing state legislators to make the decision as to where state funds and the resulting political consequences go. It is also unclear why O'Hear posits the need for local authorities to serve as gatekeepers to federal enforcement authority' 69 as opposed to a purely state-based mechanism, removing the need for federal enforcement in intrastate marijuana policy. While the local-federal cooperative would put more power in the hands of local authorities, the "Competitive Alternative" uses a roundabout mechanism for empowering local politicians, while still supporting federal entrenchment. Indeed, rather than bolstering extensive bureaucracy and the resulting squabble between state and federal officials-not to mention the looming threat of federal bullying of local District Attorneys-an alternative would be for states and local governments to maintain concurrent enforcement authority, keepinf the federal government out of intrastate marijuana issues. In sum, O'Hear's localized enforcement regimes seem less responsive to the shortcomings of state-based regulatory authority, and more to amending some pitfalls in the federally dominated regulatory model. For instance, O'Hear argues for localization on one hand in making local law enforcement accountable to the local community, yet his framework notes that "local police would become answerable not only to federal law enforcement authorities, but also to local leaders who stand outside the law enforcement establishment."l 7 1 Rather than decentralization and the workability of a state-local dichotomy in incentivizing efficient enforcement allocation, the "Competitive Alternative" seemingly adapts the current federal framework by instituting a more localized federal regime, appeasing decentralization advocates while tiptoeing around the status quo. 2.
Learning From the Competitive Alternative The "Competitive Alternative" make a good point about the perverse incentives generated by current forfeiture laws and articulates a very workable idea in the form of redirection to a state general fund. 17 2 Because municipal actors respond to drug policies at the ground level, forfeiture and sharing laws incentivize local enforcement personnel to over-enforce drug laws in an effort to boost local coffers with the proceeds from drug busts. Rather than redirecting all enforcement to the state, O'Hear smartly recognizes the ability to redirect assets to the state level.173 The "Competitive Alternative" also cogently points to the problems inherent in the federal framing of the drug issue to the
American public.174 The federal propaganda machine and its "War on Drugs" distorts the issues surrounding marijuana legislation and pits reform groups against politicians responding to the federal anti-drug stance. O'Hear sensibly argues for federal advertising funding to be directed instead to state marketing budgets or to Congressional spending bills.s75 The importance of this directive, however, may be limited under a "Constitutional
Alternative" framework, as the federal government plays such a limited role in marijuana enforcement that continued federal advertising spending would be unlikely. Unlike the alcohol regulatory context, however, there are still many other drugs that would fall under the guise of the CSA, maintaining the federal government's incentive to continue its campaign against illegal drugs. Thus, it does appear that some control over the federal media machine is necessary, and directing at least a portion of its funds as it relates to marijuana is imperative. In addition, stipulations as to the federal content and the overarching "War on Drugs" message would be essential to fostering state innovation and adoption of progressive marijuana policies. Ultimately, O'Hear's "Competitive Alternative" argument, while putting forth strong ideas for specific reforms, is seemingly unresponsive to any purported shortcomings of state-based regulatory authority. Instead of elucidating the decentralization regime he purports to stand behind, O'Hear makes adjustments to much of the federally entrenched framework we see in place today, without accounting for the reality, and necessity of, state innovation and competition in the market for marijuana. Nonetheless, O'Hear makes cogent points about the federal role in enforcement, incentives, and media content. Accordingly, this article recognizes the need to adopt reformed forfeiture laws, asset redirection, and redistributed government media funding so as to properly set the stage for state-based jurisdiction over marijuana laws. IV. A Final Concern Raised by Decentralization: The
"Race to Nowhere" The previous Part set out to raise, and refute, some of the most salient concerns surrounding state consolidation of marijuana policy. Among the most prominent arguments against divergent state-based policymaking is the "Race to the Bottom" effect garnered by individualized competition for (or against) an identifiable social policy repercussion. As discussed previously, the variety of interests inherent in the market for marijuana do not lend it to a race to overly stringent or lenient
regulation and increasingly inefficient outcomes inherent in one-upping neighboring states. Interestingly though, is the possibility not for a
"Race to the Bottom," but simply to one extreme or the other, giving a jurisdiction an all-or-nothing choice, legalization or a complete ban. This Part will first explain a previously illegalization in an effort to avoid the criminal element entrenched in illegal drug distribution. B. Undercutting the
Assumptions Necessary to Effectuate a "Race to Nowhere" Clearly, the aforementioned result is not optimal for a state that, all else being equal, chooses decriminalization, medical marijuana, or drug treatment programs over full legalization or a complete ban. Policymakers faced with an all or nothing choice will opt for the lesser of two evils, whatever that choice might be, but inefficient regardless. This hypothetical, however, rests on several assumptions, none of which can be fully realized in a world of bundled laws and complex regulatory frameworks. For the "Race to Nowhere" to occur there must be citizen mobility, full information, and unrealized benefits from the centrist choice. First, consider the ability and willingness of citizens to move from one jurisdiction to another based on the marijuana policies within the state. With more than fourteen million marijuana users in the United
States, this is hardly a trifling variable.176 But of those fourteen million users, it is entirely unclear how many would choose to move based on the legality of their marijuana use when all they have ever known is a complete ban. Moreover, it is questionable how many would choose to relocate at the expense of families, jobs, and geographic ties. Assuming that many users choose to remain in a total-ban jurisdiction, State A, criminal distributors would have a market in both State A and State C, the intermediate, decriminalized, jurisdiction. Given this counterargument to full mobility, we can expect a viable criminal distribution market spread across both abolitionist and intermediate jurisdictions. One part of the hypothetical should remain true, however, in that the criminal element would remain displaced in State B, where distribution is legal, because the criminal distribution chain would be overwhelmed by regulated retail sales. Unlike mobility, full information is more likely to come to fruition in this hypothetical. With the overwhelming use of the Internet and the salience of the marijuana policy debate, both consumers and distributors are likely fully aware of the relevant policies in place. On the demand side, any consumer making a decision to move jurisdictions based on the marijuana policy is undoubtedly informed of the law when making such a decision. Even if not making a mobility decision based on another jurisdiction's marijuana laws, it seems likely that a drug user, accustomed to illicit substance use and avoiding enforcement, will be aware of current policy and upcoming changes to policy. On the supply side, just as we would expect a businessman to know the regulations and laws that apply to the business, drug dealers or legal dispensaries will know the law, how to avoid or comply with it, and surely be abreast of changes in policy. The true uncertainty in full information is more likely to be through the lens of the policymaker. A legislator faced with battling interest groups may be more informed on highly specific issues and less apprised of the indirect

criminal costs associated with marijuana distribution and displacement from other jurisdictions. The costs and benefits of proposed intermediate policy is probably most difficult to project and account for in a hypothetical "Race to Nowhere." For such a race to occur, the hypothetical assumes that the benefits associated with a centrist marijuana policy choice would be outweighed by criminal activity within its borders based on the policy actions of
State A and State B. However, given uncertain citizen mobility and possible criminal disbursement between State C and State B, the costs associated with such a choice may be limited. Further, state policymakers may not have full information on the consequences of their decisions relative to increased criminal distributor influx into the jurisdiction. Moreover, even if these two factors are fully realized, legislators may find that the benefits of an intermediate policy outweigh the costs of any criminal influx. For instance, reduced enforcement costs on minor possession may be redistributed to enforcement on distributors and trafficking or simply used for drug treatment. The intermediate policy itself may be focused on public health, instituting drug courts, or rehabilitation,'77 rather than turning a blind eye to addiction as many abolitionist states do, or simply promoting use as a legalization state does. The "Race to Nowhere" is likely not a foregone conclusion, albeit relying on several assumptions that are almost impossible to predict. Focusing on the analogy to alcohol regulation leads to the conclusion that the race is at least plausible, though limited. While states are free to implement their own alcohol policies, none has kept alcohol completely illegal; some states, however, maintained prohibition for several years following enactment of the Twenty-First Amendment. But some states do allow counties and municipalities to enact their own alcohol restrictions, and many have done so, opting for complete bans within county lines; restricted alcohol sales on certain days of the week; or requiring distribution through government suppliers. 7 9 While some of these limitations are less than a complete ban, and clearly not full legalization, neither are they akin to decriminalization where one side of the economic chain, consumption, is legalized and the other side, distribution, is criminal. Centrist alcohol ordinances, such as Sunday sales and government distribution, would not be expected to garner a bootlegging criminal element. Criminals are unlikely to move to take advantage of a one-day black market or to attempt to circumvent government distribution when consumers can easily accommodate the law and still consume alcohol. Liquor law regulation in this context has not progressed toward decriminalization or substance abuse programs in lieu of criminal punishment. Rather, alcohol policies reflect complete bans or legalization with retail restrictions. The alcohol analogy, though not perfectly aligned to marijuana regulation, seems to support a "Race to Nowhere."
Even if a "Race to Nowhere" exists, the cure is not federal regulation. The Prohibition and its aftermath tells us that much.
Beyond the alcohol regulatory analogy, the past generations of over-enforcement; billions of dollars of federal taxpayer money; seeming absence of a "Race to the Bottom" or substantial negative externalities; exceedingly high violent crime rates associated with illicit drugs; and unclear
federal enforcement policy lead to the conclusion that decentralization is the best regulatory stance for marijuana laws.
IV. Conclusion Currently, more than 24.8 million people are eligible to receive medical marijuana licenses under state laws, and approximately 730,000 people actually do.180 Medical marijuana markets exist in seven states: California, Colorado, Michigan,
Montana, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico and five more will open this year in Arizona, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island and the District of
Columbia.' Economically speaking, the marijuana marketplace is projected to more than double within the next five years.1 2 Outside of the capitalist retail market for marijuana, the question remains whether there is a viable market for innovative state laws. As addressed in Part II.A.- B., the federal regime over marijuana laws is hampering innovation and efficient policymaking, leaving overly harsh federal laws that go largely unenforced in practice and by Executive Order.
State legislators and enforcement authorities are left in the dark, and United States citizens are faced with an unclear state-federal dichotomy by which distribution may be illegal but consumption is decriminalized.
Even more striking, dispensary operators may be legally licensed by the state and yet subject to federal enforcement for violation of the Controlled Substances Act.183
Even outside the lack of clarity and poor suitability of federal authority, we should expect a fairly robust "market" for marijuana laws where there are competing interests, an informed and reactive populace, and a primed state-to-state competition for economic growth and citizenry
.184 Further, as discussed in Part III.B, there does not seem to be reason to expect marijuana policies to be ill-suited for efficient competition, by promoting a
"Race to the Bottom"
85 through imperfect information, negative externalities, or power inequalities between suppliers and consumers of laws
. 86 In addition, federalization as a remedy to an unclear problem stifles innovation and experimentation, replacing jurisdictional competition with regulatory oversight and unwavering rules.
' 8 7 Most simply, a given legal system would prefer state laws if the "market" has the ability to produce efficient laws and will not inflict market failures leading to overly stringent or lax regulation
.'8 In the market for marijuana laws, one would expect to encounter less need for consistency, uniformity, and correction of market failure because jurisdictional "markets" in the drug trade will presumably be transparent and consumers will have relatively full information, while states will have appropriate incentives to optimize laws.' 89 The legalization, decriminalization, and medicalization of marijuana undoubtedly comprise a story in its early chapters. As states continue to adopt progressive marijuana laws, the legal marijuana industry continues to grow, and the executive branch ignores the strictures of the CSA, the structure of marijuana policy will begin to crystallize. Until then,
United States citizens are at a crossroads of conflicting state and federal law and are waiting to see how the policymaking game will play out.
Interest groups and lobbyists are no strangers to this game, pitting Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the Religious Right against a progressive populace and state legislators looking to fill their recession- ragged coffers while cutting back on drug-induced violence. The federal regulatory regime and the politically motivated and maintained "War on Drugs" costs American taxpayers billions of dollars a year in a seemingly fruitless attempt to rid the
American populace of the social and moral hazards of drug use. Yet the social ills of marijuana use stem almost entirely from its illicitness, 90 inducing violent organized crime but causing fewer deaths each year than alcoholl91 or tobacco use;192 marijuana's addiction rate is also a mere pittance compared to nicotine addiction.' 9 3
The United States system of federalism is premised on extensive

state autonomy, leading to experimentation and innovation in policymaking,
concurrent with the citizenry's ability to choose the laws they want applied by locating in a jurisdiction with the bundle of laws they find most appealing. In accordance with this paradigm, we have already seen the bulwark of progressive marijuana laws enacted on the West Coast,194 and almost no innovation in the Southeast, seemingly in line with population ideologies in those respective locales.' 95 Cutting the federal government entirely out of marijuana regulation and enforcement is neither plausible, nor advisable. The drug trade is too international to limit federal involvement and states rely on federal enforcement where distribution and trafficking crosses state lines. Economies of scale also empower the federal government to utilize powerful resources in an effort to keep pace with well-funded drug syndicates. Further, federal legislators have too much at stake in the drug debate to let it go entirely. As seen in the alcohol regulatory scheme, we can expect to see Congress utilize its spending power to incentivize states to act in accordance with federal objectives.16
That being said, two central arguments from the "Competitive Alternative" give informed guidance to Congress, arguing to reign back on forfeiture laws and simultaneously cut spending on federal media campaigns against marijuana use.197
Ultimately, it seems the marijuana train has left the station and has the momentum necessary to establish its legitimacy in the United
States. The million-dollar question then is how it will be regulated.
From the standpoint of history and logic, state authority is the best vehicle for public welfare, citizen autonomy, and efficient regulation.
Pietro S.
, 200
; Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. Issues in
Governance Studies, July 2007, Rediscovering Federalism, http://mavdisk.mnsu.edu/parsnk/2011-12/Pol680fall11/POL%20680%20readings/federalism-wk%202/07governance_nivola.pdf
This paper stipulates that federalism can offer government a helpful division of labor
. The essay argues that the central government in the United States has grown inordinately preoccupied with concerns better left to local authorities. The result is an overextended government, too often distracted from higher priorities
. To restore some semblance of so-called “subsidiarity”—that is, a more suitable delineation of competences among levels of government—the essay takes up basic principles that ought to guide that quest. Finally, the paper advances several suggestions for how particular policy pursuits might be devolved. Whatever else it is supposed to do, a federal system of government should offer policy-makers a division of labor
.1 Perhaps the first to fully appreciate that benefit was Alexis de Tocqueville. He admired the federated regime of the United States
because, among other virtues, it enabled its central government to focus on primary public obligations
(“a small number of objects,” he stressed, “sufficiently prominent to attract its attention”), leaving what he called society’s countless “secondary affairs” to lower levels of administration
.2
Such a system, in other words, could help officials in Washington keep their priorities straight
. It is this potential advantage, above all others, that warrants renewed emphasis today.
America’s national government has its hands full coping with its continental, indeed global
, security responsibilities, and cannot keep expanding a domestic policy agenda that injudiciously dabbles in too many duties best consigned to local authorities
. Indeed, in the habit of attempting to do a little of everything, rather than a few important things well, our overstretched government suffers a kind of attention deficit disorder.
Although this state of overload and distraction obviously is not a cause of catastrophes such as the successful surprise attacks of September 11, 2001, the ferocity of the insurgency in Iraq, or the submersion of a historic American city inundated by a hurricane in 2005, it may render
such tragedies harder to prevent or mitigate.
, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth
(Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at
Dartmouth College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and
International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster
Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College “Don’t Come Home America:
The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–
51)

A core premise of
is that it prevents the
of
a far more dangerous global security environment
. For one thing, as noted above, the
U nited
S tates’ overseas
presence gives it the
to restrain partners from taking
provocative action
. Perhaps more important, its core
also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony
from contemplating expansion
and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged
baleful
is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John
Mearsheimer
, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and
even runs at regional hegemony and
72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?).
Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present.
There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if the United States retrenched is very much dependent on its particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense.
research across the
social and other sciences
, however, undermines that core assumption
: states have preferences
not only for security but also for prestige, status, and other aims
, and they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that
the
n pacifier
either a
regional
associated insecurity, arms racing,
the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including regional
). Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument noted above: that avoiding wars and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the
United States could survive the return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First, overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of interstate military competition, one would see
overall higher levels of military spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of competitive regional
—all of which would be concerning, in part because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi
Arabia all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate over the stability of proliferation changes as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are inevitably probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before feared neighbors nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse.
Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world were to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are concerned about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear powers will not have truly survivable forces—seem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen crisis dynamics
” that could
is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest faces a second

problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S. engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local powers to do the dangerous work of counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes, “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.” 81 Therefore, unless China’s rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” 82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and
Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United States is doing. 83 In sum,
security
for peace
, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment might bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difªcult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the degree to which
underlying
the
strategy.
By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active management, the U nited
S tates lowers security competition
in the world’s key regions, thereby preventing the emergence of
a hothouse atmosphere for growing
new military capabilities
. Alliance ties dissuade partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States’ formidable military machine may deter entry by potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity” of the United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85

[Felix, Staff Engineer, Production at PEMEX “Drug Cartels Seriously
Imperil Mexican Energy Reform”, http://oilpro.com/post/7309/drug-cartels-seriously-imperilmexican-energy-reform]
Mexico's drug cartels are stealing billions
of dollars' worth of oil from pipelines
, threatening the country's ability to profit from the recently-enacted energy reform. Pemex data released last week indicate that gangs are becoming more numerous and active.
So far this year, thieves across Mexico have drilled 2,481 illegal taps into state-run pipelines, up more than one-third from the same period last year. Pemex estimates it has lost about 7.5 million barrels of oil valued at $1.15 billion. Emilio Lozoya,
Pemex's CEO, called this
trend "worrisome,"
the AP reported Thursday. enter image description here Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya More than a fifth of the illegal taps occurred in Tamaulipas, the Gulf state neighboring Texas that is a centerpiece of
Mexico's future oil plans. Including the Mexican region of the Eagle Ford play, the area contains Mexico's largest fields of recoverable shale gas. Overall, the EIA estimates that Mexico holds the world's sixth largest reserves of shale gas- equivalent to 60 billion barrels of crude oil. That's in excess of twice the total amount of oil that Mexico has produced via conventional means over the last century, AP reports.
The recently passed overhauling energy reform hopes to attract
$10 billion to $15 billion in private investment
each year.
However, the attractiveness of
the sector to foreign and private companies may depend on the degree to which Tamaulipas is brought under control.
Senator David Penchyna, who heads Mexico's Senate Energy Commission, said,
"The energy reform won't be viable if we aren't successful...in solving the problem of crime and impunity
...
The biggest challenge
we Mexicans have, and I say it without shame,
is Tamaulipas." The Zetas and the Gulf cartel are the two rival gangs that have long used Tamaulipas as a route to transport drugs
and migrants to the US.
In recent years, they have diversified
their activities: stealing gas and oil and selling it to Texas refineries or to gas stations on both the Texas and Mexico side of the border.
At least twice daily
, AP reports, the gangs pull up to one of the hundreds of pipelines that traverse the state.
Workers rapidly dig down a couple of yards to uncover a pipeline and then siphon their stolen oil into a stolen tanker truck, army Col. Juan Carlos Guzman, whose troops have raided a number of these illegal taps, told the AP.
The knowledge required in order to tap into the pressurized pipelines leads authorities to suspect the gangs have infiltrated Pemex
or influenced company employees, AP reported.
[August 8th, Mexico Topples Oil Theft Ring, But Cartel Threat Lingers Over
State Petroleum Company, By Rafael Castillo, August 8, 2014 | 2:40 pm, https://news.vice.com/article/mexico-topples-oil-theft-ring-but-cartel-threat-lingers-overstate-petroleum-company]
Mexico has taken down a criminal ring dedicated to stealing oil
from its state petroleum monopoly Pemex, authorities said on
Wednesday night, part of efforts to clamp down on out-
country's
.
The federal attorney general’s office said five people were arrested in connection with a cell of oil thieves, after 14 search warrants were served in three regions of the country. Authorities seized ten properties, at least $20,000 dollars, and numerous tractors, trailers, firearms, luxury vehicles, and jewels. Officials said the group operated in the states of Jalisco in western Mexico, Queretaro in central Mexico, and Mexico City. But authorities did not name those who were detained, or reveal any possible cartel links that the suspects might have.
The relative lack of information on the criminal group is perhaps a sign that Mexico is far from effectively tackling mass-scale oil thefts
, even as Pemex appears poised to finally be opened up to direct private
investment from foreign companies
with controversial constitutional reforms set to go into effect.'It's an American problem': meet the militias patrolling the US border. Read more here. In recent years, organized crime groups that were once focused more on trafficking drugs or people to the US have shifted their attention to the relatively easy racket of tapping state oil

pipelines and then selling stolen oil or gas to consumers or rogue companies.
The main cartel responsible
for these illegal taps is the
fearsome
Zetas
. “
They can [arrest] a few [of us], but there will always be others.
As long as they move gas through tubes, this is going to continue,” a member of the Zetas cartel told VICE News in the documentary. The problem of oil theft in Mexico can frequently turn deadly
.
In 2010, an illegal tap in the state of Puebla ignited, sparking a fire that destroyed some 115 homes and killed 30 people
.
Pemex estimates that it loses $5 billion a year in illegal taps, an issue the monopoly must confront, analysts say, as its operations are opened up to foreign investment.
[Paul, Deputy Director of NORML and the NORML Foundation, recognized as an expert on the subject of marijuana policy, “How to End Mexico's Deadly Drug
War”, http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/how-to-end-mexicos-deadly-drug-war]
How much of this goes directly to Mexican cartels is difficult to quantify, but no doubt the percentage is significant. Government officials
estimate that approximately half the marijuana consumed in the
United States originates from outside its borders, and they have identified Mexico as far and away America’s largest pot provider.
Because Mexican-grown marijuana tends to fetch lower prices on the black market than domestically grown weed (a result attributed largely to lower production costs—the Mexican variety tends to be grown outdoors, while an increasing percentage of American-grown pot is produced hydroponically indoors), it remains consistently popular among U.S. consumers, particularly in a down economy. As a result, U.S. law officials now report that some Mexican cartels are moving to the United States to set up shop permanently. A Congressional Research Service report says low-level cartel members are now establishing clandestine growing operations inside the United States (thus eliminating the need to cross the border), as well as partnering with domestic gangs and other criminal enterprises. A March 23 New York
Times story speculated that Mexican drug gangs or their affiliates are now active in some 230 U.S. cities, extending from Tucson, Arizona, to Anchorage, Alaska.
In short, America’s multibillion-dollar demand for pot is fueling the Mexican drug trade and much of the turf battles
and carnage associated with it.
Same Old “Solutions” So what are the administration’s plans to quell the cartels’ growing influence and surging violence? Troublingly, the
White House appears intent on recycling the very strategies that gave rise to Mexico’s infamous drug lords in the first place. In March the administration requested $700 million from Congress to “bolster existing efforts by Washington and Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s administration to fight violent trafficking in drugs . . . into the United States.” These efforts, as described by the Los Angeles Times, include: “vowing to send U.S. money, manpower, and technology to the southwestern border” and “reducing illegal flows (of drugs) in both directions across the border.” The administration also announced that it intends to clamp down on the U.S. demand for illicit drugs by increasing funding for drug treatment and drug courts. There are three primary problems with this strategy. First, marijuana production is a lucrative business that attracts criminal entrepreneurs precisely because it is a black- market (and highly sought after) commodity.
As long as pot remains federally prohibited its retail price to the consumer will remain artificially high
, and its production and distribution will attract criminal enterprises willing to turn to violence
( rather than the judicial system) to maintain their slice of the multi-billion-dollar pie.
Second, the United States is already spending more money on illicit-drug law enforcement, drug treatment, and drug courts than at any time in our history. FBI data show that domestic marijuana arrests have increased from under 300,000 annually in 1991 to over 800,000 today. Police seizures of marijuana have also risen dramatically in recent years, as has the amount of taxpayer dollars federal officials have spent on so-called “educational efforts” to discourage the drug’s use. (For example, since the late 1990s
Congress has appropriated well over a billion dollars in anti-pot public service announcements alone.) Yet despite these combined efforts to discourage demand, Americans use more pot than anyone else in the world. Third, law enforcement’s recent attempts to crack down on the cartels’ marijuana distribution rings
, particularly new efforts launched by the Calderón administration in Mexico, are driving the unprecedented wave in Mexican violence—not abating it.
The New York Times states: “
A crackdown
begun more than two years ago by President Felipe Calderón, coupled with feuds over turf and control of the organizations, has set off an unprecedented wave of killings in Mexico
. . . . Many of the victims were tortured. Beheadings have become common.”
Because of this escalating violence, Mexico now ranks behind only
Pakistan and Iran as the administration’s
top international security concern
. Despite the rising death toll, drug war hawks at the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) remain adamant that the United States’ and Mexico’s “supply side” strategies are in fact successful. “Our view is that the violence we have been seeing is a signpost of the success our very courageous Mexican counterparts are having,” acting DEA administrator Michele Lionhart said recently. “The cartels are acting out like caged animals, because they are caged animals.” President
Obama also appears to share this view. After visiting with the Calderón government in April, he told CNN he intended to “beef up” security on the border. When asked whether the administration would consider alternative strategies, such as potentially liberalizing pot’s criminal classification, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano replied that such an option “is not on the table.” A New Remedy By contrast the
Calderón administration appears open to the idea of legalizing marijuana—or at least reducing criminal sanctions on the possession of small quantities of drugs—as a way to stem the tide of violence. Last spring
Mexican lawmakers made the possession of personal-use quantities of cannabis and other illicit substances a noncriminal offense. And in April Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, told
CBS’s Face the Nation that legalizing the marijuana trade was a legitimate option for both the Mexican and U.S. governments. “[T]hose who would suggest that some of these measures [legalization] be looked at understand the dynamics of the drug trade,” Sarukhan said. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox recently echoed Sarukhan’s remarks, as did a commission of former Latin American presidents. “I believe it’s time to open the debate over legalizing drugs,” Fox told CNN in May. “It can’t be that the only way [to try to control illicit drug use] is for the state to use force.” Writing recently on CNN.com, Harvard economist and Freeman contributor
Jeffrey Miron said that ending drug prohibition
—on both sides of the border— is the only
realistic and viable way to put a permanent stop to the rising power and violence associated with Mexico’s drug traffickers
. “
Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug

market underground
,” he wrote. “
This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead
. . . .
The only way to reduce
violence, therefore, is to legalize drugs.”
Growing Support Americans’ support for legalizing the regulated production and sale of cannabis—an option that would not likely rid the world of cartels, but would arguably reduce their primary source of income—is at all an all-time high. In May a national Zogby telephone poll of 3,937 voters by the Republican-leaning
O’Leary Report discovered, for the first time ever, that a slight majority (52 percent) of Americans “favor the legalization of marijuana.” A separate Zogby poll reported even stronger support (58 percent) among west-coast voters.
Predictably, critics
of marijuana legalization claim that such a strategy would do little to undermine drug traffickers’ profit margins because cartels would simply supplement their revenues by selling greater quantities of other illicit drugs. Although this scenario sounds plausible in theory, it appears to be far less likely in practice.
As noted,
Mexican drug lords derive an estimated 60 to 70 percent of their illicit income from pot sales.
(By comparison, only about 28 percent of their profits are derived from the distribution of cocaine, and less than 1 percent comes from trafficking methamphetamine.)
It is unrealistic to think that cartels could feasibly replace this void by stepping up their sales of cocaine, methamphetamine or heroin
— all of which remain far less popular among U.S. drug consumers anyway.
Just how much less? U.S. Department of Health and Human Services survey data show that roughly two million Americans use cocaine, compared to 15 million for pot. Fewer than 600,000 use meth amphetamine, and fewer than 155,000 use heroin. In short, this is hardly the sort of demand that would keep Mexico’s drug barons in the lucrative lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.
Of course, it’s unrealistic to think that pot legalization would wipe out prohibitioninspired violence altogether
. After all, ending alcohol prohibition in America didn’t single-handedly put the Mafia out of business (though it greatly reduced its power and influence). And it’s always possible that Mexico’s drug cartels would continue to engage in violent acts toward one another as competing factions fought over the crumbs of America’s drastically shrunken illicitdrug market. That said, it’s equally unrealistic
, if not more so, to think that continuing our same failed drug war policies will do anything but exponentially increase the catastrophe they’ve spawned,
both in Mexico and at home. It’s time to engage in a different strategy. It’s time to seriously consider legalizing marijuana and other drugs.
[Ramiro S. Fúnez, Ramiro is a Honduran-American political journalist, activist and foreign policy analyst earning his Master's degree in Politics at New York University. He graduated from St. John's University with a Bachelor's degree in Journalism,n Argument for
Legalizing Marijuana Even Conservatives Can Rally Behind Ramiro S. Fúnez's avatar image By
Ramiro S. Fúnez January 7, 201 http://mic.com/articles/78275/an-argument-for-legalizingmarijuana-even-conservatives-can-rally-behind
Marijuana legalization in Uruguay, Colorado and Washington has sparked deliberation among many lawmakers who are curious about how similar legislation would affect other countries, including the crime-ridden barrios of Mexico. Legislators in Mexico City submitted a proposal to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana possession last year, but the country's federal government has shown no sign of attempts to loosen up its tough stance on drug laws. Consequently, drug lords have capitalized on the substance's illegality and profited from their exclusive proprietorship. Despite Mexico's inability to quash rampant cartel-related crimes because of the federal government's refusal to ease its policies, the growing international push to
marijuana could subdue the power of drug lords
, especially if the Mexican government recognizes how impactful state-regulated cannabis is.
Doing that could help ease violence across the border
and is the kind of result everyone should get behind, no matter your views on weed.
Here are three ways marijuana legalization could stop the growth of Mexican drug cartels: 1. Loss of Profits Marijuana legalization
in Colorado,
Oregon and Washington could eliminate
up to 30% of profits made by Mexican drug cartels, a study conducted by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute reveals.
The possibility of federal authorization of recreational use
of marijuana in the U nited
S tates and Mexico could lead to steeper
losses on the part of illegitimate crime groups.
2. Strengthening of Government Institutions
Uruguay is the first Latin American country to legalize recreational possession and use of marijuana and will earn up to $40 million in government profits appropriated from the country's black market.
Mexico, which has a black market
marijuana trade system with estimated values ranging from $2 billion to $20 billion annually
, could use those funds to reinforce and establish government institutions aimed at curtailing the

use of harder substances
like cocaine and heroin. More government revenue from marijuana profits could usher in free addiction treatment programs and hard drug enforcement agencies.
3. Loss of Recruitment Mexican drug cartels, including the notoriously ruthless Los Zetas
, have infiltrated approximately 276 cities in the
U nited
S tates and are known to specifically target marijuana dealers for recruitment
, according to the
Department of Homeland Security. Considering the fact that marijuana is the most commonly purchased and sold controlled substance and that many of those illegitimate vendors sell cannabis almost exclusively, a complete nationalization of the marijuana industry would significantly deter recruitment efforts made by cartels in the
U nited
S tates.
Beau
, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Brittany M. Bond, Peter H. Reuter (Kilmer--
Codirector, RAND Drug Policy Research Center; Senior Policy Researcher, RAND; Professor,
Pardee RAND Graduate School, Ph.D. in public policy, Harvard University; M.P.P., University of
California, Berkeley; B.A. in international relations, Michigan State University, Caulkins--Stever
Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Bond-research economist in the Office of the Chief Economist of the US Department of Commerce's
Economics and Statistics Administration, Reuter--Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. “Reducing Drug Trafficking
Revenues and Violence in Mexico Would Legalizing Marijuana in California Help?” RAND occasional paper (peer reviewed), http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2010/RAND_OP325.pdf
However, there is
at least
one countervailing factor that might reduce violence in the short run.
Given that the signal of market decline will be strong and unambiguous, experienced participants might accept the fact that their earnings and the market as a whole are in decline.
This could lead to a reduced effort on their part to fight for control of routes or officials, since those areas of control are now less valuable.
Of course, that does presume strategic thinking in a population that appears to have a propensity for expressive and instrumental violence.
The
natural projection in the long run is
more
optimistic.
Fewer young males will enter the drug trade, and the incentives for violence will decline as the economic returns to leader- ship of a DTO fall.
10 However, the long run is indeterminably measured: probably years, and perhaps many years. The outcome, either in the short or long term, of a substantial decline in the U.S. market for Mexican marijuana in 2011 is a matter of conjecture. One view is that, in the short run, there could be more violence as the DTO leadership faces a very disturbing change in cir- cumstances. The fact that a decline in their share of the marijuana market would come after a period in which there has been rapid turnover at the top of their organizations and much change in their relationships with corrupt police could make it particularly difficult for the DTOs to reach a cooperative accommodation to their shrunken market. However, if the Mexi- can government lessens pressures and signals its willingness to reach an accommodation with a more collaborative set of DTOs, the result could be a reduction in violence. In the long run, the analysis is different. One would think that
DTO participation would become less attractive
. However, the government’s actions are again capable of reversing this. The government might take advantage of the weakened state of its adversary to break up the larger DTOs; a configuration of many smaller organizations could lead to greater competitive violence.
Evan
, assistant professor of national security studies at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, interviewed in: What Are the Benefits of China-Mexico Energy
Cooperation?, June 27, http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2014/06/what-are-the-benefitsof-china-mexico-energy-cooperation/
“The proposed $4 billion fund is similar to the $10 billion China Development Bank loan to Petrobras in 2009. With Pemex, as with
Petrobras, the deal provides symbolic ‘fruit’ for the deeper and better relationship sought by both the Mexican and Chinese presidents. As with Petrobras, Pemex has good access to Western financial markets, and thus doesn’t ‘need’ Chinese financing as does PDVSA in Venezuela. Yet the Chinese line of credit is welcome for a company struggling to invest to

offset declining production
from its core mature assets in the Campeche basin.
Future oil shipments to China would also offset declining petroleum exports to the United States
and the persistent Mexican deficit with
China in manufactured goods.
For the PRC, the loan offers ‘insider’ access to Pemex and the Mexican oil industry, useful to
the Chinese national oil companies (
NOCs) in evaluating future acquisitions and bids
, as ongoing reforms open up the Mexican petroleum sector to foreign investment,
just as the CDB loan to
Petrobras arguably paved the way for Chinese acquisitions of Repsol and Statoil assets in Brazil, and most recently, CNPC and
CNOOC participation in the Libra auction. The signing of the deal, which was accidentally disclosed in May, was probably anticipated as a highlight of President Peña Nieto’s trip to the PRC, programmed for this November.” Answer: Sun Hongbo, associate professor at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing: “Mexico is now becoming an important potential country for China to extend its energy cooperation in Latin America.
In view of the current
Mexican energy reform, both Pemex and Chinese national oil companies expect to tap great commercial opportunities
within the oil sector, possibly supported by the future Sino-Mex Energy Fund. More importantly,
Mexico regards China as a necessary partner to diversify its foreign investment
and crude oil export markets.
In 2013, Pemex signed crude oil trading, financing and other cooperation framework agreements with Chinese companies and financial institutions.
The energy interests of both China and
Mexico have good convergence in energy trade
, finance and infrastructure building because of the two countries’ relative economic advantages and the complementarities in the energy industry. In fact, Chinese national companies have entered into Mexico’s upstream oil market by providing technical services in the last decade, and Mexico has been exporting crude oil to
China since 2009. Considering the decline of the proven oil reserves and production, Mexican oil exports to China will not increase rapidly in the short term.
Chinese companies may consider financing, technical services and equipment trade and energy infrastructure participation as cooperation priorities
. On June 13,
President Xi
Jinping
emphasized the importance of international energy cooperation and effective use of international resources for China’s energy security. He also stressed that China shall strengthen international energy cooperation in a comprehensive way and safeguard China’s energy security under open-market conditions
. Without any doubt,
Chinese companies will look forward to diverse cooperation deals with Mexico if the
Mexican investment environment is favourable.
Yang
, Increase in Mexican oil exports indicates thawing ties, Global Times
Published: 2013-4-9, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/773515.shtml
Observers say Mexican state oil company
Pemex's decision to significantly boost oil exports to China will help optimize the imbalanced bilateral trade
structure and indicates thawing ties following their leadership transitions. On the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia on Saturday, Pemex Chief Executive Emilio Lozoya said the company would begin increasing exports to China by 30,000 barrels a day starting this month, according to a two-year agreement between Pemex and China's Sinopec, Reuters reported.
The level of exports to China could increase over time as part of the agreement
, he added.
Mexico
, the seventh largest oil producer in the world, exports
nearly 80 percent of its oil to the US and only some 50,000 barrels to China
each month, according to China Radio International. Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times that the increase stemmed from China's potential for growth in demand
, against the backdrop of shrinking US imports as a result of its shale boom. A report released by OPEC last week expected China to overtake the US as the world's largest oil importer by 2014.
This would also diversify China's sources of oil imports
, "as only about 9 percent of the imports came from Latin
America last year," Lin added. Data from the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation showed last year nearly half of China's oil imports came from the Middle East.
Gal
, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, Dependence on Middle East energy and its impact on global security, http://www.iags.org/luft_dependence_on_middle_east_energy.pdf

Impact on global security As nations become increasingly dependent on oil, it becomes strategically imperative for them to secure their access to the Middle East. This means building strong alliances with the region’s suppliers, providing them with diplomatic support and military aid and often turning a blind eye to their human rights transgressions. Since the famous 1945 meeting between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saudi King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in Egypt's Great
Bitter Lake, it was the U.S. that served as the guarantor of security and stability in the Persian Gulf. In fact, the use of military power to ensure free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf has been a tenet of U.S. national security strategy. According to the Carter Doctrine, put forth by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, any effort by a hostile power to block the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the U.S. will be viewed as an attack on America’s vital interests and will be repelled by any means necessary including military force. Since then, the U.S. has exercised the Carter doctrine several times. When, during the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian forces attacked Kuwaiti tankers, President Ronald Reagan authorized “reflagging” and provided them with U.S. Navy protection. Then, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 President H.W. Bush authorized military action aimed to defend Saudi Arabia’s oil fields and restore
Kuwait’s sovereignty. In the decade between the Gulf War and the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. strengthened its military presence in the region, building bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. At a cost of $50-$60 billion per year it patrolled the waters of the Gulf, imposed no-fly zone in Iraq and provided training and equipment to the region's militaries.
Throughout the Cold War
years, the
Pax Americana in the Middle East was rarely challenged.
The Soviets had strategic interests in the region but being oil rich their economy was hardly dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
All this is going to change with the economic ascendance of oil poor China
and India. In the coming decades, the Middle East will turn increasingly to Asia to market its oil and gas. By far the most important growth market for countries like Iran and Saudi
Arabia is China, which is today the world’s second largest oil consumer and which by 2030 is expected to import as much oil as the
U.S. does today.
To fuel its growing economy, China is following America’s footsteps, subjugating its foreign policy to its energy needs
. China attempts to gain a foothold in the Middle East and build up long-term strategic links with the region’s producers. Though some optimists think that China’s pursuit of energy could present an opportunity to enhance cooperation, integration and interdependence with the U.S., there are ample signs that China and the U.S. could already be on a collision course over oil.
For China, the biggest prize in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, home of a quarter of the world’s reserves. Since September 11, tension in U.S.-Saudi relations has provided the Chinese with an opportunity to win the heart of the House of Saud. As mentioned before, to Washington’s dismay, China has also set its sights on Iran, announcing that it will not support sanctions against Iran in the UN
Security
Council.
No doubt that as China’s oil demand grows so will its involvement in Middle East politics.
China is likely to provide the region’s energy exporters not only with diplomatic support but also with weapons, including assistance in the development of WMD
. India is no less of a challenge. Unlike
China whose geography allows oil imports from neighboring Russia, India’s only nearby source of oil and gas is the Middle East. In recent years, India has grown increasingly interested in signing energy deals with Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Just like China’s,
India’s engagement with Iran provides the Islamic Republic an economic lifeline at a time when the West is trying to isolate it. Such growing bonds have already compromised India’s relations with the U.S. All this means that in the long run, as China
and India’s dependence on the Middle East grows, they are likely to increasingly challenge U.S
. policy in the
Middle East, turning the region from a unipolar region in which the U.S.
enjoys a near uncontested hegemony into a multipolar system in which more and more global powers vie for influence.
Sydney J.
Jr.
, deputy editor for defense publication Breaking Defense and 13 year journalist at National Journal and has won awards from the association of Military
Reporters & Editors in 2008 and 2009, as well as an honorable mention in 2010, 10/1/13,
China’s Fear Of US May Tempt Them To Preempt: Sinologists, http://breakingdefense.com/2013/10/chinas-fear-of-us-may-tempt-them-to-preemptsinologists/
Because China believes it is much weaker than the United States, they are more likely to launch a massive preemptive strike in a crisis.
Here’s the other bad news:
The current US concept for hightech warfare, known as Air-Sea Battle, might escalate the conflict even further towards a
“limited”
nuclear war, says one of the top American experts on the Chinese military.
[This is one in an occasional series on the crucial strategic relationship and the military capabilities of the US, its allies and China
.] What US analysts call an “anti-access/area denial” strategy is what China calls “counter-intervention” and
“active defense,” and the Chinese appraoch is born of a deep sense of vulnerability that dates

back 200 years,
China analyst
Larry
Wortzel said at the Institute of World Politics: “The People’s
Liberation Army still sees themselves as an inferior force to the American military, and that’s who they think their most likely enemy is.”
That’s fine as long as it deters China from attacking its neighbors. But if deterrence fails, the Chinese are likely to go big or go home. Chinese military history from the
Korean War in 1950 to the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 to more recent, albeit vigorous but non-violent, grabs for the disputed Scarborough Shoal suggests a preference for a sudden use of overwhelming force at a crucial point
, what Clausewitz would call the enemy’s “center of gravity.”
“What they do is very heavily built on preemption,”
Wortzel said.
“The problem with the striking the enemy’s center of gravity is, for the United States, they see it as being in Japan, Hawaii, and the
West Coast….That’s very escalatory.
” (Students of the American military will nod sagely, of course, as we remind everyone that President George Bush made preemption a centerpiece of American strategy after the terror attacks of 2001.) Wortzel argued that the current version of US Air-Sea Battle concept is also likely to lead to escalation.
“China’s dependent on these ballistic missiles and anti-ship missiles and satellite links,”
he said.
Since those are almost all land-based, any attack on them “involves striking the Chinese mainland, which is pretty escalatory.” “You don’t know how they’re going to react,”
he said.
“They do have nuclear missiles. They actually think we’re more allergic to nuclear missiles landing on our soil than they are on their soil. They think they can withstand a limited nuclear attack, or even a big nuclear attack, and retaliate.”

[Joshua, JD, Suffolk University, EPIC FAILURE: THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH
ABOUT THE UNITED STATES' ROLE IN THE FAILURE OF THE GLOBAL WAR ON DRUGS
AND HOW IT IS GOING TO FIX IT, Suffolk University Suffolk Transnational Law Review
Summer, 2013, 36 Suffolk Transnat'l L. Rev. 423, p. lexis]
C. Step 2: Real Reform - the U.S. Needs to Stand at the Forefront of Drug Policy Reformation
The U.S. wields considerable influence over the rest of the world
, so it is no surprise that its call for the development and maintenance of prohibitive, punitive drug policies resulted in a majority of the international community following.
n105
Conversely, if the U.S. leads the call for the development and maintenance of more tolerant drug policies grounded in health
, humanity and science, a majority of the international community will also follow. n106
Cultural shifts do not take place overnight, and the idea of complete U.S. drug policy reformation is too aggressive and stark in contrast to succeed against modern bureaucracy and political alliances.
n107 On the other hand,
a more moderate, piecemeal approach could effectively act as a catalyst for this transformation
while simultaneously serving as a case study for opponents of legal regulation. n108 [*442]
If the U.S. is serious about addressing the ineffectiveness of the War on Drugs
, then
n109
The tone of the Obama administration is a significant step in this direction.
n110 President Obama has explicitly acknowledged the need to treat drugs as more of a public health problem, as well as the validity of debate on alternatives, but he does not favor drug legalization. n111
This progressive rhetoric is a significant step in the right direction, but until there is some real reform confronting the issue, reducing punitive measures and supporting other countries to develop drug policies that suit their context,
there is still an abdication of policy responsibility. n112 1. Starting Small - Potential Positive Effects of
Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana in the U.S.
If marijuana was legal
in the U.S., it would function similarly to the market of legal substances
such as liquor, coffee and tobacco. n113 Individual and corporate participants in the market would pay taxes, increasing revenues and saving the government from the exorbitant cost of trying to enforce prohibition laws. n114 Consumers' human rights would be promoted through self-determination, autonomy and access to more accurate information about the product they are consuming. n115 Additionally, case studies and research suggest that the decriminalization or legalization [*443] of marijuana reduces the drugs' consumption and does not necessarily result in a more favorable attitude towards it. n116 The legal regulation of marijuana would relieve the current displaced burden the drug places on law enforcement, domestically and internationally. n117 In the U.S., law enforcement could refocus their efforts away from reducing the marijuana marke t per se and instead towards reducing harm to individuals
, communities and national security
. n118
Abroad
, U.S.
at home and afar. n119 The precarious position repressive policies place on foreign governments when they have to destroy the livelihoods of agricultural workers would be reduced. n120 Additionally, legalization
and regulation would provide assistance to governments in regaining some degree of control over the regions dominated by drug dealers and terrorist groups
because those groups would lose a major source of funding for their organizations. n121 2. Health Concerns? - Marijuana in Comparison to Other Similar Legal Substances The federal government, acknowledging the risks inherent in alcohol and tobacco, argues that adding a third substance to that mix cannot be beneficial. n122 Adding anything to a class of [*444] dangerous substances is likely never going to be beneficial; however marijuana would be incorrectly classified if it was equated with those two substances. n123 Marijuana is far less toxic and addictive than alcohol and tobacco. n124 Long term use

of marijuana is far less damaging than long term alcohol or tobacco use. n125 Alcohol use contributes to aggressive and reckless behavior, acts of violence and serious injuries while marijuana actually reduces likelihood of aggressive behavior or violence during intoxication and is seldom associated with emergency room visits. n126 As with most things in life, there can be no guarantee that the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana would lead the U.S. to a better socio-economical position in the future. n127
Two things however, are certain
: that the legalization of marijuana in the U.S. would dramatically reduce
most of the costs associated with the current drug policies
, domestically and internationally, and
[*445] if the U.S. is serious about its objective of considering the costs of drug control measures
, then it is vital and rational for the legalization option is considered
. n128 D.
Why the Time is Ripe for U.S. Drug Policy Reformation The political atmosphere at the end of World War I and II was leverage for the U.S., emerging as the dominant political, economic and military power. n129 This leverage allowed it to shape a prohibitive drug control regime that until now has remained in perpetuity. n130 Today, we stand in a unique moment inside of U.S. history. n131 The generational, political and cultural shifts that accompanied the U.S. emergence from the "Great Recession" resulted in a sociopolitical climate that may be what is necessary for real reform. n132 Politically, marijuana has become a hot issue; economically, the marijuana industry is bolstering a faltering economy and socially, marijuana is poised to transform the way we live and view medicine. n133 The public disdain for the widespread problems prohibition caused in the early 20th century resulted in the end of alcohol prohibition during the Great Depression. n134 If history does actually repeat itself than the Great recession may have been much more telling than expected. n135 V. Conclusion The U.S. and its prohibitionist ideals exacerbated the failure of both the international and its own domestic drug policies. n136 As a result, the U.S. should accept accountability for its mistakes by reforming its drug policies in a way that will help
[*446] place the global drug market back into a manageable position.
n137
Marijuana is an actionable, evidence based mechanism for constructive legal and policy reform that through a domino effect can transform the global drug prohibition regime
. n138 The generational, political and cultural shifts that accompanied the U.S. emergence from the "Great Recession" have resulted in a sociopolitical climate ready for real reform. n139
The U.S. will capitalize on this unique moment by
setting the stage for future international and domestic drug policies that are actually effective
. n140
[Copyright (c) 2014 New Mexico Law Review New Mexico Law Review Spring, 2014
New Mexico Law Review 44 N.M.L. Rev. 169 LENGTH: 17061 words ARTICLE: THE
QUAGMIRE THAT NOBODY IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WANTS TO TALK ABOUT:
MARIJUANA NAME: Melanie Reid * BIO: * Associate Professor of Law, Lincoln Memorial
University-Duncan School of Law, p. lexis]
VI. CONCLUSION: WHY CONGRESS MUST ACT NOW
The U nited
S tates is
currently in a precarious state caused by a lack of leadership on
the marijuana legalization
issue.
State and federal laws are in conflict.
In two states, a citizen can possess marijuana, but cannot grow, distribute, or import marijuana without risking federal prosecution.
There is sufficient overlap between federal and state laws that the issue can be no longer ignored. Congress is aware that: Controlled substances manufactured and distributed interstate cannot be differentiated from controlled substances manufactured and distributed intrastate. Thus, it is not feasible to distinguish, in terms of controls, between controlled substances manufactured and distributed interstate and controlled substances manufactured and distributed intrastate. . . . Federal control of the intrastate incidents [*203] of the traffic in controlled substances is essential to the effective control of the interstate incidents of such traffic. n204 Moreover, it would not be sensible to amend federal laws that currently prohibit simple possession under 21 U.S.C. § 844 to allow possession of small amounts of marijuana, if there are state laws that criminalize its use. Demand for marijuana invariably leads to its cultivation and production, and yet, in some states, selling and manufacturing marijuana is labeled as a crime, while possession is not. n205
In this current environment, Colorado and Washington may become the
Amsterdam of the United States
. In 2012, in Colorado alone, "there were 274 marijuana interdiction seizures destined for other states, compared to 54 of such seizures in 2005. This is a 407 percent increase." n206
Citizens from other states will take marijuana vacations to these two states, perhaps giving rise to the same effects witnessed by
Dutch coffee shops catering to international tourists--too many visitors bringing in a criminal element to the state
, creating a black market for marijuana.
Colorado and Washington could overtake
Mexico to become the leading suppliers of marijuana to the rest of the United States. One grower in California dreams of "bud'n'breakfast inns" and

"tasting rooms"--"[t]ourism in Mendocino could be bigger than pot tourism in Amsterdam." n207 [*204] Legalization in one state, and criminalization in the others simply does not work. n208 Professor Sam Kamin has suggested that a type of "cooperative federalism" could result from state-level legalization
, where the federal government looks the other way, and states that have legalized marijuana effectively regulate marijuana within its own borders
. n209 However, this proposed solution flies in the face of
the rule of law
:
A collection of legal principles that all relate to the placement of limitations on the exercise of political power and the operation of government.
Those principles include (1) government must follow its own rules; (2) government must apply the law impartially
; and (3) government must provide due process
for those accused of breaking the rules. n210
The federal government violates the rule of law when it chooses to apply federal laws without impartiality by prosecuting federal marijuana cases in states that have not legalized marijuana and
[ignoring] turning a blind eye in states that have legalized marijuana.
The federal government must either legalize and regulate or criminalize and prohibit
marijuana production and use.
As to legalization (Option 1),
two bills, the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of [*205] 2013 n211 and the Marijuana Tax Equity
Act of 2013, n212 are currently before Congress that would effectively make the transition from criminalization to legalization a reality at the federal level. States should enlist federal agencies to provide expertise and oversight in handling licensing, quality control, and enforcement of regulatory laws.
States are incapable of independently handling this issue. There is some indication that Congress might be moving in this direction. In June 2013, the
House of Representatives voted to approve an amendment to the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013 (the FARRM bill). This
Act would allow colleges and universities to grow and cultivate industrial hemp for research purposes, as long as it is legal in the particular state and the hemp plant contains no more than a 0.3 percent THC content. n213 Advocates for hemp and marijuana see this as a positive step in the marijuana legalization movement at the federal level. n214
As to criminalization (Option 3),
since Washington and Colorado have legalized recreational use of marijuana, the federal government must act soon if it chooses to enforce the CSA. Otherwise, it will find it difficult to stop the momentum in favor of legalization that the marijuana industry has fought so hard to create. State and federal governments should not consider the legalization of marijuana for medical use (Option 2) as a stepping-stone towards outright legalization. Thus, the States' Medical Marijuana Protection
Act n215 and the States' Medical Marijuana Property Rights Protection Act, n216 should not be considered, because they merely advocate continued conflict between the states who have approved marijuana use for medical purposes and the federal government. States that are considering legalizing
[*206] marijuana for medical use should choose to legalize marijuana for all types of use (Option 1). The options outlined here have been considered or implemented on numerous occasions since the discovery of marijuana.
What is important today is a decision on the legality of marijuana production and use.
Unfortunately,
Under the current status quo, the true beneficiaries are the profiteering, opportunistic owners of the medical marijuana clinics, and the doctors who recommend medical cards. They work in an environment free of taxes and strict regulations.
Meanwhile, we continue to hear crickets, adding many more years of silence, uncertainty, and damage to both sides of the debate.
n217
The federal government must take a stand and either crack down
on the growing marijuana business, or legalize it
, and begin the arduous task of regulating and taxing marijuana production and use, while at the same time advocating for minimal use.
The United States can examine the policies of other countries while determining an effective path forward.
,
[4/19/14, Jon, Ph.D. in public policy, teaching undergraduate criminal justice and graduate level management courses., “Remove Marijuana from the Controlled Substances
Act” http://www.hightimes.com/read/remove-marijuana-controlled-substances-act]
Marijuana does not belong in the Controlled Substances Act.
of marijuana in the Controlled Substances Act is a threat to
medical marijuana use and state
medical marijuana laws
. Rescheduling is an obsolete remedy, once long overdue but now its only value would be to provide a pretext to roll back or eliminate the advances brought about by state level reform. The CSA is intended to regulate pharmaceutical products, manufactured by corporations, and provided to patients according to prescriptions issued by doctors. Marijuana is not a pharmaceutical product, it is grown not manufactured, and no doctor in the United States can write a prescription for a substance that remains unapproved by the Food and Drug
Administration. State medical marijuana laws challenge the premise that marijuana should be subject to this federal regulatory framework. State medical marijuana law are part of a process, governed by the principles of federalism, to develop alternative regulatory approaches that better serve the needs of patients and caregivers. Rescheduling is advanced today as a means of expediting research on medical marijuana that would provide the means to successfully challenge the DEA’s opposition to recognizing the therapeutic

benefits of cannabis. Some also hope the provisions of any bill passed by Congress to change marijuana’s placement in the CSA would include protections for state medical marijuana programs and patients. This poses an obvious question.
If
Congress is willing and able to pass a law providing protection for state programs and medical cannabis users, then
Also, as a related but perhaps separate matter, if Congress is willing and able to pass a law to expedite research on the medical use of cannabis, why not establish appropriate regulations outside the framework of the Controlled Substances Act? The reader may have noticed that this discussion has not included any explanation of the differences in the various schedules of the CSA and how placement in one schedule or another would affect research or medical availability. This is because it doesn’t matter. A different schedule for marijuana would make research easier, but Congress could accomplish that with specific legislation. As long as marijuana is subject to the CSA, there will be no legal medical use under federal law until there is FDA approval of corporate, patented, pharmaceutical cannabis products.
There was a time when the symbolic ramifications of rescheduling would have helped to advance reform of the nation’s marijuana laws. That time is past. Passage of state-level medical marijuana laws has accomplished that, and much more – they have provided legitimacy, access and legal protections
.
At the federal level it is time for substantive changes in federal law and policy, not symbolism, nor half- measures, nor tinkering around with the CSA to provide the
without providing any significant relief for patients
.
Imagine the following scenario.
Marijuana is rescheduled and the DEA then aggressively attempts to make all medical marijuana access in the US subject to the regulatory restrictions established by the CSA. Access to
medical marijuana
under state programs is reduced and made much more complicated as tighter controls are enacted
. Within a few years Sativex, a cannabis pharmaceutical product, will be approved for sale in the US by the Food and Drug Administration. The DEA will probably make it a Schedule III substance, like Marinol (the THC pill) or maybe even something less restrictive. The DEA will then argue that while access to medical marijuana may have been necessary in years past, this new pharmaceutical product has rendered medical marijuana obsolete. Is this the Obama Administration’s plan? Maybe, but probably not.
However, Obama will only be in office until 2016. What then? Who knows? What we do know is that the CSA is not a practical regulatory framework for medical cannabis and that it
can be used to roll back or eliminate medical
cannabis access. Right now, everybody involved in medical cannabis distribution can be indicted under federal law
, if not now under this Attorney
General then later under another one. Rescheduling marijuana once had potential to advance marijuana law reform. It no longer does
. State level reform has changed the playing field in significant and profound ways.
It’s time to change
federal law to address the legitimate needs of patients in every state
and federal passage of a new piece of legislation granting every American access to marijuana in a legal regulated market.
[Testimony October 1, 2009 Transnational Drug Enterprises: Threats to Global Stability and U.S. National Security By: Vanda Felbab-Brown, Senior Fellow, Foreign
Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, http://www.brookings.edu/research/testimony/2009/10/01-drug-enterprises-felbabbrown]
Large illicit economies
dominated by powerful traffickers also have pernicious effects on a country’s law enforcement
and judicial systems.
As the illicit economy grows, the investigative capacity of the law enforcement and judicial systems diminishes. Impunity for criminal activity increases, undermining the credibility of law enforcement, the judicial system, and the authority of the government. Powerful traffickers frequently turn to violent means to deter and avoid prosecution, killing off or bribing prosecutors, judges, and witnesses. Colombia in the late 1980s and Mexico today are powerful reminders of the corruption and paralysis of law enforcement as a result of extensive criminal networks and the devastating effects of high levels of violent criminality on the judicial system. In addition, illicit economies have large economic effects.
Drug cultivation and processing, for example, on the one hand generate employment for the poor rural populations and may even facilitate upward mobility. As mentioned before, they can also have powerful marcoeconomic spillover effects in terms of boosting overall economic activity. But a burgeoning drug economy also contributes to inflation and can hence harm legitimate, export-oriented, import-substituting industries. It encourages real estate speculation and undermines currency stability.
It
also displaces legitimate production
. Since the drug economy is more profitable than legal production, requires less security and infrastructure, and imposes smaller sunk and transaction costs, the

local population is frequently uninterested in, or unable to, participate in other (legal) kinds of economic activity. The illicit economy can thus lead to
a form of so-called
Dutch disease
where a boom in an isolated sector of the economy causes or is accompanied by stagnation in other core sectors since it gives rise to appreciation of land and labor costs. Effects of Regional Manifestations of the Drug-Conflict Nexus on U.S. Security Even though the drug-violent-conflict nexus follows these general dynamics irrespective of the locale, how acute a threat to U.S. security interests it presents depends on the strategic significance of the state weakened by such connections and the orientation of the belligerent group toward the United States. Perhaps nowhere in the world does the presence of a large-scaled illicit economy threaten U.S.
primary security
interests as much in Afghanistan. There
, the anti-American Taliban strengthens its insurgency campaign by deriving both vast financial profits and great political capital from sponsoring the
illicit economy. The strengthened insurgency
in turn threatens
the vital U.S. objectives of counterterrorism and
Afghanistan’s stability
plus the lives of U.S. soldiers and civilians deployed there to promote these objectives.
The
large-scale opium poppy economy also undermines these goals by fueling widespread corruption
of Afghanistan government and law enforcement, especially the police forces.
A failure to prevail against the insurgency will result in the likely collapse of the national
government and Taliban domination of Afghanistan’s south, possibly coupled with civil war.
A failure to stabilize Afghanistan will in turn further destabilize Pakistan
, emboldening the jihadists in Pakistan and weakening the resolve of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services to take on the jihadists
. Pakistan may likely once again calculate that it needs to cultivate its jihadi assets to counter India’s influence in Afghanistan
– perceived or actual. But the seriousness of the threat and the strategic importance of the stakes do not imply that aggressive counternarcotics suppression measures today will enhance U.S. objec tives and global stability.
Indeed, just the opposite
.
Premature measures, such as extensive eradication before legal livelihoods are in place, will simply cement the bonds between the rural population dependent on poppy for basic livelihood and the Taliban, limit intelligence flows to Afghan and
NATO forces, and further discredit the Afghan government and tribal elites sponsoring eradication.
Nor, given the Taliban’s large sources of other income, will eradication bankrupt the Taliban. In fact, eradication so far has failed to accomplish that while already generating the above mentioned counterproductive outcomes.
After years of such inappropriate focus on eradication of the poppy crop, the new counternarcotics strategy for Afghanistan, announced by U.S. government officials in summer 2009, promises to mesh well with the counterinsurgency and state-building effort. By scaling back eradication and emphasizing interdiction and development, it will help separate the population from the Taliban. A well-designed counternarcotics policy is not on its own sufficient for success in Afghanistan. But it is indispensible. Counterinsurgent forces can prevail against belligerents profiting from the drug trade when they increase their own counterinsurgency resources and improve the strategy. Moreover, “success” in suppressing poppy in Afghanistan may well increase threats to U.S. security in other ways.
Given existing global demand, poppy cultivation will shift elsewhere
. There are many countries where poppy can be grown; but Burma, which used to be the number one producer for many years, Central Asia, and Pakistan are likely candidates.
A shift to Pakistan would be
by far the most worrisome
. In that case,
Pakistani jihadi groups would not only be able to increase their profits, but also, and most dangerously, their political capital
. Today, they have little to offer but ideological succor to the dissatisfied populations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the Northwest Frontier Province, and wider Pakistan.
If widespread poppy cultivation shifted to these areas, Kashmir
, and possibly even parts of Punjab, the jihadist belligerents would be much strengthened by
providing real-time economic benefits to marginalized populations.
(Stephen J., Political Writer and Former Member of the British Labour Party
Executive Committee, “Better another Taliban Afghanistan, than a Taliban NUCLEAR
Pakistan!?”, 9-23, http://www.freearticlesarchive.com/article/_Better_another_Taliban_Afghanistan__than_a_
Taliban_NUCLEAR_Pakistan___/99961/0/)
As the war intensifies
, he has no guarantees that the current autonomy may
yet burgeon into a separatist movement
. Appetite comes with eating, as they say. Moreover, should the Taliban fail to re-conquer al of Afghanistan, as looks likely, but captures at least half of the country, then a Taliban Pashtun caliphate
could be established which would act as a magnet to separatist Pashtuns in Pakistan
. Then, the
likely break up of Afghanistan
along ethnic lines, could
, indeed, lead
the way to the break up of Pakistan, as well
. Strong centrifugal forces have always bedevilled the stability and unity of
Pakistan
, and, in the context of the new world situation, the country could be faced with civil wars and
popular fundamentalist uprisings
, probably including a
military-fundamentalist coup d’état. Fundamentalism is deeply rooted in Pakistan society. The fact that in the year following 9/11, the most popular name given to

male children born that year was “Osama” (not a Pakistani name) is a small indication of the mood. Given the weakening base of the traditional, secular opposition parties, conditions would be ripe for a coup d’état by the fundamentalist wing of the Army and ISI, leaning on the radicalised masses to take power. Some form of radical, military Islamic regime, where legal powers would shift to
Islamic courts and forms of shira law would be likely. Although, even then, this might not take place outside of a protracted crisis of upheaval and civil war conditions, mixing fundamentalist movements with nationalist uprisings and sectarian violence between the
Sunni and minority Shia populations. The nightmare that is now Iraq would take on gothic proportions across the continent. The prophesy of
an arc of civil war over Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq would spread to south Asia, stretching from Pakistan to Palestine, through Afghanistan into Iraq and up to the Mediterranean
coast.
Undoubtedly, this would
also spill over into India
both with regards to the Muslim community and Kashmir.
Border clashes
, terrorist attacks, sectarian pogroms and insurgency would break out. A new war, and possibly nuclear war
, between Pakistan and India could not be ruled out
. Atomic Al Qaeda Should Pakistan break down completely, a Taliban-style government with strong Al Qaeda influence is a real possibility.
Such deep chaos would
, of course, open a “Pandora's box” for
the region and the world
. With the possibility of unstable clerical and military fundamentalist elements being in control of the Pakistan nuclear arsenal, not only their use against India, but Israel becomes a possibility, as well as the acquisition of nuclear and other deadly weapons secrets by Al Qaeda. Invading Pakistan would not be an option for America. Therefore a nuclear war
would now again become a real strategic possibility. This would bring a shift in the tectonic plates of global relations. It could usher in a new Cold War with China and Russia pitted against the US
.
[Losing the “Forgotten War” The US Strategic Vacuum in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia By Anthony H. Cordesman September 25, 2014, Arleigh
A. Burke Chair in Strategy, CSIS]
Corruption is another enormous inter-agency challenge facing reconstruction in Afghanistan. The consensus among everyone I speak with is that if corruption is allowed to continue unabated it will likely jeopardize every gain we’ve made so far in
Afghanistan
.…
Corruption destroys the populace’s confidence in their elected officials
, siphons off funds that would be used to combat insurgents or build infrastructure, and ultimately leads to a government that is ineffectual
and distrusted.
The threat from unabated corruption is especially exemplified right now in light of the ongoing election crisis. A crisis spawned from corruption,
which many fear is putting Afghanistan’s entire future in jeopardy
. …However, the problem of corruption isn’t new. Experts and SIGAR have been highlighting concerns about corruption for a long time. Top U.S. officials are very much aware of
Afghan corruption. A report commissioned by General Dunford last year noted that “Corruption directly threatens the viability and legitimacy of the
Afghan state.” USAID’s own assistant administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Larry Sampler, told Congress that Afghanistan is “the most corrupt place I’ve ever been to.” And Retired Marine Gen. John Allen identified corruption as the biggest threat to Afghanistan’s future an even bigger threat than the Taliban. The Afghans are also concerned with corruption. In June, Integrity Watch Afghanistan (an Afghan NGO) issued their latest national corruption survey. It found that corruption tied for second as the greatest challenge facing Afghanistan, after security. While 18% of respondents in the
2012 survey said they faced corruption within the last 12 months, 21% of respondents said they faced corruption in the 2014 survey. The survey also noted that Afghans believe corruption in most public sectors undermined their access to services. The same services the U.S. invested billions in establishing….For example, 28% of respondents believed that their households were deprived of access to electricity because of corruption and 18% said corruption blocked their access to higher education. The exact same areas where U.S. agencies commonly claim great success. In fact, the corruption percentages for electricity and education are not only up from 2012 but they are also higher than for justice by the courts and security by the police. In
June, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace singled out Afghanistan as an example of a state where governing systems have been bent to benefit one or a very few networks. According to the report, President Karzai regularly calls his attorney general to influence cases or personally orders the release of suspects from pre-trial detention, quashing the cases against them. This is the same Attorney General that recently threw a respected New
York Times reporter out of the country because he didn’t like his reporting. The DOD and the State Department have repeatedly noted that the Afghan
AG has deliberately avoided prosecuting either senior officials or individuals with ties to senior officials and stymied the work of the investigatory arm of his own internal-control and monitoring unit….SIGAR has also had problems with the Attorney General. In one case, SIGAR worked to freeze and seize nearly $70 million in funds, stolen from the U.S. government, that was sitting in Afghan banks. For months we pressed the Attorney General's
Office to freeze the money and begin the legal process to seize the cash. At first, we were told the bank account was frozen and the money protected.
Unfortunately, as is too often the case, we later learned that the money was mysteriously unfrozen by some powerful bureaucrat in Kabul. SIGAR has issued a number of reports on U.S. efforts to combat corruption. These reports have continually pointed out that the United States lacks a unified anticorruption strategy in Afghanistan. This is astonishing, given that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and a country that the
United States is spending billions of dollars in….Yet there has been no progress made toward developing a unified anti-corruption strategy. In fact, things could get worse with the drawdown. We cannot shy away from the challenge of corruption. We need a strategy, and we need to hold the Afghans feet to the fire on this issue. SIGAR will continue to point out how well or poorly not only U.S. officials but also Afghan officials perform in their promises to reduce corruption. …
Directly tied to corruption is the
final inter-agency challenge I wanted to talk about today countering the growth of the drug trade
. This challenge is no secret to anyone; the U.S. has already spent nearly $7.6 billion to

combat the opium industry. Yet, by every conceivable metric, we’ve failed…Production and cultivation are up
, interdiction and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan. During my trips to Afghanistan I’ve met with U.S., Afghan and international officials involved in implementing and evaluating counternarcotics programs. In the opinion of almost everyone I’ve met, the counternarcotics situation in Afghanistan is dire
, with little prospect for improvement. As with sustainability and corruption, the expanding cultivation and trafficking of drugs puts
. ..The narcotics trade poisons the
Afghan financial sector and fuels a growing illicit economy. This, in turn, undermines the Afghan state’s legitimacy by stoking corruption, nourishing criminal networks and providing significant financial support to the Taliban and other insurgent groups…
There are already signs that elements within the Afghan security forces are reaching arrangements with rural communities to allow opium poppy cultivation even encouraging production to build local patronage networks and generate illicit income.
[Brian A. JD, Golden Gate University School of Law, FROM MOUNTAINS TO
MOLEHILLS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DRUG POLICY, Annual Survey of
International & Comparative Law Golden Gate University School of Law Spring, 2013 Annual
Survey of International & Comparative Law 19 Ann. Surv. Int'l & Comp. L. 197, p. lexis]
C. LEGALIZATION HARMONIZES THE HARMS REDUCTION APPROACH WITH EXISTING LAW Besides the ability to prevent mass death, human rights atrocities, and the social destruction generated by prohibitionist policies, the legalization of drugs
would resolve the clash between the laws of prohibition and the realities of harms reduction approaches
.
The reality that harms reduction policies are in fact pursued internationally and domestically contradicts
creating a clash between fact and law.
This clash is readily apparent when comparing the national harms reduction policies of the Netherlands, Portugal, and Bolivia to the international obligations of prohibition imposed under the
SCND, CPS, and CAIT. However, the effect of this clash on the rule of law is better expressed in the U.S., where state laws embracing harms reduction approaches and the use of federally scheduled
and prohibited substances results in arbitrary enforcement
of the law and legal
uncertainty. Despite a federal prohibition
of drugs in the U.S., many states have loosened their drug laws to decrease criminal sentences
and enforcement. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have passed medical marijuana laws, which aim to permit the use of a federally prohibited drug in the medical treatment of patients.171 Since California passed the first medical marijuana law in 1996, the number of states duplicating such laws has grown steadily. There are an additional eleven states with legislation currently under consideration to legalize medical marijuana.1Similar to state efforts to legalize medical marijuana, state efforts to legalize the recreational use of marijuana are also rapidly gaining momentum. In 2010, California attempted to pass a law legalizing the possession and use of marijuana under state law, but narrowly failed.173 Two states have gone so far as to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, and as many as seven other states are considering similar legislation.174 While these hard fought legislative efforts represent the evolution of drug policy in the U.S. and perhaps even herald the eventual demise of prohibition, these states' laws remain in conflict with established and preemptive federal law. The production, transportation, possession, and sale of federally scheduled substances is criminally prohibited by the CSA, and the federal government still uses a scheme of mandatory sentences to guarantee the imprisonment of offenders.
175 However, what the federal government does with the enforcement of the federal law in relation to the states has proven to be inconsistent
at best. Generally, the federal government in the U.S. has chosen not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws. Recently, the U.S. Attorney General even went so far as to issue what is popularly called the Ogden Memo, a memo to all U.S. Attorneys instructing them that state law regarding medical marijuana is to be respected.176 However, the Obama administration has drastically changed the course of federal enforcement on facilities operating within the precepts of state law. Contrary to the Ogden Memo, U.S. Attorneys issued letters to state governments threatening prosecution of state officials participating in the regulation of medical marijuana dispensaries.177 In 2012, the U.S. DEA and Internal Revenue Service recently raided Oaksterdam University and the home of its proprietor, Richard Lee.178 Richard
Lee was a pioneer in developing the medical marijuana system in California and an advocate for legalization of marijuana but decided to surrender all of his businesses out of fear of federal prosecution.179 Richard Lee and Oaksterdam University serve as examples of the legal risk implicit in a flawed system that yields a clash between fact and law.
Oaksterdam University was similarly situated to many of the coffee shops in the Netherlands in that its business is technically prohibited by national law but permitted by local law. With the recent advent of legalized marijuana for recreational use in two states, it remains unclear how the federal government will respond.
Legitimate businesses will not take part in the drug trade under the current prohibitionist regime
, because they are under threat of prosecution by a national government.
Illegal actors, however, will participate in the drug trade regardless of the legality of the market. Legalization, however, would encourage legitimate businesses to participate in the drug market. A policy encouraging legitimate

businesses is best understood as a harms reduction approach to drug policy. Legitimate businesses willingly submit to regulation and can be monitored and controlled more easily. They do not perpetuate violence and they sell a product that can be subjected to governmental controls of quality and taxation. Illegal actors are not subject to any of these controls and have no incentive to comply with government regulations at all. If efforts to address the harms imposed by the international prohibition of drugs are ever to be realized, it is clear that some form of legal protection from prosecution is necessary. On the international level, there is no enforcement mechanism equivalent to the U.S. federal government over state governments, but there are other means by which the global norm of prohibition is enforced. Specifically, member States can exert significant pressure on each other to comply with international law
, to get back in line with the herd. We can see this at practice with the pressures the U.S. exerts over its neighbors to the South, both financially and politically, with efforts like Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative.
The need for legalization on all levels of government, domestic and international, is essential to ever effectively combat the problems with drugs.
[Joanne, professor of Clinic Population and Family Health at Columbia University’s
Mailman Public Health School, with Richard Parker and Nancy Worthington, Rethinking the
War on Drugs: The Impact of US Drug Control Policy on Global Public Health, March, http://www.mailman.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/rethinking-the-war-on-drugs.pdf]
During the closing years of the 20th century, particularly with the emergence of the HIV epidemic and a growing awareness of the role of injection drug use and needle sharing in driving this epidemic in many countries outside sub-Saharan Africa public health experts highlighted the need for risk-reduction to take precedence over criminal approaches to the problem of drug dependency.
A significant increase in social and behavioral research carried out in response to HIV and AIDS in the late 1980s and the early 1990s provided an unprecedented level of scientific evidence for the effectiveness of harm reduction services
, such as medication-assisted drug dependence treatment, needle exchange, and safer injection facilities, in improving the health of drug users without increasing levels of drug use,* As evidence for the effectiveness of such measures in preventing injection-driven HIV infection grew during the late
1990s and into the present decade, it seemed reasonable to assume that the harm reduction approaches grounded in public health principles would be adopted, and that the unprecedented scale-up of HIV services would, in turn, force a rethinking of the global war on drugs that impeded access to HIV services and pressed hundreds of thousands into institutions where no such services were available. Yet any review of global policy debates over the course of the past decade would have to conclude that the results have been far more ambiguous
than might have been expected. At best, the international community seems to have oscillated between reaffirmation of the drug war mentality and relatively timid steps in the direction of public health approaches. If we open the timeframe of our analysis to include the 1998 20a United Nations General
Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on illicit drugs, we find the UN General Assembly committing member states to achieving "a drug-free world."5 The 1998 UNGASS Declaration outlined what it described as a comprehensive global strategy for simultaneously reducing both the supply of and demand for illicit drugs and developed a mandate for the UN International Drug Control
Programme (UNDCP) to "develop strategies with a view to eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008."6 Disappointing those who had hoped for meaningful drug policy reform, it basically reasserted the same goals that had driven the global war on drugs for decades. HIV was unmentioned. Just a few years later, however, at the 2001 UNGASS on HIV and AIDS, an assembly of the same nations seemed to signal a possible shift of emphasis, including harm reduction efforts and access to sterile injecting equipment as part of the stated goals in its Declaration of
Commitment.7
In 2003, at the mid-term review of the UNGASS on drugs, the focus seemed to have reverted back to prohibition,
with UNODC arguing that important progress had been made on reaching the goals and targets that had been established in 1998 and citing long lists of drug control measures undertaken by member states in the five years that had passed.8 In June of 2005, the Programme Coordinating Board (PCB), which governs the Joint United Nations
Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS), pushed back in the opposite direction, approving a UNAIDS policy position paper, "Intensifying
HIV Prevention," that officially affirmed support for needle exchange programs as a key part of the global fight against the epidemic; both the paper and the PCB report approving it, however, explicitly noted that the USA (the largest donor to UNAIDS) could not support needle exchange because it contradicts its domestic drug policies.9 And in 2008, at the ten-year review point for the 1998
UNGASS, which was initiated at the 2008 meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna, the debate seemed to veer back yet again, with the UNODC claiming major successes in the control of coca and opium production and reaffirming the need to place greater emphasis on demand reduction in resource- rich consumer countries.10 While a range of complex factors have surely affected the development of these contradictory policy debates, probably nothing has been more
important than the policy positions promoted and defended internationally by the
US government
. Indeed, no matter which side of the debate one comes down on, for or against the war on drugs, all observers agree that the US has been at the center of most of the major decisions and activities

driving international drug policy since its inception more than a century ago, and US policies related to drugs have largely determined drug control practices globally.
Even in the wake of the global
HIV and AIDS epidemic, US commitment to the war on drugs has been one of the central factors underlying resistance to the adoption of more scientifically-informed policies grounded in contemporary public health approaches to health promotion and disease prevention
. The history of US policy in relation to these issues has also been marked by changes over time, as well as by conflicts and differences of opinion that have shifted policy emphasis both within and between different administrations.
There can be no doubt
, for example, that the policies pursued by
the
Bush
administration, from 2001 to 2009, and the Bush administration's commitment to promoting those policies globally, are among the most important factors that have shaped the development of international drug policy debates over the course of the past decade
. Recognizing the importance that US policies have had in shaping responses to drug use globally, and the likelihood that this will continue to be the case in the future, this paper seeks to review the development of US policy on drugs over the course of the past decade, with a primary focus on its relevance for the politics of global public health more broadly. We are particularly interested in looking at the consequences of US policy during the eight years of the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2009, as well as the initial steps taken by the Obama administration, since its inauguration at the start of 2009, in order to assess the potential policy impact of both administrations in relation to the broader context of global public health in the early 21st century.
Tom
, professor of philosophy, “AIDS and Apocalyptics for Questioning Millennium
Madness, http://bioethicscourse.info/aidsite/lec-millemad.html
The worst threat to humankind
AIDS is "the number one health problem on this planet."
(C. Everett Koop, former US
Surgeon General) "
AIDS is the single greatest threat to well-being facing the world's population today."
(Marc Lappé)
AIDS is "a messenger of apocalyptic change," as it is spread through "one of the most biologically urgent of human behaviors
." - Dr June Osborn (former member of the US
Presidential Commission on HIV/AIDS, & professor in U Mich SPH) Economic costs are high "Although it is less than a decade since the virus that causes AIDS was discovered, it has become increasingly evident that this pandemic will have profound economic and social implications for both developed and developing countries. The importance of health as an input to the economic development and growth of a country is well established - a healthier population is more productive and has an increased capacity for learning. The adverse impacts of the HIV/AIDS pandemic will undermine improvements in health status and, in turn, reduce the potential for economic growth. AIDS is distinct from other diseases, and its impact can be expected to be quite severe
.... Its most critical feature, distinguishing AIDS from other life-threatening and fatal illnesses, such as diarrhea (among children in developing countries) or cancer (among the elderly in developed countries), is that it selectively affects adults in their sexually most active ages, which coincide with their prime productive and reproductive years
." - in AIDS in the World, 1992, p 195 (Jill Armstrong is an economist in the Eastern Africa Dept of the World Bank, Washington, DC.
Eduard Bos is a demographer in the Population, Health, and Nutrition Division of the World Bank's Population and Human Resources Department.) E. "
Whatever else AIDS is, it's not just another disease
." (Dr June Osborne, former member of the US Presidential Commission on HIV/AIDS) Features that make AIDS unique: * High morbidity & mortality * Lifelong infectiousness * lengthy asymptomatic stage * highly mutable virus Joshua Lederberg considers the possibility of HIV "learning the tricks of airborne transmission:"
"We know that HIV is still evolving. Its global spread has meant there is far more HIV on earth today than ever before in history. What are the odds of its learning the tricks of airborne transmission? The short answer is "No one can be sure
."
... [A]s time passes, and HIV seems settled in a certain groove, that is momentary reassurance in itself. However, gi ven its other ugly attributes, it is hard to imagine a worse threat to humanity than an airborne variant of AIDS
. No rule of nature contradicts such a possibility; the proliferation of AIDS cases with secondary pneumonia [and TB] multiplies the odds of such a mutant, as an analog to the emergence of pneumonic plague."
* effective modes of transmission * destroys the immune system * viral reservoir expanding Dr Barry D Schoub, Director of the National Institute of Virology at the
University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, sums up thus: "[
T]he ability of the virus to cause a slow, progressive and permanent infection with permanent infectivity makes it a unique cause of epidemic disease.
Thus, with no recovery, no loss of infectivity, no development of either individual or herd immunity, there is no known biological mechanism which can stop the continuing expansion

of the disease
unless an effective vaccine were to come about, and at present there is no feasible design for such an effective vaccine.
The progressive increase in the pool of
HIV can,
in theory, o nly lead to an exponential increase in the number of individuals who will become infected until eventually the majority of the sexually active population will be infected unless interventions are at lease moderately successful.
"
Koblentz, 10 (Deputy Director of the Biodefense Program @ GMU, Assistant Professor in
Public and International Affairs, March, "Biosecurity Reconsidered: Calibrating Biological
Threats and Responses." International Security Vol. 34, No. 4, p. 96-132)
Pandemics are disease outbreaks that occur over a wide geographic area, such as a region, continent, or the entire world, and infect an unusually high proportion of the population. Two pandemic diseases are widely cited as having the potential to pose direct threats to the
stability and security of states
: HIV/AIDS and influenza. HIV/AIDS. Since it was first identified in 1981, HIV is estimated to have killed more than 25 million people worldwide. According to the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the percentage of the global population with HIV has stabilized since 2000, but the overall number of people living with HIV (33 million in 2007) has steadily increased. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to bear a disproportionate share of the global burden of HIV with 35 percent of new HIV infections, 75 percent of AIDS deaths, and 67 percent of all people living with HIV. 116 Scholars have identified four ways that HIV/AIDS can affect security. 117 First, the disproportionately high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the armed forces of some nations, particularly in Southern Africa, may compromise the ability of those states to defend themselves from internal or external threats. Militaries with high rates of HIV infection may suffer losses in combat readiness and effectiveness as infected troops are transferred out of combat roles, units lose cohesion because of high turnover rates, middle management is "hollowed out" by the early death or disability of officers, and defense budgets are strained because of rising medical costs and the need to recruit and train replacements for sick soldiers. The second threat is that HIV
/AIDS will undermine the international
peace-keeping system. Nations with militaries with high rates of HIV/AIDS will be unable to provide troops for international peacekeeping missions; nations with healthy militaries may be unwilling to commit troops to peacekeeping operations in nations with a high prevalence rate of
HIV/AIDS; and war-torn nations may be unwilling to accept peacekeepers for fear they will spread the disease in their country.
The third threat is that
a "second wave" of HIV/AIDS could strike large, strategically important countries such as China, India, and Russia. These states, which possess nuclear weapons and are important players in critical regions, also suffer from internal security challenges that could be aggravated by a severe AIDS epidemic and its attendant socioeconomic disruptions.
The fourth threat is that the high prevalence of HIV in less developed countries will cause political instability that could degenerate into internal conflict or spread into neighboring countries. Unlike most diseases, which affect primarily the poor, young, and old,
HIV/AIDS strikes young adults and members of the middle and upper classes. By sickening and killing members of society when they should be their most productive, HIV/AIDS has inflicted the "single greatest reversal in human development" in modern history. 118

Richard A.
, Senior Lecturer at University of Chicago Law School,
[Catastrophe:
Risk and Response: Risk and Response, p. 22-24 (Gender modified – Sigalos)]
AIDS illustrates the further point that despite the progress made
by modern medicine in the
diagnosis and treatment of diseases, developing a vaccine or cure for a new
(or newly recognized or newly virulent) disease may be difficult, protracted, even impossible
. Progress has been made in treating AIDS, but neither a cure nor a vaccine has yet been developed. And because the virus’s mutation rate is high, the treatments may not work in the long run.7
Rapidly mutating viruses are difficult to vaccinate against
, which is why there is no vaccine for the [END PAGE 22] common cold and why flu vaccines provide only limited protection.8 Paradoxically, a treatment that is neither cure nor vaccine, but merely reduces the severity of a disease, may accelerate its spread by reducing the benefit from avoiding becoming infected
. This is an important consideration with respect to AIDS, which is spread mainly by voluntary intimate contact with infected people.
It might seem that the role of technology in relation to naturally occurring diseases would be wholly positive. Not so.
Modern transportation, especially by air, facilitates the rapid spread of new diseases, as does crowding in huge cities, especially in poor countries
.9
These may be factors in the increased number of emerging (new) and “re-emerging” diseases, such as t u b erculosis, in recent decades.10
And the promiscuous use of antibiotics has spurred the evolution of anti-biotic-resistant
, potentially lethal bacteria
.11 (The effect is similar to that of pesticides in promoting the evolution of pesticide-resistant pests.)12 I call it
“promiscuous” because neither the patient nor his [or her] doctor is likely to consider the effect of prescribing the antibiotic on the evolution of resistant disease strains. But it may be offset by the benefit to the patient, and may even be neutralized by the fact that curing an infected person shortens the time during which he or she can infect other people.
Yet the fact
that
Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease
to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a
source of genuine comfort
, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race, that is, its host population.
The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race is probably even less today than in the past
(except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human [END PAGE 23] contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science.
But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure
: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a first time
.
That the human race has not yet been destroyed by germs created or made more lethal by modern science
, as distinct from completely natural disease agents such as the flu and AIDS viruses, is even less
reassuring. We haven’t had these products long enough to be able to infer survivability from our experience with them. A recent study suggests
that as immunity to smallpox declines because people are no longer being vaccinated
against it, monkeypox may evolve into “a successful human pathogen,”
15 yet one that vaccination against smallpox would provide at least some protection against; and even before the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, smallpox did not wipe out the human race.
What is new is the possibility that science, bypassing evolution, will enable monkeypox to be “juiced up” through gene splicing into a far more lethal pathogen than smallpox ever was
.

Chang, 14 – staff for Main Street; cites a report from the ArcView Group, a cannabis investment and research firm (Ellen, “Is Marijuana the Next Bubble?” 2/26, http://www.mainstreet.com/article/marijuana-next-bubble
Legal marijuana businesses are cropping up in many states, but those who have definitive business models and mainstream strategies are able to attract funding from investors, boost their growth and achieve scale.
The potential for the marijuana market to increase to $10.2 billion within the next five years or a
700% increase from the current U.S. market value is very likely, said Douglas Leighton, managing partner of Dutchess Capital, a New York investment firm which manages $125 million in assets, has $200 million in direct investments and made its first investment in the cannabis industry recently. The "real growth" will arise when more states decriminalize the use of marijuana.
"I've never seen it where a market already exists for the product," he said. "The market is already there and it will gain wider acceptance."
Support for legalizing marijuana is widespread as support from Americans rose to an all-time high of 58%, a 10-point increase in a year, according to a Gallup poll last October. Washington and Colorado are expected to add $359 million and $208 million each to their respective markets in 2014 for adult use. Another 14 states are projected to pass adult use regulations in the next five years, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts,
Maine, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont, the
ArcView report said.
While there are very few public companies in this sector currently, the demand for them remains high, said Leighton. Some of the stocks appear to be expensive, but have risen substantially in the past six months, he said.
"I think the public stocks have gotten a little ahead of themselves," Leighton said. "There is a large amount of capital chasing a small pool."
Investors should conduct due diligence on companies before they make an investment and to ensure the businesses are operating within state regulations, he said. Investing directly into dispensaries or companies who grow marijuana is not a good option since most of the operations remain smaller because of state regulations, Leighton said.
Depending on an investors' risk tolerance, consumers should consider investing in ancillary companies instead who do not directly handle the cannabis or its related byproducts, he said.
Dutchess Capital created http://www.mmjinvest.com/ to connect investors with adult and medical marijuana entrepreneurs.
"If you can take risk and want a better return on your capital, then those companies which control the plant are a great place to be," he said. "If your tolerance for risk is lower, then invest in the other businesses where there is greater growth potential."
Companies which are involved in controlling the cultivation of the core commodity and develop a brand around it "maintain the best opportunity in the industry," said Derek Peterson, CEO of
Terra Tech. (TRTC), a public company based in Irvine, Calif. which manufactures agricultural equipment.

"From my perch, there is going to be a value in the companies that own and control state issued permits for retail dispensaries and commercial cultivation throughout the country," he said.
Investing in the marijuana market has the same caveats as allocating money in a startup or emerging market, said Peterson, a former senior vice president with Morgan Stanley Smith
Barney. Investors should examine the company's valuations and potential market size, but also the space and location it operates in, he said.
"Investors should look at whether the company has a good product or service and if they are operating in a location that is supportive of medical cannabis-related companies," Peterson said.
"There are areas in California and other legal states where the local government is pushing these businesses out through zoning and other restrictions. This industry is unique as it operates in a quasi-legal environment due to the dichotomy between state and federal law."
Companies traded on the OTC QB and QX markets are required to have independent audited reporting requirements, he said.
"When looking at public companies I would focus on fully reporting companies," he said. "I believe this industry is still in its infancy and far away from any level of maturation."
Until marijuana is federally legal, investors should shy away from businesses which are involved in grow operations, said Bill Chaaban, CEO of Creative Edge Nutrition Inc. (FITX), a public vitamin nutritional supplement company which plans to produce marijuana for medicinal use in the U.S. and Canada through its subsidiary CEN Biotech. The market could generate as much as
$10 billion in revenue by 2018 and outpace the sales of tobacco and alcohol combined, he said.
"I think it is definitely a lot larger," Chaaban said. "You have a huge percent of the population currently using marijuana that possess medical marijuana licenses who are really recreational users. There are many people who partake in it and it will just become legal. It is definitely mainstream."
The margins for the industry will be shrinking in the future, but investing in the cannabis market is not for short term investors looking for quick gains, said Justin Hartfield, CEO of
Ghost Group, a Newport Beach, Calif. operating company that owns and manages marijuana technology companies including Weedmaps, a listings and reviews site for marijuana dispensaries.
"You need to be passionate about the product," he said. "This is going to be comparable to the wine industry and bigger than the tobacco industry in the future. The black market is probably five to 10 times larger than legal sales. There is always demand."
[Pop! Why bubbles are great for the economy, By Daniel Gross,American journalist and author. Since July 2012 he has been editor of global finance for Daily Beast/Newsweek. He was formerly Senior Editor at Newsweek, and between 2010 and 2012 was employed at Yahoo!
Finance http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2007/05/pop.single.html]
If you blew the kids' college fund on Pets.com stock back in 2000, or dropped $800,000 last year on that spec house in Phoenix that you knew you could flip for $1.4 million, you probably won't believe me when I say:
Investment bubbles are great for the economy
. Yes, those periodic outbursts of investor insanity
, which inevitably degenerate into venality, corruption, and searing losses—
America needs them!
In my new book, Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, I explain why Americans have misunderstood the frenzies, manias, and stampedes that periodically seize us.
In that magical world known only to a few economists
, where resources are allocated efficiently and investors and consumers behave rationally, bubbles would always be unambiguously negative.
They cause
all sorts of distortions
and silly, self-defeating behavior (buying Amazon.com at $400).
But that's not the world in

which we live, especially in the U nited
S tates.
We are not blessed with a population composed entirely of hyper-rational individuals.
And the government doesn't control the deployment of revolutionary inventions. As a result, new technologies and ways of doing business are always rolled out in fits and starts.
What's more, the excitement of a new technology interacts with some of the more unstable components of America's character—boundless optimism, a tendency toward entrepreneurship, a tolerance of creative destruction, and greed—to produce a kind of mania. So, every time a hot new technology comes along (whether it's the telegraph or the Internet), Americans collectively lose their minds—and then lose their shirts.
Looking back through the last 150 years, a familiar pattern emerges
.
A wonderful new technology or economic idea arrives.
A few good years of solid growth help engender a sense that things are different and that new rules apply.
Hype and rosy projections— from Irving Fisher's 1929 prediction of a "permanently high plateau" to Dow 36,000­—justify investing at stratospheric levels. The trend, previously confined to the business community, crosses over into popular culture. Everyone's buying stock, investing venture capital, refinancing a mortgage, installing compact fluorescent light bulbs.
And then, pop! The bubble bursts
, heroes become goats, and bankruptcies spread. As corruption and venality are exposed, self-loathing and recriminations rule the day. (See: subprime lending, spring 2007.) And that's when all the moralizing narratives about the tragedy of bubbles get written. But this is only half the story!
After all, the process of growth and innovation doesn't end when a bubble bursts.
The Internet wasn't unplugged and shut down in 2002.
In fact, once you gain a little historical distance from bubbles, it is clear that some bubbles—some, not all—leave behind something that is a little bit boring but extremely useful
: infrastructure
.
The bubbles that have left behind commercial infrastructure have been incredibly important contributors to America's remarkable long-term
economic performance
. Simply put, bubbles are how new
commercial infrastructure gets built in this country
. In the 1840s and 1850s, European governments slowly strung up telegraphs from large city to large city. But in the United States, bubbledrunk entrepreneurs rampaged throughout the countryside, stringing up competing and often redundant wires way ahead of demand. Most went bankrupt. In the 1880s, vast competing, and often redundant, rail networks were built way ahead of demand. By 1894 about a quarter of the rails were in bankruptcy. The 1990s saw an orgy of commercial infrastructure built for the Internet. We all know how that ended. But
Americans recover from failure very quickly.
All that infrastructure wasn't torn down—it was consolidated, taken over by new investors with lower cost bases, and reused. T he cheap, pervasive telegraph led to American dominance in the national and international market in information—and longlasting businesses like the Associated Press and the Chicago Board of Trade. The cheap, pervasive national railroad network led to an integrated market in goods and commodities—and long-lasting businesses such as department stores, mail-order retailers like Sears, and national brands from Coca-Cola to Procter & Gamble.
The
Internet pop has left us with Web 2.0
—
Facebook and Skype, MySpace and YouTube, and, most of all, Google
.
Each of these companies either was started or gained critical mass after the Internet bubble burst. Each gained tremendous scale overnight thanks to all the cheap excess capacity built during the 1990s bubble. During bubbles, a second type of infrastructure is built, too: the mental infrastructure
. The money raised during bubbles doesn't just go into the incinerator. It is spent on marketing, advertising, promotion, hype, and brand awareness. Bubble-era companies, desperate for traffic, discount furiously, pay rebates, offer free shipping, and run their businesses on negative margins—all as part of a heroic effort to coax consumers and businesses to spend their money in fundamentally different ways. The telegraphs slashed per-word rates to compete with the mail and with each other. The railroads slashed freight rates to compete with canals and rivers, and with each other. In the 1990s, the entire e-commerce sector spent furiously to persuade consumers and businesses to take the leap of faith and buy stuff—stocks, books, airline tickets, pet food, groceries, diamonds, chemicals, you name it—online.
Most of the pioneering Internet bubble-era companies failed as businesses. But they succeeded in making millions of people believe that it was safe, efficient, and desirable to conduct business online.
That mental infrastructure didn't disappear after the bust
.
People didn't suddenly stop buying things online in 2001.
According to Forrester Research, e-commerce more than
doubled between 2001 and 2006, to $211.4 billion. Post-bust innovators were able to tap into both a commercial physical infrastructure (near-universal broadband) and a huge installed base of customers. Thus, businesses that were stillborn during the boom (Webvan, advertising-supported video sites) can thrive after the bust (FreshDirect,
YouTube).
Today the services-driven U.S. economy is showing a remarkable capacity to blow and deflate bubbles quickly
. With the assistance of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, we transitioned seamlessly from Internet bubble to real-estate bubble to alternative-energy bubble in just six years. That makes the mental infrastructure more important than ever. Take the housing bubble that just popped.
Millions of people will get hurt—and hurt badly—as housing prices fall and ARMs are reset higher. The upsides of bubbles are always hardest to see when things are collapsing.
(Raise your hand if, in 2001 and 2002, you thought an Internet search and advertising company would be worth $146 billion in 2007.) But the mental and commercial infrastructure surrounding real-estate credit will remain. The culture of refinancing, which proved a huge boon to the economy throughout the 1990s and first half of this decade, will stay with us. So, too, will important bubble-era services like Zillow that empower consumers. These efforts to make a virtue out of some of the worst tendencies in the American economic character may sound like a naive exercise of hope over experience. But in my book, experience should give us hope—even if the housing bubble continues to wreak damage on the economy and the alternative-energy space is getting bubbly. It is possible, even rational, to be both short-term gloomy and long-term optimistic.
Those who believe that the nation's experience with bubbles is all gray cloud and no silver lining need to ask where we would be without the irrational exuberance. Without the disasters of
Global Crossing and Worldcom, would we still have Google?

[“Demand Reduction or Redirection? Channeling Illicit Drug Demand towards a
Regulated Supply to Diminish Violence in Latin America”, Research Coordinator for the Drug
Policy Alliance, 91 OR. L. REV. 1227, p. Hein online]
B. Levels of Violence It is also impossible to foresee how regulation would affect levels of violence. Some analysts believe a shortterm increase in violence is possible (as competition over a smaller market could intensify), but that violence in the longer term will decline.106
Some
analysts point out that organized crime may further diversify into other activities, such as extortion and kidnapping, though these have been shown to be considerably less profitable than drug trafficking.
As one scholar notes, given the profitability of the drug trade, “it would take roughly 50,000 kidnappings to equal 10% of cocaine revenues
from the U.S.107
While the
American mafia certainly diversified into other criminal endeavors after the Repeal of alcohol
Prohibition
, homicide rates nevertheless declined dramatically.
108 Combining marijuana regulation
with medical regulatory models for heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine could strike a major blow to the corrosive economic power of
violent trafficking organizations, diminishing their ability to perpetrate murder, hire recruits, purchase weapons, corrupt officials, operate with impunity, and terrorize societies.
Moreover, these approaches promise concrete results
— potentially significant reductions in DTO revenues—unlike all other strategies that Mexico or the United
States have tried to date.
109
Criminal organizations would still rely on other activities for their income, but they would be left weaker and less of a threat to security.
Furthermore, the United
States and Latin American governments would save resources currently wasted on prohibition enforcement and generate new revenues in taxes
— resources which could be applied more effectively towards confronting violence and other crimes that directly threaten public safety.

Federal Register, 1 (DEPARTMENT OF LABOR Office of the Secretary 29 CFR Part 4 RIN
1215-AB26, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2001-01-18/html/01-1337.htm)
The AFL-CIO noted that this criterion
is designed to ensure that all contractors compete on an equal basis. The AFL-CIO questions whether the criterion accomplishes this goal since it only
requires that all or ''nearly all'' of the offerors meet the requirements
of the other criteria. The AFL-CIO suggests that this standard be changed to require that all offerors meet the requirements.
The Department's intention is that a contracting officer would not make this determination unless he or she has a high degree of confidence that
all offerors will meet the requirements
. It is unlikely that any contracting officer would feel able to determine absolutely that every offeror will qualify for the exemption.
The ''or nearly all'' language
therefore would permit the extraordinary situation where one bidder might not qualify as exempt
.
Returning to the automotive maintenance example described previously, an employer with a single employee and a relatively small number of commercial customers could bid on the contract to maintain on average a few vehicles a month. With that small volume of government work, the workforce for ``nearly all'' prospective contractors would spend less than 20 percent of their time working on the contract. The single employee working for a company with relatively few commercial accounts, however, might spend more than 20 percent of his or her time performing work on the contract. While this company's offer might be rejected for other reasons
(e.g., the contract might require a capacity to service more than one vehicle at a time--a capacity that the two-person shop might not possess), the fact that one non-exempt contractor might bid on the contract should not negate the application of the exemption to everyone else. The Department believes that retaining some amount of flexibility in this regard is appropriate, and the criterion is retained.
The Department would like to emphasize that
''nearly all'' does not mean most or a majority
.
The words ''nearly all'' are intended to recognize the possibility of exceptional circumstances where an individual offeror might not meet all of the criteria
. If this offeror receives the contract, of course, the contract would be subject to SCA prevailing wage requirements. On the other hand, the Department realizes that there may be circumstances where, once bids are received, the contracting officer determines that he or she was incorrect in the determination that all or nearly all bidders would meet the exemption requirements. The regulation has therefore been revised to provide that in such circumstances SCA will apply to the procurement.

Anderson, 55 - Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Minnesota (William, The
Nation and the States, Rivals Or Partners?, google books)
United States. Both the Articles and the Constitution utilize this term to designate the organized nation or the group of states taken as a single entity. In fact
"United States" became the standard term at the time of the Declaration of
Independence to designate the national unit of government and has been used in that way ever since
.
There is, however, a subtle difference between the Articles and the Constitution in the way in which "United States" is used. Nearly every use of the term in the Articles is in the phrase "the United States in Congress assembled," as if the United States did not exist except when the delegates from the several state legislatures were assembled in a Congress. Usually the words "United States in
Congress assembled" are not even capitalized. Clearly the term "United States" did not as yet mean a fully united nation or a political entity with an established name, a government, and a being of its own.
On the other hand, the framers of the Constitution, just ten years after the Articles were drafted, spoke of the United States and the people of the United States as if they already existed as one nation. "
The government of the United States" is recognized as a distinct government, in
Article I, section 8, paragraph 18, of the Constitution, and evidently as something separate from and not dependent upon the state governments
; while the
Congress of the United States is spoken of as such, and never as "the United States in Congress assembled."
In contrast with the term "the United States" the framers used the phrase "the several states" to refer to the separate states
and their local or particular governments.
[Executive Director of the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey [Angelo M.
Valente, “Marijuana Legalization: Now What?,” Partnership for a Drug Free New Jersey, Posted
9/4/2013, pg. http://tinyurl.com/mccvw9k]
Marijuana is a schedule I classification drug under the C ontrolled
S ubstances
A ct in the United States, meaning that it has a high potential for abuse and there is no ACCEPTED medical precedent for it. Therefore, it is illegal to possess or sell in the U nited
S tates.
This is federal law
.
According to Article IV, Clause 2 of the Constitution
of the United States, better known as the Supremacy Clause, “
This Constitution, and the Laws of the U nited
S tates… shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding
.” In other words,
Washington
can pass the
Undiscovered Species Protection Act, which makes it illegal to harass Bigfoot or any other undiscovered species but it
can’t legalize
marijuana because it is against federal law and the law of the U nited
S tates supersedes that of the state
.

—Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies, and
Department Chair @ Emory, PhD Vanderbilt (John J., Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol.
22, No. 4, 2008, “A Terrible Love of Hope”, Project MUSE, RBatra)
If concrete cases of love of hope
and peace point toward
, and result from, both self and societal transformation
, so too do
concrete cases of love of war
. We may discipline ourselves to become more loving or more hateful. We may engage in social action to foster harmony or conflict. Recognizing this fact, we should not only strive to eliminate love of war through inward-bound self-transformation or
outward-bound societal reconstruction
.
Hillman argues
that this is impossible
, and whether it is necessarily impossible, as he says, or just contingently impossible, neither of these strategies has worked so far. Instead, we should focus on changing the conditions that call forth action on behalf of love of war—and thereby change the consequences of love of war. In other words, if a healthy dose of realism suggests that we cannot eliminate love of war, then a healthy dose of meliorism suggests
that we need to work to
(1) reduce—not eliminate, but reduce—its manifestations or outbreaks and
(2) redirect its energy.
Let me expand on these two points. In the first place, then, we need to focus on the signs in our experience that love of war is moving us toward acts of war
. What are these signs?
They include
at least the following six features of experience:
— a morality of fundamentalist dualisms and absolutes
: experiences of sharply separate and complete goods and complete evils
, of self and radical other, of us and them
, of good guys in a shining city on the hill and white hats and evil empires, of our benevolence and their arrogance and humiliation of us, of the outwardly same actions by us as justified and by them as unjust
— a unique temporality
: experiences that things are different or unique or special now
, that a final moment has been entered
and that we are tested by it, that we must respond right now fully and finally, that their actions must not be allowed to pass, that we have come to a turning point, that there is no going back
, that it is now or never and that the past has come to an end
— an exceptional metaphysics : experiences that God and history are with us; that we are chosen or exceptional or highest
; that we are more than just another group striving to respond to our problems and advance our interests; that our interests, above all others, are Real or True or Holy
— a projected transformation
: experiences of anticipation
and expectation that everything that really matters will be different—depending on what we do now; that we stand at a threshold of possible irreversible triumph, glory, and salvation; that a qualitatively different future is about to dawn
— a single-mindedness
: experiences of narrowed focus and realization
, finally, of what alone matters
; of everything else as secondary and unimportant; of this alone as one’s calling and meaning of life; of what one was born for, made for, prepared for; of one’s destiny
— the impossibility of communication
: experiences that we cannot talk with them, that our truths permanently cut us off from their lies
, that we can understand them but that they cannot understand us
, that without our direct experience and our identity outsiders can never understand us, that deliberation and understanding are impossible and pointless and even demeaning 13
These and related experiences, rooted in a love of war, are not merely “natural.”
Instead, they can be, and are
, manufactured and manipulated and deployed
. Today we have learned that Hermann Göring was right that it is easy for leaders to drag
the people to war
: “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” Accordingly, those who hope for peace must invent democratic practices and institutions that mediate, intervene, and educate for different, fundamentally opposite experiences and policies. The politics of any effective love and hope for peace must be, in the broadest sense of the term, educational.

Slava
, York University, "Escape from Reason: Labels as Arguments and
Theories", Dialogue XLVI (2007), 781-796, philpapers.org/archive/SADEFR.pdf
The way McLaughlin shows
the rosy prospects of psychoanalytical
social theory boils down to
this: there are people who labour at it.
He reports on Neil Smelser’s lifelong elaborations of psychoanalytical sociology, which prescribed the use of
Freudian theories. Then he presents a “powerful” psychoanalytical theory of creativity of Michael Farrell, commenting on how the theorist “usefully utilizes psychoanalytic insights,” though McLaughlin does not specify them.
He correctly expects that I might not view his examples as scientific. Their problems begin well before
that. First, due to their informative
emptiness, or tautological character, all they amount to is rewordings of everyday assumptions
. Second, due to their vagueness these accounts are compatible with any outcomes; in other words, they lack explanatory and predictive power. The proposed ideas are too inarticulate to subject to intersubjective criticism, and to call them empirical or scientific theories would be, no matter how comforting, a gross misuse of words.
¶ On the constructive side, a psychoanalytic theorist may be challenged to unambiguously formulate her suppositions and specify conditions of their disproof, to leave out what we already well know and smooth out internal inconsistencies, and revise the theories in view of easily available counter-examples and competing accounts. Only after having done this can one present candidate theories to public criticism and thus make them part of science, and fruitfully discuss their further refinements. Another suggestion is not to label them “powerful theories,” “classics,” or anything else before their real scrutiny begins. ¶
That criticism and disagreement are indispensable for science is not a
“Popperian orthodoxy
,” although Popper does champion this idea; it is the pivot of the tradition
(which we owe to the Greeks) which identifies rationalism with criticism
. 4 McLaughlin ostensibly bows to the critical tradition but does not put it to use. Instead of critical evaluation of the theories in question he writes of “compelling case,” “powerful analytic model,” and “useful conceptual tool.” ¶
On the methodological side of the issue, we should inquire into the mode of thinking common
to Fromm and all adherents of confirmation-ism.
The trick consists in mere replacement of familiar words with
new, more peculiar ones
; customary expressions are substituted by “instrumental intimacy,” “collaborative circles,” and
“idealization of a self-object.”
Since the new
, funnier, and pseudo-theoretical tag does the job of naming just as well, it “shows how” things work. The new labels
in the cases criticized here do not add anything to our knowledge; nor do they explain
. We have seen Fromm routinely abuse this technique. The vacuity of Fromm’s explanations by character type was the central point in my analysis of Escape , yet McLaughlin conveniently ignores it and, like Fromm, uses the method of labelling as somehow supporting his cause. ¶
The widely popular practice of mistaking new labels for explanations has been exposed by many methodologists
in the history of philosophy, but probably the most famous example of such critique comes from Molière. In the now often-quoted passage, his character delivers a vacuous explanation of opium’s property to induce sleep by renaming the property with an offhand Latinism, “virtus dormitiva.” The satire acutely points not only at the impostor doctor’s hiding his lack of knowledge behind foreign words, but also at the emptiness of his alleged explanation. (Pseudo-theoretical literature is boring precisely because of its “dormitive virtue,” its shuffling of labels without rewarding inquiring minds.) ¶ Let me review notable criticisms of this approach in the twentieth century by Hempel,
Homans, and Weber leaving aside their forerunners. This problem was discussed in the famous debate between William Dray and Carl Hempel. Dray argues, contra the nomological account of explanation, that historians and social scientists often
try to answer the question,
“What is this phenomenon?” by giving an “explanation-by-concept”
(Dray 1959, p. 403). A series of events may be better understood if we call it “a social revolution”; or the appropriate tag may be found in the expressions “reform,” “collaboration,” “class struggle,”
“progress,” etc.; or, to take Fromm’s suggestions, we may call familiar motives and actions “sadomasochistic,” and any political choice save the Marxist
“escape from freedom.” ¶ Hempel agrees with Dray that such concepts may be explanatory, but they are so only if the chosen labels or classificatory tags refer to some uniformities
, or are based on nomic analogies. In other words, our new label has explanatory force if it
states or implies some established regularity
(Hempel 1970, pp. 453-57).
For example, you travel to a foreign country and, strolling along the street, see a boisterous crowd. Your guide may explain the crowd with one of several terms
: that it is the local soccer team’s fans
celebrating its victory, or
it is a local religious festival, or a teachers’ strike, etc. The labels applied

here—celebration, festival, strike— have explanatory value, because we know that things they refer to usually manifest themselves in noisy
or unruly mass gatherings
.
¶
If, on the
other hand, by way of explaining the boisterous crowd the guide had invoked some hidden
social or
psychological forces, or used expressions such as
embodiment, mode of production, decentring, simulacra, otherness, etc., its causes would remain obscure. If she had referred to psychoanalytic “character types”
(say, Fromm’s authoritarian, anal, or necrophiliac types), the explanation would
not make much sense either.
Nothing prevents us nevertheless from unconditionally attaching all these labels to any event.
The mistake
McLaughlin and confirmationists
persistently make is in thinking that labelling social phenomena alone does theoretical and explanatory work.
5 George Homans observed the prevalence of this trick some decades ago: ¶
Much
modern sociological theory seems to us to possess every virtue except
that of explaining anything.
. . .
The theorist shoves various aspects of behavior into his pigeonholes, cries “Ah-ha!” and leaves it at that. Like magicians
in all times and places, the theorist thinks he controls phenomena if he is able to give them names, particularly names of his own invention
. (1974, pp. 10-11)

Michael
, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of the Pacific, McGeorge
School of Law, “Joints or the Joint: Colorado and Washington Square Off Against the United
States,” http://law.uoregon.edu/org/olr/volumes/91/4/documents/Vitiello.pdf
Several senators
, including Patrick Leahy
, have pushed the administration to take a position to accommodate local marijuana laws
.108 Other members of Congress, including Dana Rohrabacher,
¶
have begun proposing federal legislation to recognize local
¶
options.109 If the Obama administration fails to take the lead on
¶
creating space for state law, Congress may give him cover by
¶
enacting such legislation. The President and the Attorney General
¶
must factor in the probability of Congress taking the lead on the issue
¶
if they fail to do so. And here, they must recognize how dysfunctional
¶
Congress has become.110
¶
A congressional solution may be more desirable from a number of
¶ perspectives
, including greater certainty for those interested in investing in the marijuana trade
in Colorado and Washington.
After all, a policy of forbearance by the executive branch can be overturned by the next administration. Overturning legislation would be more difficult
.111 Either scenario would give Colorado and Washington the opportunity to implement their laws without fear of aggressive federal intrusion. But that begs yet other questions and invites my concluding thoughts on the road to legalization.
(Lindsay, “Does the Court Act as "Political Cover" for the Other Branches?” 11-18 legaldebate.blogspot.com)
While the Supreme Court may have historically been able to act as political cover for the
President and/or Congress, that is not true in a world post-Bush v. Gore. The Court is seen today as a politicized body, and especially now that we are in the era of the Roberts Court, with a Chief
Justice hand picked by the President and approved by the Congress, it is highly unlikely that
Court action will not, at least to some extent, be blamed on and/or credited to the President and
Congress
. The Court can still get away with a lot more than the elected branches since people don't understand the technicalities of legal doctrine like they understand the actions of the elected branches; this is, in part, because the media does such a poor job of covering legal news. Nevertheless, it is preposterous to argue that the Court is entirely insulated from politics, and equally preposterous to argue that Bush and the Congress would not receive at least a large portion of the blame for a Court ruling that, for whatever reason, received the attention of the public.
[Graham, third Way Social Policy & Politics Program visiting senior fellow, 2014
“Marijuana Legalization: Does Congress Need to Act?”, June, http://content.thirdway.org/publications/830/Third_Way_Report_-_Marijuana_Legalization-
_Does_Congress_Need_to_Act.pdf]
Additionally, reinforcing and arguably expanding upon the Memorandum, federal officials have issued guidance that takes an important step toward allowing financial institutions to provide some services to l icensed

marijuana businesses
.22 The issue first arose when Deputy Attorney General Cole testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and faced questions about the potential dangers of forcing marijuana businesses to operate as cash-only enterprises. As several Senators pointed out, federal rules currently prevent marijuana businesses from holding bank accounts, forcing them to keep large amounts of cash on hand, and thereby creating a high risk of robbery and violence. Cole declared that he would take responsibility for clearing away obstacles to marijuana businesses having access to financial services.23 T he Second Cole Memorandum and the engagement in the banking issue suggest a shift in federal policy towards a more nuanced and pragmatic policy stance on stateregulated marijuana. But without Congressional action, it is merely a band-aid solution, since it could be changed at a moment’s notice and gives no guarantee of protection against prosecution, still explicitly stating that banks and marijuana businesses would be contravening federal law even by following the guidance.
The current federal policy is a good first step toward giving state officials room to construct a regulatory system and begin issuing licenses.
But without legislation at the federal level, the participants in these newly-regulated markets will continue to face significant hurdles and uncertaint y, and states will continue to be hampered in their ability to protect the public safety interests of their citizens. The next President or Attorney General could put a quick end to existing marijuana businesses and could even undertake prosecutions for past actions. In short, an exercise of prosecutorial discretion today can become a policy of prosecutorial vigor tomorro w.
The federal government could also decide to change course and sue the legalizing states directly
— a risk that increases each time a state gets more involved in directly regulating certain aspects of the marijuana market
.
This atmosphere of uncertainty and peril dissuades law-abiding businesspeople from becoming operators, discourages transparent business practices, and impedes state lawmakers who wish to crack down on mislabeled marijuana products which could threaten public safety and health
. To solve these problems and create space for the states that have legalized recreational marijuana use to do it right, Congress needs to amend the Controlled Substances Act to establish a policy of federal non-intervention based in state waivers that carry the force of law.*

Wallach 14 [Lori Wallach, Director of Global Citizens’ Trade Watch, “NAFTA at 20: One
Million U.S. Jobs Lost, Higher Income Inequality,” Huffington Post, 01/06/2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lori-wallach/nafta-at-20-one-million-u_b_4550207.html]
Despite the overwhelming evidence of NAFTA's failure, the
Obama
administration has made it a priority
for this year to sign the TPP
, a sweeping pact
with 11 Pacific Rim nations premised on expanding
the
NAFTA
model. Past efforts to expand NAFTA
throughout Latin America via a Free Trade Area of the Americas and to Asia via an Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) Free Trade Agreement failed as the major economies in each region sought to avoid the damage they observed NAFTA
causing within the United States and Mexico.
[Arjun Makhijani, Electrical and nuclear engineer with 37 years experience in energy and nuclear issues. He is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research. IEER has been doing nuclear-related studies for twenty years and is an independent non-profit organization located in Takoma Park, Maryland. Makhijani has a Ph.D.
(Engineering), from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences of the
University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in the application of plasma physics to controlled nuclear fusion, “Counterpoint: Slow or Fast, Nuclear Fission is Not the Answer”, http://e360.yale.edu/counterpoint_say_no_to_fast_breed_nuclear_reactors.msp, September
10, 2012]
Fred Pearce is right about one thing — plutonium is nasty stuff, posing immense security risks when separated. And we have been making it just to boil water, make steam, and turn turbines. Worse, a few countries, notably France and Britain, have been separating it from civilian spent fuel to the point that surplus commercial stocks of separated plutonium exceed global military stocks. Almost half the civilian stock is in Britain. But I part company with Pearce in his suggested nuclear solutions, both for climate and for dealing with surplus plutonium. Let’s take nuclear energy and climate first.
Pearce brushes off supposedly
“threadbare” arguments about the high cost of nuclear power by attributing them to the
“doctrinaire technophobic opposition” of environmental ists. But scornful statements cannot make the reality of the high cost and severe financial risk of nuclear power disappear, nor can they negate the disastrous impact of accidents like Fukushima
. Jeffrey R.
Immelt
, hardly a doctrinaire technophobe (he is
CEO of General Electric), told the Financial Times in 2007 that were he the CEO of a utility he would “never do nuclear” because it was a “bet my company” risk.
He would build wind- or natural gas-fired power plants. He repeated that view in July 2012. Wall Street refuses to finance nuclear power. In 2005,
Congress allocated $18.5 billion in loan guarantees to spur on a “nuclear renaissance.”
The Department of Energy has conditionally guaranteed an $8.3 billion loan for two reactors, though that guarantee has not been finalized. Despite numerous government inducements, there is no nuclear renaissance in the United States
.
Nuclear power is just too costly and risky and the plants take too long to build. They are falling of their own financial bulk
. Only two projects, one in Georgia and one in South Carolina, are proceeding in the United States. In both cases, legislatures are forcing electricity consumers to pay in advance for the reactors through higher bills without any guarantees that the plants will even be built. There would be no refunds if they are

not.
They will get no return on their investment if they are. In that case, the profit, guaranteed by government, will go to utility stockholders who would have taken essentially no risk.
The Japan Center for Economic Research estimates that the cost of cleaning up and decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi reactors will range from $70 billion to $250 billion. This includes decontaminating land up to a 20-kilometer radius, but not beyond — even though contamination in some directions extends considerably farther. The cost estimates do not include indirect economic damage caused by the accident, such as loss of agriculture, fisheries, and industrial production. Nor does it include accident-related health consequences.
Even a partial but significant role for nuclear in addressing climate change will involve the construction of 2,000 reactors (or more) worldwide over 40 years. They would create about 60,000 bomb-equivalents of plutonium each year
. A hundred uranium enrichment plants would be needed to fuel them. One enrichment plant in Iran is giving the world a major security headache. Plutonium separation and breeder reactors would only make this worse.
Just accounting for the nuclear materials to ensure that none were being illegally diverted for nuclear weapons would be technically daunting; the deficiencies could reveal themselves as horrific surprises.
I agree with Pearce and all those who have concluded that the more than 250 metric tons of excess commercial separated plutonium sitting around is undesirable from a security point of view. But his recommendation that sodium cooled-fast neutron reactors be built to denature the plutonium reveals a technological optimism that is disconnected from the facts. Some of them have indeed operated well. But others, including the most recent — Superphénix in France and Monju in Japan — have miserable records. Roughly $100 billion have been spent worldwide to try and commercialize these reactors — to no avail. Liquid sodium has proven to be a problem coolant. Even small leaks of a type that would cause a mere hiccup in a light-water reactor would result in shutdowns for years in sodium-cooled reactors. That is because sodium burns on contact with air and explodes on contact with water.
The PRISM reactor
, which Pearce describes, has a secondary cooling loop in which the fluid on one side is sodium; on the other it is water, which turns to steam to drive a turbine.
Pearce goes from technological optimism to fantasy when he opines that a sodium-cooled reactor would take five years to license and five years to build.
Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, the lead U.S. laboratory for
Generation IV reactors, estimate that testing of a suitable fuel form and matrix for sodiumcooled breeders would take 20 years
.
They should know. The Idaho site has been the principal center for reactor development in the United States.
There are better, simpler, cheaper, and faster ways to put surplus plutonium, which has no economic value (as the Royal Society has noted), into non-weapons usable form.
Britain could use its MOX plant to make non-fuel-grade pellets. Fuel rods containing these pellets could be interspersed with spent fuel from nuclear power reactors and disposed of when there is a geologic repository. That will be a long time, to be sure. But in the meantime, the plutonium would be more secure than it is today. Or plutonium, which in Britain is already in oxide form, could be mixed with high-level waste and vitrified. This would similarly make it more secure. Or the plutonium could be mixed with large amounts of chemical analogs like thorium and made into ceramic pucks for eventual disposal in a deep repository, such as the one in
New Mexico, where many tons of plutonium-containing waste have already been disposed of. Managers of the world’s fourth-largest economy, the Germans, are no technophobes. They have decided that their densely populated country cannot afford an accident like
Chernobyl. More than two decades ago they decided that they would not commission their completed sodium-cooled reactor at
Kalkar, which a Dutch company then bought and turned into an amusement park with six hotels. Germany is an electricity exporter.
The Germans will be the technological leaders of the 21st-century economy while a fanciful nucleophilia detains some. Here is advice from a technophile and electrical engineer: Let’s move on to an efficient, renewable energy system, convert the plutonium into a suitable waste form, and stop making vast quantities of it just to boil water and spin turbines.
5-11-200
; Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform; “Is “Shared Savings” the Way to Reform Payment?” www.chqpr.org/downloads/SharedSavings.pdf
Unfortunately, there are
some fundamental weaknesses in the shared savings approach that make it far less desirable as a payment reform than it might first appear:
1. It’s P4P, Not Fundamental Payment
Reform. Shared savings is just another form of pay-for-performance (P4P
). It doesn’t actually change the current payment system at all – key primary care services
that aren’t paid for today (like nurse care managers for chronic

disease patients, phone and email consultations with physicians, etc.) still wouldn’t be paid for, services where fees are too low
to cover costs would still lose money
, etc. Creating an incentive for providers to control total spending is a good idea, but only if it is coupled with significant changes in the underlying payment system. 2.
It Gives Providers Risk
Without Resources
. At first glance, shared savings looks like the perfect deal for the health- care provider – if the provider is successful in reducing total costs, it gets a bonus; if it’s not successful, it suffers no penalty. The flaw in the logic is assuming that there is no cost to the provider of doing what is needed to achieve success. For exam- ple, although there are programs that have been demonstrated to reduce preventable hospitalizations, most of these pro- grams require an increase in upfront spending by the primary care practice or the health system that implements them, or they take time away from other revenue-generating tasks. The shared savings payment might ultimately cover those costs or it might not, and so the provider has no assurance that its increased costs will be covered. Moreover, when multiple provid- ers are involved, shared savings creates a variant of the
“prisoner’s dilemma” – if one provider makes the investment to im- prove care but others don’t, the total sav- ings may not be sufficiently large to insure the shared portion will cover an individual provider’s costs; conversely, if most pro- viders make the investment, any individ- ual provider can increase their profit by sharing in the savings without making any upfront investment themselves. 3.
It Rewards High Spenders Rather Than High
Performers
. The communi- ties and providers that have the most to gain from shared savings are the ones that are “wasting” the most resources today, through high rates of hospital admissions, use of unnecessary procedures, etc. In con- trast, the communities that are the na- tion’s best performers — those with rela- tively low costs and high quality of care — are already “saving” Medicare and other payers significant amounts of money, but they receive no reward for doing so. The first group can improve relatively easily, since they have so much “low-hanging fruit” to pursue, and therefore would be eligible to get a large reward through a shared savings model. The latter group, even if it can still improve further, may need to invest significantly more resources to do so; this would require it to spend more in the short run, but with a lower probability of achieving enough savings to pay back those costs . In effect, shared savings exacerbates the current inequities in the payment system. The problem is even worse if the payer chooses to take a disproportionate share of the savings first, as Medicare has done in the Physician Group Practice Demonstration. Although this is intended to avoid rewarding providers for reductions in spending simply due to random variation, the practical ef- fect is to increase the amount the provider has to spend or lose before receiving any reward through shared savings. 4. A Smaller Reduction in
Revenue is Still a Reduction. In order for the payer (e.g., Medicare) to have any savings at all, some provider has to get less revenue than it would have otherwise received. If that provider is participating in the ef- fort to reduce spending, giving them back an arbitrary share of the savings reduces the amount they lose, but they may still get less revenue than their actual cost of delivering services, which will discourage them from participating in the effort to create the savings in the first place. Moreover, if only one payer is sharing savings but the provider changes its approach with all of its patients, the shared savings program may offset only a small portion of the provider’s losses. 5.
It’s Not a Sustainable Approach
. What happens after the initial savings have been achieved and shared?
Even if costs remain lower
than would otherwise have been expected, nothing has changed about the underlying payment system
, and it will be hard for payers to continue making special “shared savings” payments indefinitely based on savings achieved in the past, particularly as the providers and their patients change over time.
This will deter providers from making
large invest- ments
in care improvements that would need to be paid off over a multi-year period.
(Dr. Jim, Professor of Economics – New Mexico State University, “Energy Issues of the US-Mexico Border Region,” Border X Roads, October, http://blog.bnsl.org/?p=329)
The international border creates additional complexity for energy issues in the border region
. San Diego and Tijuana (or El Paso and Juárez) are cities in two different nations but anyone living in the border region can explain that they have more in common than geographic proximity. Interactions across the border include workers who commute, trade flows, cross-border investments, families in which some members live on one side of the border while others live in el otro lado. Traffic flows and long lines at border crossings are almost daily reminders of cross-border interaction. Energy is also a transborder phenomenon. City pairs in the interior of a nation such as Dallas-Fort Worth may have daunting energy issues, but they do not have an international border to contend with.
Border region city pairs
(they are not twins as they are sometimes called) are located where two very different national energy systems collide and where trans-border cooperation on energy issues is not exactly easy
.
Energy prices in Mexico and the US are rarely the same
. Total energy consumption per capita in the US is about 4.5 times the comparable figure in Mexico.
Electricity consumption per capita in the US is about 6.5 times as large as in Mexico
–but Mexico’s per capita electricity consumption is growing at a faster rate than in the US. For each $1,000 of GDP, the US uses more energy than Mexico but

the gap is narrowing because US industries have greatly increased their energy efficiency. (The data in this paragraph are from
World Bank, Development Indicators as of 2009, the latest year available http://data.worldbank.org/topic/energy-and-mining).
The US and Mexican national energy systems also differ in terms of market structure
.
US petroleum is produced almost exclusively by private firms while in Mexico the oil industry is dominated by a single state owned firm, PEMEX.
For more than fifty years the US has been a large importer of petroleum and for most of that time Mexico has been a large exporter of petroleum –mainly to the US. In the borderlands, consumers and suppliers face the same petroleum related problems as in the two nations. Prices of petroleum (and natural gas) are mainly determined in national and international markets even though there may be small regional price differentials. Figure 1 displays percent changes in inflation adjusted (real) West Texas Intermediate prices per barrel. The WTI price is a commonly used benchmark price for oil. While many people assume that oil prices (and other energy prices) always increase, what is striking in
Figure 1 is that oil prices are highly volatile. Other energy (natural gas, uranium, coal) prices are also highly volatile and confronting this price volatility is a major energy issue that affects consumers, producers, and the business community in the border region.
In the US, most but not all electricity is produced and distributed by private
(regulated) firms while that is not the case in Mexico
. The Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) is the state owned electric company in Mexico. CFE is responsible for nearly all electricity generation, transmission, and distribution in Mexico including the six border-states. While states and municipalities on both sides of the border face challenges to ensure adequate supplies of electricity and a stable electricity grid for a growing population and expanding commerce and industry, they do so in very different regulatory and investment environments.
Cross-border transmission of electricity
(mainly from Mexico to the US) is already occurring
and this phenomenon will probably increase in the future. Historically, the US first exported electricity to Mexico in
1905. NAFTA expanded the possibility of cross-border electricity sales and regulatory agencies in the US such as the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC) and state agencies responded with appropriate regulatory changes. The potential for cross border trade in electricity generated by renewables is also enhanced by individual state environmental standards, particularly Renewable
Portfolio Standards (RPS). RPS standards are state regulations that require a specified percentage of electricity sales in the state to be generated by renewables. Imports of electricity generated by renewables can generally be counted against RPS standards.
Increasingly, electricity generation projects on the borderlands (both sides) involve solar or wind generation (Photo 1). While cross-border energy projects
can increase efficiency, such projects can also create additional difficulties
.
For example, in the early 2000s various environmental and citizen groups alleged that power plants being built in Mexicali to provide electricity to southern California and
Arizona did not meet US environmental standards
.
The debate over whether or not the plants were being built in Mexico to circumvent US law was bitter and intense
(see, for example the report by the
US Government Accountability Office on the estimated emissions from the two plants: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-823
).
11-23-200
; “Panel Sees No Need for A-Bomb Upgrade”, Lexis
In a new report, a secretive federal panel has concluded that programs to extend the life of the nation's aging nuclear arms are sufficient to guarantee their destructiveness for decades to come, obviating a need for a costly new generation of more reliable warheads. The finding, by the Jason panel, an independent group of scientists that advises the federal government on issues of science and technology, bears on the growing debate over whether the United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or, instead, prepare for the design of new nuclear arms. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and other
Republicans have argued that concerns are growing over the reliability of the United States' aging nuclear stockpile and that the possible need for new designs means that the nation should retain the right to conduct underground tests of new nuclear weapons.
The testing issue is expected to flare in the months ahead when the Obama administration submits the test ban treaty for ratification by the Senate, where it faces a tough fight. The White House is building a case that advanced technologies make any additions to the nuclear arsenal unnecessary and would also allow the United States to verify that other countries are refraining from underground testing. Backers of the test ban hailed the new report as supporting President Obama's position.
''It kills the hysteria
and builds the case for what the president and the Democrats want to do,'' said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, based in Washington. Jeffrey G. Lewis, a nuclear specialist at the New America Foundation, a
Washington research group, said in a blog posting that the report ''should drive a stake through the heart'' of
the
Reliable Replacement Warhead, a Bush administration initiative to build a new generation of nuclear arms
. The
Jason report, mandated by Congress, centers on an Energy Department program that refurbishes the nation's aging nuclear arms.

As central players in the cold war, the warheads were designed for relatively short lifetimes and frequent replacement with better models. But such modernization ended after the United States quit testing nuclear arms in 1992, and all weapons that remain in the arsenal must now undergo the refurbishment process, known as life extension.
The Jason panel said that it had found no evidence that the accumulated changes from aging and refurbishment posed any threat to weapon destructiveness
, and that the ''lifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss of confidence.''

--- CEO of the George Marshall Institute and president of Solutions
Consulting, Inc. (William, “Will GOP control of the Senate affect energy policy?” http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/217479-will-gop-control-of-thesenate-affect-energy-policy, JMP)
A lot of attention is being paid to November's election because control of the Senate could switch from Democratic to Republican. Some races that seemed safe for Republican incumbents, or were leaning Republican, have now become less certain and more competitive, e.g. Kansas and
North Carolina. However, even if Republicans pick up the needed six seats to gain control, does it matter in terms of energy policy? I think that the answer is "not much."
Even though Republicans have been in the minority, they have been able to block most of Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) legislative agenda, whatever it is. As the minority party, the Democrats would be able to use similar tactics to prevent Republicans from passing much of their energy agenda or acting on energy legislation passed by the House.
The major energy issues are Keystone XL, removing the prohibition on crude oil exports, accelerating the construction of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities, accelerating exploration and production on federal lands, subsidies for renewable energy projects, preventing Environmental Protection Agency anti-coal regulations, securing electric power generation, and clean energy and climate change.
President Obama has delayed action on the Keystone pipeline for political reasons, since the case for approving it on both energy and environmental grounds is overwhelming. The most likely reason for slow-walking approval is that he does not want to offend environmental voters.
He needs them and other liberal Democrats to turn out in large numbers to help save the most vulnerable Democratic senators. After the election and before the presidential campaigning really gets underway, he could well give his approval. If he didn't, a Republican Senate could be challenged to pass legislation that would not encounter a filibuster or face a presidential veto.
And there is no way that the Senate could muster enough votes for an override.
The same is probably true for legislation on LNG exports, removing the constraints on crude oil imports and expanding exploration on federal lands. Any Republican energy legislation that the
White House or Senate Democrats opposed would face the same tactics from Democrats as used by Republicans.
Sixty votes are the key and it is hard to foresee a situation where the Senate announces
"Kumbaya," locks arms and finally starts doing the public's business. The dysfunction caused by extreme polarization is not likely to change any time soon. Members of both the House and
Senate have long forgotten the wise counsel of Henry Clay: "Politics is not about ideology or political purity. It is about governing. If you can't compromise, you can't govern."
The word "compromise" in Congress has become an epithet, when it should mean finding common ground without abandoning principle. The enmity between Reid and Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has become so strong that they seem unable to reach out to each other for the country's good. A few months ago, The Washington Post wrote about the
Senate's dysfunction. According to Paul Kane, "The Senate went three months this spring without voting on a single legislative amendment, the nitty-gritty kind of work usually at the heart of congressional lawmaking. ... The big issues have been sidelined by political and

procedural battles and an intensely personal war between the leadership offices." The article quoted several senators who essentially said that there is no way to fix the problem between two men whose mutual distrust is so intense.
It would be easy to conclude that the current situation is simply election-year politics with each party trying to bolster its election prospects while damaging those of the opposition. However, that is not the case. The Bipartisan Policy Center issued a report this summer, Governing in a
Polarized America, by a committee that included former senators. It documented the seriousness of the situation in the Senate and the reasons why it is unlikely to change anytime soon.
The best hope for change would come from both Reid and McConnell stepping down from their leadership positions.
That may seem radical, but when a company's leadership performs so poorly, its board — 98 senators in this case — brings in new leadership. That is what is required to advance the process of finding common ground.
With new leadership, the Senate and House should be able to reach out to the president with a bipartisan agenda that goes beyond energy to include budget, tax, immigration reform and an energy agenda that builds on the success of the recent energy renaissance.
If Sens. Reid and McConnell simply switch positions, gridlock will just be another color.
(Mark, “Researchers: U.S. LNG exports won’t solve 'Russia problem'” http://www.wyomingbusinessreport.com/article/20140929/NEWS/140929964, JMP)
Natural gas producers are encouraging liquid natural gas, or LNG exports, partially under the auspices of harming the natural-gas rich Russian government in the throes of political unrest and armed conflict. However, a new study said exporting U.S. liquid natural gas would do little to divert Russia from its course of using its natural resources as a power
grab in Europe.
Researchers from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy concluded in a 60-page report released last week that while LNG exports could cause pain in Russia, the people feeling the pain might not be the intended targets.
“By forcing state-run Gazprom to reduce prices to remain competitive in the European market,
U.S. LNG exports could have a meaningful impact on total Russian gas export revenue,” said researchers Jason Bordoff and Trevor Houser. “While painful for Russian gas companies, the total economic impact on state coffers is unlikely to be significant enough to
prompt a change in Moscow’s foreign policy, particularly in the next few years.”
They concluded, moreover, that U.S. LNG exports would give European nations some bargaining power with Russia, they wouldn’t “free Europe from Russian gas.”
“Russia will remain Europe’s dominant gas supplier for the foreseeable future, due both to its ability to remain cost-competitive in the region and the fact that U.S. LNG will displace other high-cost sources of natural gas supply,” they said.
But some producers are saying whatever impact could be made should be made.
“Unpredictable suppliers create unpredictable markets,” said John Harpole, the president and founder of Mercator Energy in a recent article he wrote for a trade magazine. Harpole said exporting U.S.LNG could keep some families from freezing through the Ukrainian winter as
Russia cuts gas supplies, and that it could also make friends in the process.

“What value is there in being an energy superpower unless that power is projected outward and delivered to energy-starved allies and potential allies?” Harpole wrote.
But Harpole admits there would be shortfalls to the strategy.
“U.S. shale gas won’t resolve Europe’s energy issues overnight, but additional U.S. regulations and delays will dash any hope for near-term energy competition,” Harpole said. “The DOE has granted LNG exports at a glacial pace.”
He said at a recent event that the issue is as important as the Keystone XL Pipeline to the U.S energy industry.
Researchers did agree to some extent with the energy industry’s side of the story.
“Over time, however, U.S. LNG can help Europe minimize the amount of leverage Russia gains from selling gas to Europe, as part of a broader European energy security policy agenda,” they said. And a richer environment of energy choice for European consumers will give Europe larger bargaining chips to work with as they shape future negotiations with Russia and other producers.
“Maximizing the benefits of this opportunity, however, requires changes in European
policy and infrastructure that focus on reducing vulnerability to Russian supply disruption, not only dependence on Russian gas overall,” the researchers stated.
Keith B.
, author and international correspondant of the Washington Post in
Asia, MA in International Relations from the London School of Economics, 8/15/14, Electile
Dysfunction and Asia, http://www.keithrichburg.com/blogs/keith-b-richburg/electiledysfunction-and-asia
Once admired as a global model for its democratic values and practices, the U.S. today seems like the world’s poster child for political dysfunction, and an abject lesson in how not to run a modern, advanced country.
¶ ¶
America’s allure as a model was fading
before, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis that exposed deep flaws in the financial system
and called into question the ability of the U.S. to manage the global economy.
Then came the self-inflicted wounds — the showdown over the debt ceiling and the Tea
Party-engineered 16-day government shutdown
of 2013.
¶ ¶
No wonder President Barack Obama expressed such exasperation in his revealing August 8 interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions,” Obama said.
¶ ¶
Now here’s the really depressing news – it’s only likely to get worse
.
¶ ¶
When Obama travels to Asia in November for talks
that will include the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) meeting in Beijing and the East Asia Summit in Myanmar
, it will be just one week after American midterm elections that are widely expected to hand Obama’s Democratic Party a brutal drubbing at the polls, and could
, if the current prognoses hold, deliver the Senate to his Republican opponents
.
¶ ¶
So
Obama will
likely arrive in Asia a severely weakened leader, a veritable lame duck with no
chance of enacting anything meaningful for the remaining two years and two months of his term
. And his Republican critics will feel emboldened enough to launch endless corruption investigations, stymie any new presidential initiatives and appointments, and perhaps even turn the impeachment fantasy of the rightwing base into reality.
¶ ¶
This was much the same situation
former President Bill
Clinton found himself in when he traveled to Asia in November 1994, after Democrats suffered a similar midterm election
shellacking that left Republicans in charge of Congress.
And the same was true for former President George W. Bush, who had to make the sojourn to the APEC summit in
Vietnam after his party suffered bruising losses in the 2006 midterms
and who saw his presidency ever-

after diminished. Clinton had time to recover - but still became embroiled in a bitter impeachment fight. Obama, like Bush, will be in the twilight of his tenure.
¶ ¶
This is all bad news for America’s partners in Asia.
¶ ¶
S outheast Asia in general prefers a strong American leader who can make decisions and push through his commitments. A weakened Obama will be unlikely to deliver much of anything — so forget about the
Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP
), the free trade agreement that was supposed to be the cornerstone of the administration’s new Asia-focused policy. Obama said he hoped to have a TPP framework agreement in place by the time of his
November summit. But the likelihood of Congress passing anything after this year is between zero and zilch.
¶ ¶
On foreign policy, it matters. The Southeast Asian
countries facing off against China over the disputed South China Sea islands would like to see a strong America act as a counterweight to Beijing’s rising power and ambition. But because of its political paralysis, Washington has become the butt of Chinese humour
— as when Maj. Gen. Zhu
Chenghu of China’s National Defense University joked at a conference in June that the U.S. was suffering from “erectile dysfunction.”
¶ ¶
America’s current paralyzed political system couldn’t manage to pass an infrastructure bill to start repairing the nation’s outdated and crumbling highways, bridges and rail lines. China, meanwhile, is forging ahead with plans for a high-speed rail line that will eventually link Bangkok to Kunming, reshaping Southeast Asia to Beijing’s liking.
¶ ¶
A dysfunctional America is also not in a very strong position to lecture others on the virtues of democracy and the necessity for political enemies to find common ground. How can the U.S. engage Thailand’s ruling generals
on the need to speed up the transition to democracy when the compelling counterargument is that an excess of party politics brought only chaos
? Can the U.S. really still preach to the Vietnamese or Laotian
Communists about the virtues of multiparty democracy?
¶ ¶
Is there any good news here? Only that there’s another U.S. presidential
election coming in November 2016, with a new president set to take office in
January 2017. She, or he, should have a brief honeymoon period of a few months to get something done.
Michael
, AEI's director of Japan Studies, former associate professor of history and senior research fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
University, "America doesn't need a pivot to Asia," August 27, American Enterprise Institute, www.aei.org/article/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/asia/america-doesnt-need-a-pivot-toasia/
It is time to bury the
Obama administration's pivot to Asia
. This reallocation of military and diplomatic resources was supposed to guarantee stability in a region seeking to balance China's rise. In reality, this strategic shift is less than it appears. It won't solve Asia's problems and may even add to the region's uncertainty by over-promising and under-delivering
.
¶
Everything wrong with the pivot
can be summed up by Four R's: rhetoric; reality; resourcing; and raising expectations and then doubts
. So far, the first and perhaps biggest problem with the idea of the pivot
—or, as the Defense Department calls it, the rebalancing— is that it remains largely
rhetorical, vague and aspirational
.
¶ True, there are some laudable moves, such as basing U.S. Marines in northern Australia and agreeing to port new U.S. warships in Singapore. These, however, hardly add up to a breakthrough. The world still wonders what the purpose is: to contain China, to promote democracy, to make the United States the de facto hegemon of Asia, or simply to reassure nervous nations about China's rise?
¶
The reality is that not much will change in America's actions. The pivot says nothing about taking on new commitments
, for example toward the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or to countries with whom
America does not currently have formal alliances. Just as importantly,
Washington has made clear in recent months that it will not take sides in the territorial disputes
that have roiled the East and South China Seas, even when allies like Tokyo and
Manila are involved.
¶
Further evidence for this reality comes from the resource constraints imposed on this grand project
. The
Obama
administration is trying to do it on the cheap
. Pivot funding is in danger from sequestration—forced budget cuts resulting from larger budget politicking in Washington—that, if allowed to proceed, will cut another $500 billion from a defense budget already reduced by $900 billion since 2009.
¶ The administration claims that America's military presence in Asia will not be affected by these budget cuts. If that is so, then U.S. military posture in the rest of the world will be cut back. More likely, any buildup will be difficult to sustain. The shifting of more planes and ships to the Pacific will soon slow down, as the size of the Air Force and Navy shrink, and as other world problems such as Iran and Syria continue to dominate the attention of American policy makers.
¶ This, in turn, is raising doubts about the pivot in Asia, so soon after the rhetoric from Washington had raised expectations. Countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines led themselves to believe that the pivot would have concrete results, such as quickly increasing American presence in the region and perhaps even American support in their maritime territorial disputes with China. Both accordingly reached out to Washington, holding new military exercises or discussing greater security cooperation.
¶
Yet this enthusiasm makes it all the worse when those hopes turn out to be dashed by Washington's failure to act. As one Philippines senator asked

during his country's standoff this spring with China over the Scarborough Shoal, what good is the alliance with the U.S. if America refuses to back up its partners in times of need? By appearing to make unrealistic promises, the Obama administration has created new diplomatic headaches for itself in managing the fall-out from its failure to deliver.
¶ What then is the point of the pivot? By not getting involved in maritime disputes, other than rhetorically, Washington is actually taking the most realistic approach possible.
No administration, Republican or
Democratic, is going to risk a crisis with China
short of any overt attempt by Beijing to take over territory clearly controlled by other nations.
Building up U.S. forces in Asia, were it even possible, would not change that political calculation
.
¶ The current American military posture can be diversified to a few more countries, but essentially, Washington has had the right balance for the past several decades.
While it would be a mistake to shrink the U.S. air and naval presence in Asia, all Washington could do is slightly increase it, and that will change nothing in the region
. Moreover, there are few realistic options for new partners in Asia, especially ones such as Japan and Australia that can provide some level of regional security cooperation. That means America's current grouping of allies and partners is right-sized for the political and security realities of the Asia-Pacific for the foreseeable future
.
--- J.D. from George Mason University School of Law (Doug, “Should the next attorney general be confirmed in a lame-duck session?” http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Voices/2014/0927/Should-the-nextattorney-general-be-confirmed-in-a-lame-duck-session, JMP)
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the arguments that Republicans are making here. Traditionally, at least, lame-duck sessions are intended for Congress to finish up business that could not get done prior to the election. Typically this involves budget matters, and that will be one of the matters that Congress will need to take up when it returns. The idea of members of the Senate who are leaving office, or who have just been voted out of office, voting on consequential matters like the confirmation of presidential appointees or a vote to authorize future military action against the Islamic State, on the other hand, raises serious issues that shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. Just a week before Congress returns, after all, the people will have spoken and that will likely include voting out of office several incumbents in both the House and the Senate; the idea that these legislators would then have a vote on controversial and important issues is somewhat discomforting. Yes, it’s their job, but they will have just been effectively fired from their job by the voters, and it seems somewhat wrong for them to be voting as is nothing has happened, especially when the election has resulted in the party switch for their seat. The argument is the same for legislators who have announced that they are retiring when the current session of Congress ends.
For better or worse
, though, it’s become common practice for both parties to use these lame-duck sessions to push through
things that couldn’t get passed prior to an election. During
President
Obama’s tenure, for example, we have seen budget agreements, extensions of the Bush Tax cuts, and the repeal of Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell all passed by a lame-duck Congress.
This issue has come up before, and there was even a West Wing episode about it that focused on a defeated senator who decided he could not in good conscience go against the will of the voters that had just elected his opponent, despite the fact that it would hurt the administration and his party. Four years ago, several Republican senators implored Harry Reid to delay consideration of the new START Treaty until the new Congress convened in January 2011. Democrats would still control the Senate at that time, but their majority would be a lot slimmer and Republicans would likely have had a better opportunity to influence the debate. Ultimately, Reid went forward with the vote and the treaty was ratified by a comfortable margin. At the time, though, the issue raised some serious concerns about the role of lame-duck congressional sessions, and not just from people on the right. Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman noted that there were some serious constitutional issues raised when lame-duck sessions include the consideration of controversial legislation, especially if that legislation was part of the election. At the time, I noted that the entire process seemed anti-democratic and rife with possibilities for abuse. These concerns are all well founded, but given the fact that
Congress has gotten into the habit of delaying the work it needs to get done until after
elections to the point where it is starting to become tradition, it’s unlikely that we’re going to see an end to these kinds of tactics in the near future.
(EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, “President Obama refocuses on economic themes,” http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/barack-obama-economy-111542.html?hp=l9,
JMP)

CHICAGO — After two months consumed by foreign turmoil, President Barack Obama will kick off a final month of midterm campaigning by trying to refocus the country on the
economy.
Obama will start Thursday with a campaign event here for Gov. Pat Quinn, who’s battling for reelection, and then travel with the governor a few miles north to Evanston, where he’ll speak to business students at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the speech will be a bookend to Obama’s United
Nations speech last week, calling the economy speech “a similarly forceful case for American strength and leadership at home.”
Obama had intended to make economic populism a major theme of his 2014, attempting to put issues like equal pay and raising the minimum wage at the center of Democrats’ midterm efforts. But that’s been derailed, repeatedly, including since late July, when Obama returned to his 2012 theme of “economic patriotism.”
Obama and the first lady are expected to step up their campaign schedules over the next few weeks, while staying focused in Democratic territory like Illinois. He’ll speak Thursday about raising wages, creating jobs and economic growth, Earnest said.
--- author and political analyst for Fox News Channel (Juan, “Juan Williams:
Economy could tip election to
Dem s,” http://thehill.com/opinion/juan-williams/219140-juan-williams-economy-could-tip-election-to-dems, JMP)
One of the biggest surprises on the midterm campaign trail is hearing
President
Obama echo
President
Reagan’s famous question by asking voters whether “you are better off than you were four years ago.” The question is the hammer in Obama’s toolbox for nailing down his Democratic majority in the Senate
in this year’s midterm election.
“By almost every economic measure, we are better off today than we were when I took office,” the president said
in a Sept. 19 speech to the Women’s Leadership Forum, sponsored by the Democratic National Committee. Speaking to a Labor Day rally of union workers in Milwaukee, he also pointed to America’s improved economic performance over the last five years. “You wouldn’t know it from watching the news,” he lamented. In fact,
Reuters recently confirmed the president’s upbeat claims
. The news agency reported that, however slow, the economic recovery has lasted longer than average
. The report adds, “There seems to be more gas in the tank. The International Monetary Fund expects the U.S. economy to grow 3 percent next year and in 2016. On
Obama’s watch, 5.1 million jobs have also been added to payrolls, the S&P/Case-Shiller national home price index is up about 17 percent and the S&P 500 stock index has more than doubled while hitting all-time records.”
There are more hard facts to bolster the president’s economic case. A Kiplinger’s economic outlook from this month is full of good news. The economy “looks better than was previously thought,”
Kiplinger reports,
“setting the stage for more sustained growth in coming months.”
The unemployment rate has been lower over the last five months than at any point in the last five years, dropping to 6.1 percent in August. The Dow Jones industrial average is hovering around its all-time high, now regularly closing at over
17,000 points. Consumer confidence in August also rose to its highest point in almost seven years. This, in turn, is key to consumer spending, which is the biggest part of the economy. Is all the good economic news helping Democrats with the voters? Not really – or, at least, not yet. RealClearPolitics has 55 percent of Americans disapproving of the president’s handling of the economy, to only 40 percent approving.
Democrats must get voters to turn that negative economic view around.
This month, a CBS/New York Times poll indicated that the economy is the No. 1 issue to voters. A September Gallup poll similarly found that, other than “dissatisfaction with government,” the top concern is “the economy in general.” With all the good statistics, why does America’s kitchen-table assessment of the economy remain glum? Perhaps because median household incomes fell by more than $2,100 in Obama’s first term, according to the Census Bureau. Sagging wages have created lingering discomfort and anxiety.
Democrats running for Congress are reminding voters of the GOP’s lack of interest in boosting wages for working people. The GOP has turned back efforts to raise the minimum wage and to invest in infrastructure. Democrats also point to the House GOP’s denial of extended unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless.
Republicans, meanwhile, are promising that, if they take total control of
Congress, they will boost the economy by cutting Wall Street regulation. They also plan to fight new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency and support oil and gas exploration. Speaker John Boehner (R-
Ohio) handed ammunition to the Democrats this month when he said some Americans have “this idea” that, instead of finding a job, “I think I’d rather just sit around.” Before Congress left for the campaign trail, the party race to win voters, stressed out over low pay, turned into an unusual fight over the Export-Import Bank. The bank was reauthorized for only nine months. But first, small-government Republicans — with the Club for Growth and Heritage Action support — pushed to kill the bank, blasting it as an example of “crony capitalism” and the big government “picking winners and losers.” That divided the GOP because the
GOP-leaning Chamber of Commerce is supporting the bank. It points to “thousands of businesses” that risk failure without the bank. The New York Times reports that the bank is a key issue, a “wild card” in North
Carolina, Iowa and Louisiana Senate races. “Our candidates have been leaning heavily into this and this really goes to the heart of making the economy work,” a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman told the Times. President
Obama is on to something. If the midterms turn into a referendum on which party to trust to boost middle-class wages, look for Democrats to hold the Senate.

--- Editor in Chief at The Stanford Progressive (May 2009, Ross, “Legalizing
Marijuana the Federalist Way,” http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgibin/article.php?article_id=339)
Many advocates of legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana feel Obama has abandoned them.
White
House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a consistent warrior against decriminalization. Attorney General Eric Holder has a history of opposing drug policy reforms and considers the adult use of marijuana equivalent to public nuisance. Even Joe Biden, when asked about pain management and medical cannabis, responded that “there's got to be a better answer than marijuana.” But the reality is that the Obama administration has turned the tides in favor of legalization and decriminalization in a much stronger and subtler way than open rhetorical endorsements.
Optimism for drug reform began when Obama ended federal raids on cannabis dispensaries in states which allow medical marijuana.
What marijuana advocates fail to realize is that with this t he Obama administration initiated a small but extremely important step towards legalization
. More importantly, it has done so in a way to insulate itself from Republican attacks and attempts to distract the public.
At the heart of the marijuana debate is federalism, the separation of state and national governmental power. For most of America's history, marijuana was treated as a crop subject to state regulation. However, the national government justified regulating marijuana through a variety of means, mainly the Commerce Clause of the Constitution which gives Congress power to regulate inter-state trade. This line of reasoning was forcefully used by the John Ashcroft in 2001 to enforce federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. When a state legalizes marijuana, medical or otherwise, state law is in contradiction with federal law. This grey area leads to very confusing legal proceedings. For instance, if a state patrolman finds a medical marijuana patient in possession of marijuana, nothing happens. However, if a federal officer found a medical marijuana patient in possession of the same amount of marijuana, the federal officer can and usually will arrest the patient and prosecute under federal law. This hypocrisy is at the base of the current trials going on against elderly medical marijuana patients. The Obama administration drastically changed this dynamic with just a slight alteration of criteria for federal intervention with marijuana dispensaries. Eric Holder announced that the federal government will no longer pursue medical marijuana dispensaries or patients unless they violate both federal and state laws. In the case of California, because medical marijuana is legal, federal intervention is no longer allowed in cases where California's medical marijuana laws are not broken. Thus, if California were to fully legalize marijuana, under current policy the federal government would not intervene. This leaves Republicans in a very tough spot. Small government is the bedrock foundation of the party. However, if a
“liberal” state legalizes marijuana, the only tool left to combat the legalization of marijuana is for the federal government to extend power over state government.
Obama's actions cannot be criticized as an attempt to “deregulate” marijuana. Instead, it is a triumph of state rights over federal intervention.
More importantly, any attempt to fight state legalization of marijuana through suit automatically goes to the Supreme Court. This creates an opportunity to strike down previous legislation criminalizing marijuana as opposed to having the Democrats introduce a bill on the Senate floor to legalize pot
Consider the
alternative strategy of legalizing marijuana on a national level first through Obama
. In the current political environment, the leading accusations against the president range from terrorist to Marxist to illegal alien.
Imagine the campaigns that could be waged if Obama so much as hinted that he wants to legalize
marijuana. Not only would there be insinuations that Obama wants drugs for personal use, but inevitably racial dynamics and stereotypes would enter discourse. It would be the ultimate redirect from the economy.
Instead of focusing on regulations and expenditures, emphasis would be on the president who is destroying traditional American values with reefer.
If
Obama or the Democrats proposed legalization, all the Republicans have to do is have several governors or senators who refuse to implement the federal law. This would frame the argument as Obama trying to extend the government's power to regulate what some consider the moral fabric of society. With just a few rhetorical shuffles, Obama's proposal could be linked to general monetary and budget extensions of power. This would be like the Republican's in the 30s arguing against the New Deal as a whole by linking it with a government proposal to force states to legalize prostitution. The
Obama
administration's public hesitation towards marijuana legalization is not only understandable but, considering the impact of the current economic legislation and programs the administration is endorsing, the most pragmatic and efficient route for the moment.
Legalization and decriminalization advocates should focus efforts on state-wide legalization, not nation-wide. If states are challenged in lawsuits, than the Supreme Court will be forced to rule on whether legislation criminalizing marijuana should be struck down. This is preferable to the executive putting forward a proposal to legalize marijuana from the top down. When Obama tells the country that marijuana legalization is not the path he chooses for America, he means to say that the path must first be drawn by us.
(4/10/2014, “Tea Party’s reefer hypocrisy: Why “states’ rights” is a situational sham; Turns out the states are only sovereign when they're denying equal rights to their citizens
-- not for pain relief,” http://www.salon.com/2014/04/10/tea_partys_reefer_hypocrisy_why_states_rights_is_a_sit uational_sham/)
So why is the Democratic administration that came so far on gay marriage in such a short time still balking on using its power to go with the times on marijuana? It’s simple, really. They are afraid of being perceived as “soft on crime,” the stalest trope of the modern era. It’s so pervasive that according to this New York Times article even Democratic governors in blue states like
California and Connecticut (with majority support among the citizens) refuse to consider
endorsing legalization.
This fear goes deep

into the collective American political psyche and usually relates to race and left-wing politics, both of which have close associations with marijuana. As Rick Perlstein illustrated in
“Nixonland,” his epic history of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Republican code words for racial issues and broader cultural unrest was ”States’ Rights” in the South and “Law and Order” in the
North. And ever since then, Democratic politicians have been living in fear of becoming tarred with the unruly hippies and “urban” unrest (if you know what I mean). Not that the current discussion has anything to do with that, or that a politician will be hurt by taking this popular stand:
There is little evidence in most states that a politician would pay a price for supporting legalization, said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. “We’ve moved into a frame that’s not ideological, “ she said. “It’s about a system being broken, not working, and that legalization involves strict regulation that would allow the state to collect revenues. That makes a lot of sense to the kind of voters that electeds are most concerned about. If that’s the way it’s being discussed, it isn’t a liability for a politician.”
Some, like California’s Jerry Brown, probably are scarred by their (relatively) youthful encounters with rabid conservatives, thinking it will reignite the old “Governor Moonbeam” stereotype. But it’s clear that most of them are just following their finely honed instinct for avoiding taking a leadership position on anything. (That won’t stop them from basking in the popularity of the policy if the people and the courts manage to make it happen, so they have that to look forward to.)
All of which is to say that Democratic congressmen like Steve Cohen (from that bastion of liberalism Tennessee) really do deserve some accolades from progressive Democrats. He took a rational, sane, decent public position on a hot issue — a position that happens to be shared by the vast majority of the people in his party and a majority of people in the country. That practically makes him a unicorn in Democratic Party politics.
--- senior political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight (5/1/2014, Harry, “Sorry
Democrats, Marijuana Doesn’t Bring Young Voters to the Polls,” http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sorry-democrats-marijuana-doesnt-bring-young-voters-tothe-polls/, JMP)
Some Democrats think they’ve found a great smoky hope in state ballot measures seeking to legalize marijuana. Come November, Alaska will vote on whether to make recreational marijuana legal, and several other states are thinking about doing to the same. In Alaska, the referendum will appear on the ballot alongside a competitive U.S. Senate race between
Democrat Mark Begich and an as yet undecided Republican. The Begich campaign declined to comment on whether it expected pot to help its chances,1 yet the idea that pro-marijuana ballot measures can help Democrats makes sense. Young voters, who are very much in favor of marijuana legalization and who tend to lean Democratic, haven’t made up as high a percentage of voters in midterm elections as they do in general elections; if they come out to vote on pot, maybe Alaska Democrats can get their candidate into office.
But a closer look at the evidence suggests Begich might not stand to benefit. Overall, past marijuana ballot measures haven’t meant that more young people come out to vote. This year’s senate race in Alaska would likely have to be very close for the marijuana ballot measure to make a difference.

The conventional wisdom that marijuana ballot measures help Democrats goes back to the 2012 exit polls conducted in Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Those surveys showed that young people were a larger percentage of the electorate in 2012 than in 2008. In Colorado, 18- to 29year-olds made up 6 points more of the electorate (from 14 percent to 20 percent), 12 points more in Washington (10 percent to 22 percent), and 5 points more in Oregon (12 percent to 17 percent), where the ballot measure failed.2
But there’s some contradictory evidence from another source: The government’s Current
Population Survey (CPS) didn’t show anywhere near the increase in young voters that exit polls did. The Census Bureau found youth turnout rose by 0.2 points in Colorado, dropped by 0.9 points in Oregon, and dropped by 2.7 points in Washington from 2008 to 2012, an average 1.2point drop across all three states. This drop is pretty much the same as the 1.5-point drop in young voters nationally, as measured by the CPS.
There’s reason to think we should trust the CPS more than the exit polls. The latter aren’t designed to estimate the ages of voters, as the Center for Information and Research on Civic
Learning and Engagement has pointed out. That’s not to say CPS estimates are immune to margin of error. But a third source of evidence backs up the CPS: pre-election polls. In
Colorado,3 Oregon4 and Washington5 a variety of pollsters had numbers more in line with the
CPS than the exit polls.
We can also look at prior years’ recreational marijuana ballot measures, including those that sought to legalize, decriminalize or lessen the penalty for recreational marijuana. For the 14 such ballot measures since 1998, the voting pool was made up of 0.2 percentage points fewer 18- to
29-year-olds, according to the CPS, compared to the prior similar election (i.e. the prior midterm for midterm years and the prior presidential election for presidential election years).
Looking only at the midterms, the 18-to-29 demographic rose 0.1 percentage points on average.
Once again, marijuana on the ballot doesn’t appear to have made a difference in whether young people voted.
Past research by political science professors Caroline Tolbert and John Grummel of Kent State
University and Daniel Smith of the University of Denver showed that ballot measures drive up voter turnout overall. And in 2012, when pot was on the ballot, significantly more voters turned out in both Colorado and Washington, though not in Oregon, where the referendum didn’t pass.
But those voters didn’t help Democrats. There was no relationship between a change in turnout in these three states and how well President Barack Obama, or marijuana, did in individual counties. On average, Obama lost the same amount of support in these states — 3.4 points from
2008 — as he did nationally. None of this proves that marijuana wasn’t helpful for Democrats among a subset of voters, but it suggests that the overall effect was small and fairly neutral.

1ar

[Brochstein, Part 2: New Cannabis Industry Is A 'Once In A Generation'
Opportunity
Bruce Kennedy, Benzinga Staff Writer Read more: http://www.benzinga.com/analystratings/analyst-color/14/06/4660940/brochstein-part-2-new-cannabis-industry-is-a-once-ina-g#ixzz3EjOA0sTQ]
During the Gold Rush, the people who made the money then were the people who sold the picks and shovels to the miners.
Are we at the end of that first Gold Rush
“bubble” for the cannabis industry?
The bubble was just an investment bubble, it wasn't like a business bubble. There weren't funds that were flowing into parts of the business. People like to say that those who supply the picks and shovels, will be the winners. It's not true. That is a good play, but it's not like either/or.
Unlike energy exploration or mining, growing cannabis is not a hit-or-miss thing.
Yes, there can be losers
at it, but there's a lot of knowledge out there. So you're not taking a big risk
. If you can get one of these highly-regulated licenses, a medical license, for instance, it's just a license to print money. You'll make a ton of money investing in that operation at the right price. But there are a lot of opportunities, and right now the public markets are restricted to those, quite frankly. This is a grey area. It's not like the SEC says, thou shall not touch cannabis or thou shall not get anywhere near cannabis. There's been no official proclamation. It's more a process; somebody has to be first. The first one to do it is going to be taking a big risk, because if it gets shot down the shareholders are going to be very upset. Do you think that five years from now the
Feds are just going to wave the white flag and say, okay, let it roll? My official view has been 2020, which is about five years. It will be the end of the first term of the next president. So it can become a second term issue. Hopefully, we'll have 15, 20 states (with completely legalized cannabis) by then. What ends up happening is the federal government, like (during) the Vietnam War, has to figure out how to get out and save face. You don't want to just keep imprisoning people and wasting resources. So would you describe yourself as optimistic about this sector?
I'm really optimistic that we're going to have more
second-wave companies.
The first-wave companies have had their chance to shine and they just haven't done so, for whatever reason.
[MICHAEL VITIELLO* Joints or the Joint: Colorado and Washington Square
Off Against the United States,Distinguished Professor of Law, University of the Pacific,
McGeorge School of Law; University of Pennsylvania, J.D., 1974; Swarthmore College, B.A.,
1969, ]
The first
brief moment when the federal government seemed ready to reevaluate its position on marijuana occurred during
Jimmy
Carter’s presidency
. President Carter called for its decriminalization. Also during the
Carter presidency, the government implemented a compassionate use program, allowing some seriously ill patients access to marijuana through a carefully controlled federal program.57 Begun during
Richard
Nixon’s presidency
,58 the War on Drugs proliferated during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.59 Penalties were increased, often with mandatory minimum sentences.60 And those laws were enforced, often vigorously.61 Under federal drug laws, marijuana is categorized as a Schedule I drug, one for which there is no recognized medical benefit.62
The government has fought all efforts to reschedule marijuana.
It fought early efforts of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) to do so. As I summarized elsewhere, Litigation dragged on between 1972 and 1992, with drug enforcement agencies using various procedural maneuvers to prevent a hearing on the issue. Despite an administrative law judge’s recommendation, the DEA administrator ruled against
More recent efforts to reschedule marijuana have been
met with similar resistance by the federal government. Protracted litigation has ended recently with a federal court of appeals again upholding the Drug Enforcement Agency’ s (
DEA
) refusal to reschedule marijuana
.64 During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Obama gave supporters of legalization of marijuana hope when he stated that he would stop raids on “legitimate” medical marijuana dispensaries.65 Shortly after the election, the Attorney General’s office issued a memo randum seemingly implementing that promise.66 Almost certainly, the government’s “softer” approach led to
rapid expansion of dispensaries in states with existing medical marijuana laws67 and to

passage of medical marijuana statutes elsewhere.68 That was then. But what followed seems like a U-turn in administration policy.
Notably, in California, marijuana providers opened hundreds of dispensaries, often in central business locations.69 The
Obama administration reacted forcefully
.
Under his administration, there have been more raids on marijuana dispensaries in California than there were under
the
Bush
administration.70 Federal government agents have threatened landlords with forfeiture of their drug laws that heighten penalties when drug dealers sell drugs within proximity to schools.72
Finally, the
Internal Revenue Service has pursued “legitimate” dispensaries.
The IRS’s position is especially threatening to states’ hopes of raising tax revenues. Reagan-era legislation makes it unlawful for drug dealers to deduct ordinary business expenses, including salaries paid to staff.73 At least according to news reports, the IRS has targeted some of the most law-abiding dispensaries in California.74
That stance, if upheld by the courts,75 has a potentially perverse effect: dispensary owners most interested in complying with the law would be forced out of business, while those who are interested in using medical marijuana laws as a cover for drug trafficking may be able to remain in business. Some observers express little surprise in the Obama administration’s shift in its position.76 An outsider might conclude that the
Obama
administration discovered a reality of modern government: change is hard because of inertia resulting from entrenched vested interests of governmental agencies
.
Thus, the administration’s policy shift may have resulted from a conflict between Obama’s more tolerant position towards marijuana and officials in the Office of National Drug Policy, the DEA, and other law enforcement agencies
.77
Unwilling to take on entrenched bureaucrats, especially after the 2010 election debacle, the administration simply folded.
If that narrative is accurate, then at least for the next several years, talk of legalization of marijuana is wishful thinking
. Using its full arsenal, the federal government can prevent Colorado and Washington from implementing their laws. At least as drug laws are written, state officials who participate in the state-authorized drug trade—for example, as employees providing marijuana—would be violating federal law. As the federal government has done in California, it can invoke various laws, including forfeiture laws and tax laws, to drive state-authorized drug sellers out of business. Again, continuing the same narrative, efforts to legalize marijuana create an existential crisis for agencies like the DEA: officials in those agencies will not go away without a fight. Viewed from that perspective, reports of the demise of marijuana laws are greatly exaggerated.

(Kendall, “Gallup: Louisiana shifts Democratic,” http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/poll-louisiana-democratic-111455.html?hp=l16, JMP)
In a reversal from several years ago, Louisiana is leaning Democratic, according to a new poll.
In a Gallup poll released Tuesday, 45 percent of those polled identify as Democrats or have a
Democratic lean, while 41 percent say they align more closely with the Republican Party. This is the first time that Democrats have taken a lead in Gallup’s Louisiana survey since 2010.
The pollster said the turn may be good news for embattled incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu, who faces Republicans Bill Cassidy and Rob Maness in the November midterms. Still, as Gallup points out, the current Democratic edge in the state is not as large as it was in 2008, when
Landrieu was last up for reelection.
In a recent CNN/ORC poll tracking the Senate race, Landrieu led with 43 percent, and Cassidy trailed closely behind at 40 percent. Maness was at 9 percent.
The Gallup poll was conducted between Jan. 1 and June 30 among 1,396 Louisianans and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
(Associated Press, “Close races mean possibility Senate control will be decided by post Election Day runoffs,” http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/21/close-racesmean-possibility-senate-control-will-be-decided-by-post-election/, JMP)
Of all the high-stakes "what if" possibilities, campaign professionals see a Dec. 6 Louisiana runoff as the most likely. Landrieu has scrapped to win three Senate terms, but the state has trended Republican in recent years.
"If Louisiana is the deciding seat, pity anyone watching television in the state that month," said
Matt Bennett, who has advised several Democratic candidates. "They will be blitzed with more ads, from campaigns and outside groups, than they could possibly imagine."
Generally, Republicans fare better in runoffs because their supporters tend to vote regardless of the date, weather or levels of publicity.
But an intensive, well-targeted get-out-the-vote operation could save Landrieu,
Bennett said, "and the Democrats clearly dominate in the technology and
coordination of their ground campaigns."

--- senior political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight (5/1/2014, Harry, “Sorry
Democrats, Marijuana Doesn’t Bring Young Voters to the Polls,” http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sorry-democrats-marijuana-doesnt-bring-young-voters-tothe-polls/, JMP)
Some Democrats think they’ve found a great smoky hope in state ballot measures seeking to legalize marijuana. Come November, Alaska will vote on whether to make recreational marijuana legal, and several other states are thinking about doing to the same. In Alaska, the referendum will appear on the ballot alongside a competitive U.S. Senate race between
Democrat Mark Begich and an as yet undecided Republican. The Begich campaign declined to comment on whether it expected pot to help its chances,1 yet the idea that pro-marijuana ballot measures can help Democrats makes sense. Young voters, who are very much in favor of marijuana legalization and who tend to lean Democratic, haven’t made up as high a percentage of voters in midterm elections as they do in general elections; if they come out to vote on pot, maybe Alaska Democrats can get their candidate into office.
But a closer look at the evidence suggests Begich might not stand to benefit. Overall, past marijuana ballot measures haven’t meant that more young people come out to vote. This year’s senate race in Alaska would likely have to be very close for the marijuana ballot measure to make a difference.
The conventional wisdom that marijuana ballot measures help Democrats goes back to the 2012 exit polls conducted in Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Those surveys showed that young people were a larger percentage of the electorate in 2012 than in 2008. In Colorado, 18- to 29year-olds made up 6 points more of the electorate (from 14 percent to 20 percent), 12 points more in Washington (10 percent to 22 percent), and 5 points more in Oregon (12 percent to 17 percent), where the ballot measure failed.2
But there’s some contradictory evidence from another source: The government’s Current
Population Survey (CPS) didn’t show anywhere near the increase in young voters that exit polls did. The Census Bureau found youth turnout rose by 0.2 points in Colorado, dropped by 0.9 points in Oregon, and dropped by 2.7 points in Washington from 2008 to 2012, an average 1.2point drop across all three states. This drop is pretty much the same as the 1.5-point drop in young voters nationally, as measured by the CPS.
There’s reason to think we should trust the CPS more than the exit polls. The latter aren’t designed to estimate the ages of voters, as the Center for Information and Research on Civic
Learning and Engagement has pointed out. That’s not to say CPS estimates are immune to margin of error. But a third source of evidence backs up the CPS: pre-election polls. In
Colorado,3 Oregon4 and Washington5 a variety of pollsters had numbers more in line with the
CPS than the exit polls.
We can also look at prior years’ recreational marijuana ballot measures, including those that sought to legalize, decriminalize or lessen the penalty for recreational marijuana. For the 14 such ballot measures since 1998, the voting pool was made up of 0.2 percentage points fewer 18- to
29-year-olds, according to the CPS, compared to the prior similar election (i.e. the prior midterm for midterm years and the prior presidential election for presidential election years).

Looking only at the midterms, the 18-to-29 demographic rose 0.1 percentage points on average.
Once again, marijuana on the ballot doesn’t appear to have made a difference in whether young people voted.
Past research by political science professors Caroline Tolbert and John Grummel of Kent State
University and Daniel Smith of the University of Denver showed that ballot measures drive up voter turnout overall. And in 2012, when pot was on the ballot, significantly more voters turned out in both Colorado and Washington, though not in Oregon, where the referendum didn’t pass.
But those voters didn’t help Democrats. There was no relationship between a change in turnout in these three states and how well President Barack Obama, or marijuana, did in individual counties. On average, Obama lost the same amount of support in these states — 3.4 points from
2008 — as he did nationally. None of this proves that marijuana wasn’t helpful for Democrats among a subset of voters, but it suggests that the overall effect was small and fairly neutral.