1ac
Plan
The United States Federal Government should make legal nearly all
marihuana prohibited under the Controlled Substances Act in the
United States.
Adv 1
Advantage 1 is Agriculture -Federal law blocks the application of certified organic standards t0
marijuana cultivation – that inhibits sustainable growth
Rogers 12 [Intern at the Mattole Restoration Council, a wildlife restoration non-profit
located along the Mattole River in Northern California. [Robert Rogers, “How Conscientious
Consumerism Could Re-shape the Marijuana Industry,” Earth Island Journal, July 25, 2012, pg.
http://tinyurl.com/ca9xxwz]
Under existing market conditions, a joint rolled with marijuana grown outdoors, in the lush heat of the Southern
Humboldt/ Mendocino sun and with a fraction of the carbon footprint, is sold as an equivalent
product on the black market and in many dispensaries, and is worth less to wholesalers who value THCcontent and aesthetic uniformity over a crop’s environmental footprint. These economic realities, coupled with fears of
federal law enforcement retaliations against blatant outdoor grows, have been pushing
marijuana grows indoors for decades, where carbon footprints are mightier than
Shaquille O’Neal’s slippers. It is high time that the rules governing the economic value of marijuana crops in states with
medical laws be amended, enabling sustainable, low-impact grows and family homesteads to gain a
premium price for their environmentally conscious bud. But how do we, as consumers, initiate such a change?
One way for consumers to lobby for change is by pushing dispensaries to advertise the
method of origin of their marijuana, an easy alteration that many dispensaries and collectives have
begun making already. Tea House Collective, a Berkeley, CA-based collective that sources its weed from Humboldt growers, is well-known
for marketing sun-grown marijuana and claims on its website that it only buys from growers who adhere to strict, organically-inspired cultivation
methods. (Marijuana
cannot legally – as of now -- be declared “organic” by the USDA or other
certifiers due to the federal prohibition .) Nudging local dispensaries and collectives to do the same can be as easy as
demanding sun-grown marijuana at your local dispensary, talking to owners or staff about whether their dispensary is implementing growing
standards, and leaving harsh reviews on websites and internet forums like WeedMaps.com for dispensaries that can’t or won’t offer sun-grown
products. Dispensaries
are just like any other retailer – their prerogative is customer service, and if
enough customers are unhappy with the way they do business, substantive change can and will
happen. The wave of the future for sun-grown, sustainable marijuana growers, however, is
undoubtedly third-party certification . We’ve got fair trade coffee. So why not fair trade herb? While there are many factors
that have propelled the success of the organic food movement in the United States, third-party certifiers such as California Certified Organic
been instrumental in laying the groundwork for a thriving
sustainable foods movement. While second-party certifications – such as assurances from collectives like Tea House that its
member farmers are using best practices to cultivate their bud – are useful to consumers, third-party certifications are
essential for creating and enforcing industry-wide standards in sustainable marijuana
cultivation. Such a system would not only alleviate the conscience of dope-smokers aware of
marijuana’s ecological externalities, but could incentivize sustainable practices for
marijuana growers who aren’t motivated simply by altruism. A simple “eco-grown” label for sungrown pot could shake up the entire industry , transforming low-value outdoor weed into a
desirable, boutique product. Much as consumers are willing to pay a market premium for
produce with a USDA organic label, “eco-grow” labels would allow green-thumbed marijuana
growers to receive compensation commensurate with the value consumers put on high-quality,
environmentally sustainable goods. That 15 to 20 percent premium may look awful sweet to
Farmers [CCOF] have
pot growers considering the switch to more sustainable growing techniques, and may even
convince growers who don’t value environmental sustainability to change their growing
habits in order to gain access to this lucrative market, just as CCOF has made organic farming methods attractive to
many “conventional” farmers.
Sustainable marijuana demonstrates the economic feasibility of small
farms – this creates a global model
Fine, 13 [Doug, B.A Stanford, journalist in Washington Post, Salon, and NPR, “Making Sure
the End of Cannabis Prohibition Benefits the Small Farmer,” Alternet, February 7, 2013, pg.
http://tinyurl.com/l72zvya]
the stacked deck at the mass production level is explicitly why the
cultivators of the Emerald Growers Association (EGA), a cannabis farmer trade group based in Northern California, prefer
describing the “craft brew” model for the post-prohibition cannabis economy. In a world of Coors, these
farmers plan to provide Fat Tire Ale. “We’re not afraid of what might be stocked next to cheap beer and cigarettes at the corner
store,” says Tomas Balogh, EGA board member. “Let’s remember that American craft beer was nearly an $8 billion
market in the U.S. last year.” So when people ask him if globalized corporate models or small farming community-based
models will emerge when the drug war ends here in a few years, Balogh says, “Both.” His point is that of course major players
are going to enter the fray when we’re talking about what is already a $35-billion-a-year crop in the U.S., greater than the combined value of corn and wheat. Although
the end of cannabis prohibition will almost certainly cause short-term wholesale price drops, what Balogh
says to jittery farmers like Mark is, “even if your worst, most paranoid fears about modern corporate ethics are
correct, there is still a lucrative (and expanding) niche for top-shelf, organically grown
cannabis like the Emerald Triangle provides.” If it’s done right. The same shopper who today looks for local broccoli at
her food co-op is going to demand organic techniques in her morning cannabis health shake. If a black-market farmer is
Regardless of corporate boardroom strategy,
simply churning out quick turnaround, pesticide-heavy, indoor-grown popcorn buds to pay the mortgage, that farmer is going to lose out to Coors-style mass-produced
if the three-generation knowledge base that caused
Michael Pollan to call cannabis cultivators “the best farmers of my generation ” is put to use
in the cause of long-term product quality and local community health, small-scale (maybe we can call it
“microbud”) cultivators will help the region become an internationally recognized paragon
of consistent top-shelf production. That is called a brand. “The best part is farmers can keep the industry benefiting their local
economy ,” Balogh told me from his own Mendocino County farm in 2011. Indeed, local farmers already hold meetings (I’ve attended several) in which they
discuss the fact that the economy of cannabis cultivation communities can expand beyond the already
considerable value of the psychoactive flower. To give one example, the Bavarian community of Feldheim, Germany
has become entirely energy independent (while nearly eliminating local
unemployment ) by generating municipal power generated from the unused stalks from the
rural community’s farms. When cannabis comes aboveground, its cultivators are likewise in prime
position to benefit from fermenting or gasifying stalks that would otherwise be compost. Where would
cannabis, because he’s essentially growing a Coors-quality product already. But
funding for such planet-saving entrepreneurialism come from? Perhaps from the 21st-century Homesteading Act that fifth-generation Colorado rancher Michael Bowman and
others are proposing: these would be micro-grants for micro-intensive, local community-enriching farming projects. (Social/medicinal cannabis is a specialty crop requiring a
great deal of farmer attention to every plant. For industrial cannabis in places like North Dakota and Kentucky, the grants might be on a larger scale, reflecting larger farming
Such plans are very much in the blackboard stage. After all, cannabis isn’t legal yet. That
can throw up roadblocks in the federal grant application process. Yet the discussions continue. In the Emerald Triangle,
farmers have brainstormed about cost-saving techniques for the local industry that include centralized bud-trimming facilities, warehousing and quality testing
services. These will bring local employment, as will “bud-and-breakfast” value-added tourism. You can’t talk to
operations.)
an EGA farmer without hearing how Mendocino and Humboldt counties are going to do for cannabis “what Napa did for wine.” (Napa did $11 billion just in tourism business in
2011.)
It sets the tone for a sustainable model of agriculture
Fine, 13 [Doug, B.A Stanford, journalist in Washington Post, Salon, and NPR, “Can the
Cannabis Economy Be Ecologically Sustainable?” Huffington Post, Updated: March 17, 2013, p.
http://tinyurl.com/qzfwoqd]
Because of this isolation, prohibition, and now, cultural tradition, Northern California's remote Emerald
Triangle is poised to provide a model for a sustainable post-prohibition cannabis industry. In
particular, this model, which was institutionalized in a landmark cannabis farmer permitting program by the Sheriff's Department in Mendocino
County in 2011, can provide a farmer-owned, outdoor cultivation playbook to counter some of the grow
room-based models that are in danger of becoming institutionalized in the first U.S. states to re-legalize
full adult use of the plant. "This is part of the larger food revolution we're seeing everywhere," the overalls-wearing Fuzzy
told me during what became a sodden farmer caucus during a break between speakers at the Cup, contemplatively stroking his red chest length beard.
While thick, icy raindrops fell quite audibly from redwood eaves all around me, I thought about my own produce shopping preferences. I wouldn't buy a
spear of supermarket hothouse broccoli when there's a local organic heirloom variety available at the weekend farmer's market. This kind of
conversation was the explicit reason why I had jetted into the ankle-soaking winter puddles and moss-covered power lines of Redway, Calif. to give my
own talk at The Cup: I believe that figuring
out how to keep the cannabis industry decentralized, farmercontrolled and sustainable once prohibition ends is a key piece in the "allow my kids to inherit an
inhabitable planet" puzzle . I'm a sustainability journalist and solar-powered goat rancher who's just reported just from the front
lines of the Drug War for a year. We're talking about the United States' number one crop, already worth
$35 billion per year, according to ABC News. We don't have the time or resources to initiate any more carbon intensive
industries. The good news is that cannabis is now, in 2013, in the blueprint phase. I think we're three to five years from full federal cannabis
legalization. That's enough planning time. What can be done to make sure the planet's greenest industry is born Green? It's about incorporating
sustainable cannabis methods no matter how and where the plant is cultivated -- and this includes the industrial side (hemp) in places like North
Dakota. If I weren't already driving on vegetable oil and being routinely outwitted by goats, I would have become aware of the sustainable cannabis
imperative when Nobel Laureate Evan Mills, a researcher on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that won the prize,
approached me after a live event I was doing in support of my recent book, Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution. As a
follow-up project to his UN panel work, Mills had in 2011 published a much-discussed report on the energy demand of California's (mostly indoorgrown) cannabis industry (which he concluded is responsible for 3 percent of all of California's energy use). Our email dialogue since meeting has been
spirited: as a guy who has visited probably three dozen cannabis farms, both indoor and outdoor, in the course of my research, I find myself with
notes on farming
techniques that not only help with my own tomatoes and beans, but which represent the
cutting edge of an agricultural sector that Michael Pollan describes as including "the best
farmers of my generation." Yet exchanges with Mills always force me to more critically ask questions like, "Is that farmer's drip
irrigation technique really sustainable?" and "Does the Mendocino County, California locavore permitting program that worked so well locally scale to
mass industrial sizes?" Although I followed intentionally sustainable cannabis farmers in my book, I'd have to be blind not to be aware that a segment
of the outdoor farming community in the U.S. and Mexico requires as much education as indoor gardeners do when it comes to issues like waterway
diversion and pesticide use. The truth is, most farmers here in the Emerald Triangle get it. A third generation Humboldt County farmer named Mike
told me as he stared admiringly at the rows of finalist buds behind the glass display at the Emerald Cup's straw bale-lined Growers' Tent, "The plants
adapt to the climate. Why wouldn't I use God's own sun instead of a generator?" Case in point, this year's winner of the Emerald Cup grand prize (a trip
to Jamaica), Leo Bell of nearby Laytonville (for his "exceptionally smooth, enticing and very sticky...nasturtium-scented" Chem Dawg strain, according
to judges), noted in his victory speech that during the 2012 growing season (a region-wide vintage said to be the best in a decade and a half), "I watered
by hand, and gave my heart to these plants, five (pause while choked up) hours every day." Now, if
all of humanity's agricultural
engineers operated according to such principles, climate change would be a much more
relaxed discussion. This moment presents the opportunity for the cannabis industry to chart
the very best course , or the very worst. On the dark side, you have the Drug War-inspired violent cartels,
profiteers, and poison pesticide purveyors that prohibition economies create. On the positive
side, think of the Doctor Bronner's Soap model, where organic and Fair Trade principles are embedded in every
product (many of which derive from hemp) and the CEO makes five times the salary of the lowest-paid
employee. This is the model that the farmers of the Emerald Growers Association trade group
(EGA) are using as they brand the region's cannabis crop in anticipation of a time when busy
moms in the Whole Foods cannabis section will be seeking "organic, fairly traded, local farmer-owned" plants
for Sunday's Super Bowl party dip. As for farmer Fuzzy's point about the importance of native soil, I can tell you after two decades of sustainability
journalism that he is spot-on: when I visited a local cannabis strain developer named Rock on his coastal farm, he showed me that his technique
basically involves crossing two promising strains and seeing if they like the local dirt. And Rock's strains have placed very high at past Emerald Cups.
The Emerald Triangle's barn-side genetics laboratories work. My
year of touring cannabis farms has taught me that
without question, no hydroponic set-up or garden store soil mix can approach the complex
microbial soup found in a mature Emerald Triangle farm. These are the same regional conditions and knowledge of
how to exploit them that long ago branded places like Champagne, France and Parmesan, Italy: you can't, by international law, call the same cheese
from somewhere else by the name Parmesan. And only family-level farming allows the kind of tender loving care that results in such universally
recognized branding. "Water your plants with a cup while singing to them" could never be taught at an ag school. Will the Emerald Triangle farmer
survive the inevitable period of instability and likely price drops which will follow the start of the Drug Peace era? "I think so," said Cup organizer Blake.
"We're a culture." The branding of this culture and its famous flowers is already underway. "We want people to associate the Emerald Triangle with top
shelf cannabis the way they do Napa with wine and wine tourism," explained Tomas Balogh, board member of the EGA. The worldwide post-Drug War
cannabis industry train has left the station. Working against Emerald farmer organization is the longstanding cultivator fear that legalization will bring
millions
of consumers are going to be seeking the cannabis version of Fat Tire Ale. If the region's
cultivators band together to aim for the microbrew aficionado, the EGA thinking goes, there's nothing to
fear from Coors. Craft beer was a $7.6 billion market in 2010. For the plan to work, sustainable
practices have to be taught, followed and certified in the Emerald Triangle. Especially to newer and younger
about the Coors or Marlboro version of cannabis production. And I think that concern is legitimate -- for the run of the mill farmer. But
farmers. Even Fuzzy got serious for a moment when I asked him if, alongside his own efficiently drip-irrigated crops, he sees non-sustainable practices,
such as river diversion, among his farming neighbors. "We do need standards," he admitted. It's
a small planet, and the EGA's Balogh
says that cultivators have to prepare now to take advantage of the legalization free-for-all and
emerge as the world's number one sustainable crop . "We don't have a choice with this," he says. "We have to get
it right."
Small scale food production is important for ecological sustainability
– the alternative is irreversible planetary harm
Altieri, 08 [Professor of agroecology @ University of California, Berkeley [Miguel Altieri
(President, Sociedad Cientifica LatinoAmericana de Agroecologia (SOCLA), “Small farms as a
planetary ecological asset: Five key reasons why we should support the revitalization of small
farms in the Global South,” Food First, May 9, 2008, p.
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2115]
The Via Campesina has long argued that farmers need land to produce food for their own communities and for their country and for this reason has
advocated for genuine agrarian reforms to access and control land, water, agrobiodiversity, etc, which are of central importance for communities to be
able to meet growing food demands. The Via Campesina believes that in order to protect livelihoods, jobs, people's food security and health, as well as
the environment, food
production has to remain in the hands of small- scale
sustainable farmers and cannot be
left under the control of large agribusiness companies or supermarket chains. Only by changing the export-led, free-trade based, industrial agriculture
model of large farms can the downward spiral of poverty, low wages, rural-urban migration, hunger and environmental degradation be halted. Social
rural movements embrace the concept of food sovereignty as an alternative to the neo-liberal approach that puts its faith in inequitable international
trade to solve the world’s food problem. Instead, food sovereignty focuses on local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles,
energy and technological sovereignty and farmer to farmer networks. This global movement, the Via Campesina, has recently brought their message to
the North, partly to gain the support of foundations and consumers, as political pressure from a wealthier public that increasingly depends on unique
food products from the South marketed via organic, fair trade, or slow food channels could marshal the sufficient political will to curb the expansion of
biofuels, transgenic crops and agro-exports, and put an end to subsidies to industrial farming and dumping practices that hurt small farmers in the
South. But can these arguments really captivate the attention and support of northern consumers and philanthropists? Or is there a need for a different
argument—one that emphasizes that the very quality of life and food security of the populations in the North depends not only on the food products,
but in the ecological services provided by small farms of the South. In fact, it is herein argued that the
functions performed by small
farming systems still prevalent in Africa, Asia and Latin America—in the post-peak oil era that humanity is
entering—comprise an ecological asset for humankind and planetary survival . In fact, in an era of
escalating fuel and food costs, climate change, environmental degradation, GMO pollution and corporate- dominated food systems, small, biodiverse,
agroecologically managed farms in the Global South are the only viable form of agriculture that will feed the world under the new ecological and
economic scenario. There are at last five reasons why it is in the interest of Northern consumers to support the cause and struggle of small farmers in
the South: 1. Small farmers are key for the world’s food security While 91% of the planet’s 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land are increasingly being
devoted to agro-export crops, biofuels and transgenic soybean to feed cars and cattle, millions
of small farmers in the Global
South still produce the majority of staple crops needed to feed the planet ’s rural and urban
populations. In Latin America, about 17 million peasant production units occupying close to 60.5 million hectares, or 34.5% of the total
cultivated land with average farm sizes of about 1.8 hectares, produce 51% of the maize, 77% of the beans, and 61% of the potatoes for domestic
consumption. Africa has approximately 33 million small farms, representing 80 percent of all farms in the region. Despite the fact that Africa now
imports huge amounts of cereals, the majority of African farmers (many of them women) who are smallholders with farms below 2 hectares, produce a
significant amount of basic food crops with virtually no or little use of fertilizers and improved seed. In Asia, the majority of more than 200 million rice
farmers, few farm more than 2 hectares of rice make up the bulk of the rice produced by Asian small farmers. Small
increases in yields
on these small farms that produce most of the world´s staple crops will have far more impact
on food availability at the local and regional levels, than the doubtful increases predicted for
distant and corporate-controlled large monocultures managed with such high tech
solutions as genetically modified seeds. 2.Small farms are more productive and resource conserving than large-scale
monocultures Although the conventional wisdom is that small family farms are backward and unproductive, research shows that small
farms are much more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield
from a single crop. Integrated farming systems in which the small-scale farmer produces grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products outproduce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms. A large farm may produce more corn per hectare than a small
farm in which the corn is grown as part of a polyculture that also includes beans, squash, potato, and fodder. In polycultures developed by smallholders,
productivity, in terms of harvestable products, per unit area is higher than under sole cropping with the same level of management. Yield
advantages range from 20 percent to 60 percent, because polycultures reduce losses due to
weeds, insects and diseases, and make more efficient use of the available resources of water,
light and nutrients. In overall output, the diversified farm produces much more food, even if measured in dollars. In the USA, data shows that the
smallest two hectare farms produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about $2,902 per acre. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249
per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare. Not only do small to medium sized farms exhibit higher yields than conventional farms, but do so with
much lower negative impact on the environment. Small farms are ‘multi-functional’– more productive, more efficient, and contribute more to economic
development than do large farms. Communities
surrounded by many small farms have healthier economies than
do communities surrounded by depopulated, large mechanized farms. Small farmers also take better care of natural
resources, including reducing soil erosion and conserving biodiversity. The inverse relationship
between farm size and output can be attributed to the more efficient use of land, water, biodiversity and other agricultural resources by small farmers.
So in terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would be better off with small-scale farmers. Building strong rural economies in the Global South
based on productive small-scale farming will allow the people of the South to remain with their families and will help to stem the tide of migration. And
as population continues to grow and the amount of farmland and water available to each person continues to shrink, a small
farm structure may become central to feeding the planet, especially when large- scale agriculture devotes itself to
feeding car tanks. 3. Small traditional and biodiverse farms are models of sustainability Despite the onslaught of industrial farming, the persistence of
thousands of hectares under traditional agricultural management documents a successful indigenous agricultural strategy of
adaptability and resiliency. These microcosms of traditional agriculture that have stood the test of time, and that can still be found almost untouched
since 4 thousand years in the Andes, MesoAmerica, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, offer
promising models of
sustainability as they promote biodiversity , thrive without agrochemicals, and sustain year-round yields
even under marginal environmental conditions. The local knowledge accumulated during millennia and the forms of agriculture
and agrobiodiversity that this wisdom has nurtured, comprise a Neolithic legacy embedded with
ecological and cultural resources of fundamental value for the future of humankind .
Recent research suggests that many small farmers cope and even prepare for climate change,
minimizing crop failure through increased use of drought tolerant local varieties, water
harvesting, mixed cropping, opportunistic weeding, agroforestry and a series of other traditional
techniques. Surveys conducted in hillsides after Hurricane Mitch in Central America showed that
farmers using sustainable practices such as “mucuna” cover crops, intercropping, and agroforestry suffered less
“damage” than their conventional neighbors. The study spanning 360 communities and 24
departments in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala showed that diversified plots had 20% to
40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture, less erosion, and experienced lower economic losses than
their conventional neighbors. This demonstrates that a re-evaluation of indigenous technology can serve as a key
source of information on adaptive capacity and resilient capabilities exhibited by small farms—features of
strategic importance for world farmers to cope with climatic change . In addition, indigenous
technologies often reflect a worldview and an understanding of our relationship to the natural world that is more realistic and more sustainable that
those of our Western European heritage. 4. Small farms represent a sanctuary of GMO-free agrobiodiversity In general, traditional small scale farmers
grow a wide variety of cultivars . Many of these plants are landraces grown from seed passed down from generation to generation, more genetically
heterogeneous than modern cultivars, and thus offering greater defenses against vulnerability and enhancing harvest security in the midst of diseases,
pests, droughts and other stresses. In a worldwide survey of crop varietal diversity on farms involving 27 crops, scientists found that considerable crop
genetic diversity continues to be maintained on farms in the form of traditional crop varieties, especially of major staple crops. In most cases, farmers
maintain diversity as an insurance to meet future environmental change or social and economic needs. Many researchers have concluded that this
varietal richness enhances productivity and reduces yield variability. For example, studies by plant pathologists provide evidence that mixing of crop
species and or varieties can delay the onset of diseases by reducing the spread of disease carrying spores, and by modifying environmental conditions so
that they are less favorable to the spread of certain pathogens. Recent research in China, where four different mixtures of rice varieties grown by
farmers from fifteen different townships over 3000 hectares, suffered 44% less blast incidence and exhibited 89% greater yield than homogeneous
fields without the need to use chemicals. It is possible that traits important to indigenous farmers (resistance to drought, competitive ability,
performance on intercrops, storage quality, etc) could be traded for transgenic qualities which may not be important to farmers (Jordan, 2001). Under
this scenario, risk could increase and farmers would lose their ability to adapt to changing biophysical environments and increase their success with
relatively stable yields with a minimum of external inputs while supporting their communities’ food security. Although there is a high probability that
the introduction of transgenic crops will enter centers of genetic diversity, it is crucial to protect areas of peasant agriculture free of contamination from
GMO crops, as traits important to indigenous farmers (resistance to drought, food or fodder quality, maturity, competitive ability, performance on
intercrops, storage quality, taste or cooking properties, compatibility with household labor conditions, etc) could be traded for transgenic qualities (i.e.
herbicide resistance) which are of no importance to farmers who don’t use agrochemicals . Under this scenario risk will increase and farmers will lose
their ability to produce relatively stable yields with a minimum of external inputs under changing biophysical environments. The social impacts of local
crop shortfalls, resulting from changes in the genetic integrity of local varieties due to genetic pollution, can be considerable in the margins of the
Global South. Maintaining pools of genetic diversity, geographically isolated from any possibility of cross fertilization or genetic pollution from uniform
transgenic crops will create “islands” of intact germplasm which will act as extant safeguards against potential ecological failure derived from the
second green revolution increasingly being imposed with programs such as the Gates-Rockefeller AGRA in Africa. These genetic sanctuary islands will
serve as the only source of GMO-free seeds that will be needed to repopulate the organic farms in the North inevitably contaminated by the advance of
transgenic agriculture. The small farmers and indigenous communities of the Global South, with the help of scientists and NGOs, can continue to create
and guard biological and genetic diversity that has enriched the food culture of the whole planet. 5. Small farms cool the climate While industrial
agriculture contributes directly to climate change through no less than one third of total emissions of the major greenhouse gases — Carbon dioxide
(CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), small, biodiverse organic farms have the opposite effect by sequestering more carbon in soils. Small
farmers usually treat their soils with organic compost materials that absorb and sequester carbon better than soils that are farmed with conventional
fertilizers. Researchers have suggested that the conversion of 10,000 small- to medium-sized farms to organic production would store carbon in the soil
equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road. Further climate amelioration contributions by small farms accrue from the fact that most use
significantly less fossil fuel in comparison to conventional agriculture mainly due to a reduction of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, relying instead
on organic manures, legume-based rotations, and diversity schemes to enhance beneficial insects. Farmers who live in rural communities near cities
and towns and are linked to local markets, avoid the energy wasted and the gas emissions associated with transporting food hundreds and even
thousands of miles. Conclusions The great advantage of small farming systems is their high levels of agrobidoversity arranged in the form of variety
mixtures, polycultures, crop-livestock combinations and/or agroforestry patterns. Modeling new agroecosystems using such diversified designs are
extremely valuable to farmers whose systems are collapsing due to debt, pesticide use, transgenic treadmills, or climate change. Such diverse systems
buffer against natural or human-induced variations in production conditions. There is much to learn from indigenous modes of production, as these
systems have a strong ecological basis, maintain valuable genetic diversity, and lead to regeneration and preservation of biodiversity and natural
resources. Traditional methods are particularly instructive because they provide a long-term perspective on successful agricultural management under
conditions of climatic variability. Organized
social rural movements in the Global South oppose industrial
agriculture in all its manifestations, and increasingly their territories constitute isolated areas
rich in unique agrobiodiversity, including genetically diverse material, therefore acting as
extant safeguards against the potential ecological failure derived from inappropriate
agricultural modernization schemes. It is precisely the ability to generate and maintain diverse crop
genetic resources that offer “unique” niche possibilities to small farmers that cannot be replicated by
farmers in the North who are condemned to uniform cultivars and to co-exist with GMOs. The “ cibo pulito, justo e buono” that Slow Food promotes,
the Fair Trade coffee, bananas, and the organic products so much in demand by northern consumers can only be produced in the agroecological islands
of the South. This
“difference” inherent to traditional systems, can be strategically utilized to revitalize small
farming communities by exploiting opportunities that exist for linking traditional agrobiodiversity with
local/national/international markets, as long as these activities are justly compensated by the North and
all the segments of the market remain under grassroots control. Consumers of the North can play a major role
by supporting these more equitable markets which do not perpetuate the colonial model of “agriculture of the poor for
the rich,” but rather a model that promotes small biodiverse farms as the basis for strong rural economies in the Global
South. Such economies will not only provide sustainable production of healthy, agroecologically-produced, accessible
food for all, but will allow indigenous peoples and small farmers to continue their millennial work of building and
conserving the agricultural and natural biodiversity on which we all depend now and even more so in the
future.
Adv 2
Advantage 2 is Cartels -Legalization eliminates illicit markets that drives unprecedented
waves of violence
Armentano, 09 [Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML and the NORML
Foundation. Mr. Armentano is recognized as an expert on the subject of marijuana
policy.ARTICLE How to End Mexico's Deadly Drug War NOVEMBER 18, 2009 by PAUL
ARMENTANO, http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/how-to-end-mexicos-deadly-drug-war]
officials estimate that approximately half the marijuana consumed in the
have identified Mexico as far and away America’s largest pot
How much of this goes directly to Mexican cartels is difficult to quantify, but no doubt the percentage is significant. Government
United States originates from outside its borders, and they
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
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
legalization of marijuana.” A separate Zogby poll reported even stronger support (58 percent) among west-coast voters.
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 methamphetamine, 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 prohibition-inspired violence altogether. After all, ending alcohol prohibition in America didn’t singlehandedly 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
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.
competing factions fought over the crumbs of America’s drastically shrunken illicit-drug market. That said,
Cartel violence must be stopped otherwise mass violence and
atrocities will continue unabated
Farah, 14 [Senior Fellow of Financial Investigations and Transparency @ International
Assessment of Strategy Center, Douglas Farah (President of IBI Consultants, national security
consulting firm) “Loss of Central America’s Northern Triangle,” Miami Herald, February 2,
2014]
the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) has earned the unenviable position
as the world’s most violent corner . The growing importance of the region as a multifaceted transshipment corridor for transnational organized crime (TOC) groups —
primarily Mexican drug trafficking syndicates — has brought a new and dangerous alignment in the region’s power structures. The decapitations and
dismemberments are copycat rituals of Los Zetas , the feared Mexican drug trafficking
enterprise that now controls significant territory in Central America . The U. S. government estimates that
Over the past decade,
approximately 95 percent of the cocaine leaving South America for the United States moves through the Mexico and Central America corridor. As pressure on the TOC groups has increased in Mexico, the criminal
enterprises have migrated southward with a vengeance. The result has been that the three governments of the Northern Triangle have moved from being weak, somewhat corrupt and unresponsive to almost nonfunctional in much of their national territories. The region’s civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the United States, Cuba and the Soviet bloc were deeply involved, left hundreds of thousands dead. But the
negotiated end to the wars also left a sense of hope that the nations could rebuild with new institutions, new laws and a commitment to address the social issues that drove the conflicts. That hope is gone, replaced
by deep cynicism and dismay that governments of both the right and the left immediately sought to turn their countries into piñatas in which only a few on either side benefited. The far left and far right, after
decades of blood letting, found they could make money together while their countries entered into downward spirals of impunity, violence and massive corruption. While none of the issues driving the collapse are
new, they now appear to have driven the governments past a tipping point in the correlation of forces between the state and TOC organizations. Transnational criminal organizations are on the rise and the positive
state presence ever less accessible to citizens. The governments are largely incapable of solving most of the serious issues in ways that strengthen the democratic process, rule of law of citizen security. The
Northern Triangle is emerging as a region where the state is often no longer the main power center or has become so entwined with a complex and inter-related web of illicit activities and actors that the state itself
at times becomes a part of the criminal enterprise. There are virtually no “ungoverned spaces” in the region. Some group exercises real political and military control in almost every corner of every country. What
has changed is that the authority is less and less often the state. Sunday’s elections in El Salvador, in which the gang truce is a major issue, offer cautionary tales. President Mauricio Funes won as a candidate for
the former guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party despite never having been a member of the group. He has presided over a stagnant economy, the failed gang “truce” and a rising tide
of narco activity. Rather than broker a transparent pact between the MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and Calle 18 gangs — the two largest transnational gangs — the opaque process begun in March 2012 has benefited
drug trafficking organizations, expanded the territories under gang control, given the gangs their first real taste of political power and completely ignored the victims. Yet, the pact has the backing of the
the
number of people “disappeared” has risen sharply and the likely hundreds of bodies in the clandestine cemeteries that are now coming to light
indicate how untrue that promise was. Rather than dumping the bodies of their victims on the streets, the gangs
simply buried them in shallow graves scattered across the country, giving a short-lived appearance of ebbing
violence. The gangs negotiated as equals with the government to gain complete control of the prisons in which their leaders are kept, controlling the flow of prostitutes, drugs, cash and mobile phones
into the facilities. In much of the country the gangs are the true authority on the ground. In addition to killing
with impunity , they check the ID cards of strangers in their neighborhoods and deny access to those they don’t like. They regularly collect taxes, in the form of
Organization of American States. The sole justification for the truce was the drop in homicides it promised to bring, and in the early days the promise seemed to bear fruit. But after almost two years,
extortion, and control the sale of crack and cocaine in their neighborhoods. The state, rather than benefiting the populace, is relegated to the role of broker among illicit power actors in which the brokers reap
The results have been catastrophic , both for the people of El Salvador and the
rule of law in the region. The grisly bodies still being excavated from the multiple clandestine
cemeteries include those of small children, street vendors and the elderly, an evangelical preacher, and rival gang
members. The level of mutilation is something not seen since the 1980s, when death squads
dumped bodies at designated sites for the vultures to pick at. The emergence of some branches of the transnational gangs as major
enormous benefits but the country reaps only chaos.
new actors in the drug trade, particularly in El Salvador, adds a new level of complexity to the regional dynamics and underscores the powerlessness of the states. The current FMLN candidate, Salvador Sánchez
Cerén, a former FMLN commander, has promised to move El Salvador to the radical populism that Hugo Chávez pioneered, where the states become increasingly authoritarian, intolerant and criminalized. Awash
in millions of dollars in campaign cash, whose origin the party cannot or will not explain, the FMLN is now heavily favored to win and the promise of revolutionary transparency is unkept. Norman Quijano, the
candidate for the conservative Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) — a party founded on death squad activity — has promised a harsh crackdown on the gangs and a return of power to the traditional
business class who tend to run the country as their estates, the very reason his party was voted out of office in 2009. Antonio Saca, a former president who formed his own party, was expelled by ARENA after his
presidential term for alleged massive corruption that surpassed the patience of even those long accustomed to running a kleptocracy. His enormous new mansions and unexplained fortune have done little to
dispel suspicions of the origin of his money. These options are emblematic of the Hobbesian choices facing most countries in Central America. None of the leaders of the Northern Triangle are offering new
thinking on how to tackle the multiple, complex problems in the region. The reality is that the host of factors driving the violence and the hollowing out of the states can only be tackled at a regional level. Each
individual country is too small, too insular and too poor to do much on its own. The United States must engage with the region as a whole, both out of self-interest and the interests of those in the region seeking a
new paradigm that moves beyond transactional politics of corruption and violence to rule of law, economic freedom and transparency. Yet, the U.S. cannot want change more than the Central American
governments do, nor can it help when the elites — both the traditional and emerging groups — do not view real reform as in their self-interest. Policy options are limited and complex, but the crisis is growing
quickly.
This violence is a function of the war on drugs which necessitates an
ever increasing death count --- this wreaks an immense psychological
toll on hundreds of thousands of people
Lohmuller, 14 [The Drug War and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Mexico’s Hidden
Epidemic August 22, 2014 · by COHA · in COHA Research, Drug Trafficking, Mexico,
Publications Print Friendly By: Michael Lohmuller, Research Associate at the Council on
Hemispheric Affairshttp://www.coha.org/the-drug-war-and-post-traumatic-stress-disordermexicos-hidden-epidemic/]
In recent years, the
Mexican drug war has consistently made headlines for its appalling levels of
violence and ever-increasing death count; with a figure approaching 70,000 people killed since
2006. Previously, violence in Mexico had largely been associated with drug trafficking and was concentrated in a handful of regions along key
smuggling routes, especially near the U.S. border. However, under the Felipe Calderón administration (2006-2012), Mexico’s drug cartels
faced rising pressure from state security forces, resulting in their fragmentation and the
dispersal of criminal violence around the country. Drug cartels responded to enhanced counternarcotics operations by expanding their criminal portfolios into locally focused crime in order to
supplement their earnings. This has led to a sharp increase in cases of extortion and kidnapping
(979 and 3,634 cases, respectively, were reported through the first six months of 2014), wreaking havoc on Mexican society.[1] A side effect of
this violence that has received relatively little attention is the impact on the mental health of
victims and the community at-large. More specifically, violence accompanying the Mexican drug war
has contributed to a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity, creating conditions that have put
millions of Mexican citizens at risk for developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is most commonly
associated with soldiers returning from war, and has attracted widespread attention in the United States for its effects on veterans of the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars. Yet, while Mexico is not at war in the traditional sense, many
Mexican communities live in a state of
siege—either actual or perceived. While some areas are affected more than others, the majority of Mexican
communities have been exposed—directly or indirectly—to various degrees of traumatic
violence. Nevertheless, the Mexican state has not devoted adequate attention to those victimized by violence. This role has largely been taken up
by a number of civil society organizations, such as Ciudadanos en Apoyo a Los Derechos Humanos (CADHAC) in Nuevo León and the Movimiento por
la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity). In conjunction with the important role of these organizations, however,
it is imperative that the Mexican government and health system acknowledge and research the problem of PTSD in victimized populations. The
short- and long-term effects of high levels of violence on the mental health and fabric of Mexican
society could potentially be grave. For the sake of Mexico’s future generations, it is therefore crucial that the Mexican state
begin allocating sufficient resources towards supporting those victimized by violence in order to mitigate the growth of PTSD’s nefarious consequences.
Mexico’s Escalation of Crime & Violence Felipe Calderónis widely regarded as one of the catalysts for Mexico’s current wave of violence. Upon taking
theoffice of the presidency in 2006, Calderón declared a war against Mexico’s drug cartels. This consisted of an aggressive strategy of confrontation
and, with the deployment of the armed forces into Mexico’s streets and communities, the increasing militarization of policing functions. Drug cartels,
now finding themselves the target of antagonistic governmental policies, escalated the brutality of their tactics. This was done in order both to defend
themselves against incursions by state security forces and to exploit any openings created to win territory from rivals. Violence
quickly
spiraled out of control, and has been extraordinary in its severity and indiscriminate targeting.
Mass killings, torture, dismemberment, disappeared persons, extortion, and kidnapping have
become all too commonplace, leaving a wake of destruction rippling through Mexican society as
hundreds of thousands suffered. The scale of violence in Mexico is difficult to grasp. During the
six years of Calderón’s term (2006-2012), more than 50,000 people were killed (a total of over 70,000
have reportedly died through 2014), 250,000 were displaced from their homes, 10,000 disappeared, and
8,000 wereorphaned.[2] By 2010, the homicide rate was double that of 2006.[3] Fortunately,
homicide figures for 2012 and 2013 have shown a slight declining trend. However, extortion and
kidnapping levels have increased at an alarming rate. According to official statistics from Mexico’s Interior Ministry
(SEGOB), there were 8,199 reported incidences of extortion in 2013, higher than any other year in the past decade.[4] There has also been a steady rise
in documented cases of kidnapping, climbing from 438 in 2007 to 1,698 in 2013.[5] Nonetheless, it is estimated that the vast majority of kidnappings
and extortions have gone unreported. Victims are often reluctant to seek help from officials for fear of retribution by criminal groups or that the police
are corrupt and in cahoots with the criminals. Overall, after
nearly eight years of elevated levels of criminal violence,
hundreds of thousands of people have been directly or indirectly victimized. Many
Mexican citizens rightfully perceive the government as inept and unable to provide adequate security and justice. This has contributed to the creation of
a far-reaching climate of insecurity, fear, and helplessness. High
rates of exposure to traumatic experiences among
Mexico’s populace, along with extensive and often graphic media coverage, have produced
degrees of trauma similar to those usually characterized with war zones. Consequently, many experts now say
mental health conditions typically associated with war veterans, such as PTSD, are on the rise in Mexico. What is PTSD? According to The National
Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), PTSD develops after a person experiences “a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical
harm.”[6] Someone who develops PTSD “may have been the one who was harmed,” but the harm may also “have happened to a loved one, or the
person may have witnessed a harmful event that happened to loved ones or strangers.”[7] According to the Mayo Clinic, the most common events
driving PTSD’s development include combat exposure, childhood neglect and physical abuse, sexual assault, physical attack, and being threatened with
a weapon.[8] Other events that may also bring about PTSD are, among others, natural disasters, robbery, torture, and kidnapping. The Mayo Clinic also
reports that those who do suffer from PTSD have demonstrated difficulties in maintaining their job, relationships, health, and quality of life. In
addition, PTSD has been found to increase the risk of developing other mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, as well as substance
abuse or suicidal thoughts and actions.[9] While PTSD can cause numerous symptoms, the NIMH classifies them into three broad categories: reexperiencing symptoms, avoidance symptoms, and hyperarousal symptoms.[10] Bad dreams or flashbacks are examples of re-experiencing symptoms.
Avoidance symptoms may include feelings of strong guilt or depression, loss of interest in activities one enjoyed in the past, and staying away from
places or objects that are reminders of the traumatic experience. Hyperarousal symptoms may consist of being easily startled, feeling tense or “on
edge,” having difficulty sleeping, and angry outbursts. To be diagnosed with PTSD, a person must exhibit at least one re-experiencing symptom, at least
three avoidance symptoms, and at least two hyperarousal symptoms for at least one month.[11] PTSD in Civilian Populations Several existing studies on
the mental health of civilian populations living in violent communities in U.S. cities offer a source for drawing comparisons with the case of Mexico.
Despite cross-cultural differences, the studies demonstrate that PTSD can indeed have a wide presence in civilian populations affected by disconcerting
levels of violence; a concerning find for Mexican society given the wide percentage of Mexico’s population that has been exposed to traumatic
experiences. An investigationby theGrady Trauma Projectstudied residents of violent inner-city communities in Atlanta.[12] Interviews with 8,000
inner city residents found that one in three reported experiencing symptoms consistent with PTSD at some point in their lives. Dr. Kerry Ressler, the
lead researcher of the project, said, “The rates of PTSD we see are as high or higher than Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam veterans. We have a whole
population who is traumatized.”[13] Another study took place in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, which treats around 2,000 patients per year for
gunshots, stabbings, and other violent injuries.[14] Beginning in 2011, researchers screened patients for PTSD, and observed that four in 10 patients
displayed symptoms. There was an even higher rate among those wounded by guns—over 50 percent. “We knew these people were going to have PTSD
symptoms,” said Kimberly Joseph, a trauma surgeon at the hospital. “We didn’t know it was going to be as extensive.”[15] The two studies’ conclusions
suggest that traumatic violence has influenced entire communities in these areas. This cumulative social stress can undermine the fundamental
institutions of family, work, and education, both at an individual and a collective level. At a broad level, these Atlanta and Chicago communities have
much in common with their Mexican counterparts: they are extremely poor, are plagued by inequality and violent crime, and have limited access to
hospitals or mental health services. Given comparable violence-levels and circumstances to these U.S. inner city communities, it is likely that many
Mexican communities exhibit similar patterns of PTSD rates among residents. PTSD Among Mexican Civilians Indeed, many experts now say PTSD is
on the rise in Mexico due to the extreme violence seen over the past decade. The border city of Ciudad Juárez, the epicenter of Mexico’s drug war from
2007-2012, has been particularly impacted. In 2010, homicide levels in the city peaked at roughly 60 murders per week.[16] In fact, in 2010 more than
half of all executions, shootings, disappearances, and kidnappings that occurred in Mexico were concentrated in Ciudad Juárez. Consequently,
according to figures cited in a 2013 study by researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the Ciudad Juárez Municipality has
estimated that 14-30 percent of the city’s more than 1.3 million residents suffer from PTSD due to both direct and indirect exposure to violent acts.[17]
At first, the hardest hit communities, such as Ciudad Juárez, were located in Mexico’s outlying states where the drug cartels are most powerful.
However, Mauricio Meschoulam from the Ibero-American University has said the psychosocial damage has spread beyond those areas, so that the
prevalence of PTSD symptoms is now not exclusively found in Mexico’s most violent municipalities. Meschoulam attributes this to heavy media
coverage, remarking that “people’s stress levels are directly proportional to their exposure to the mass media,” which transmits terror and panic.[18]
This, he insists, indicates a contagious phenomenon, with PTSD “spreading rapidly in populations like that of the capital and other cities in Mexico.” A
study conducted by Meschoulam, Estudio sobre efectos psicosociales por violencia en México (Study on Psychosocial Effects of Violence in Mexico),
provides some indicators of the violence’s detrimental repercussions on citizens’ mental health. The research was based on a sample of 333 people from
15 of Mexico’s 32 states, who were given a questionnaire. The results discovered that 51 percent of the interviewees said violence affected their work life,
72 percent their social life, and 58 percent their family life.[19] A further 42 percent of the respondents asserted violence had an impact on their
economic status, and 60 percent reported that it had influenced their mental health. Half of the respondents perceived the media to be the principal
transmission channel of stress. Furthermore, 10 percent changed their residence out of fear, 80 percent had stopped frequenting places out of fear, and
54 percent had altered their daily routine.[20] The 2012 National Survey on Victimization and Perception of Public Security, administered by the
Mexican government’s statistics agency INEGI, reported the number of households with at least one adult victim of crime to be 9,261,721—nearly 31
percent of Mexican households.[21] However, most Mexicans are indirect victims of violence; as a result, they cannot be figured into any official
government statistics measuring victimization rates. Many people, however, feel that they are more than mere bystanders because they have been
forced to change how they live, work, travel, and conduct their social activities.[22] México Evalúa, a Mexican government watchdog, totaled the
number of visible and invisible victims of serious crime between 1997 and 2011 at 12,993,010—of which 3,208,213 are “visible” victims, while 9,748,797
are the “invisible” victims. It has been estimated that only 22 percent of total crimes committed are reported, with the remaining 72 percent referred to
as Mexico’s cifra negra, or “black statistic.”[23] Raúl Villamil Uriarte, a social psychologist and anthropologist at the Metropolitan Autonomous
University in Mexico City, stated, “People are experiencing terror from this world of death and violence. The nation is suffering post-traumatic stress
disorder from all this violence playing out.”[24] Civil Society Responds Access to mental health services is limited because of Mexico’s centralized
health care system, meaning the majority of establishments are located in large cities. An investigation into Mexico’s mental health system published in
April 2013 found that only 30 percent of primary care services possess protocols for the evaluation and treatment of mental disorders. Additionally, the
report discovered Mexico’s meager mental health facilities, with the low ratios of 1.6 psychiatrists, 1.3 other physicians, 3.4 nurses, and 1.5
psychologists per 100,000 of the population.[25] Dr. Elena Azaola, a prominent social anthropologist in Mexico City, said that while the government
has been trying to implement more programs to prevent crime, there are no programs dedicated to working with these types of PTSD victims.
Furthermore, Dr. Azaola mentioned that there is a general lack of awareness on the need to provide mental health services, with extremely low budgets
and professional abilities to manage the issue. Support groups—religious, community, or family—have therefore been critical in helping people deal
with the negative side effects of exposure to traumatic experiences. A number of civil society organizations also provide vital support and mental health
services for victims of traumatic violence. These are largely organized on a local basis, and have sprung up in various localities around Mexico.[26] One
of these organizations, Ciudadanos en Apoyo a Los Derechos Humanos (CADHAC), is based in the Mexican state of Nuevo León. CADHAC has been
working with human rights victims by offering legal services as well as psychosocial support. Starting in 2011, CADHAC began to pay particular
attention to psychological support for family members of people who had disappeared as a result of organized crime. Liz Sánchez Reyna and Ana Luna,
two employees at CADHAC with experience working with victims, said the violence has been particularly intense since 2009—including executions,
disappearances, extortion, arbitrary detentions, and torture.[27] Between the effects documented, CADHAC has observed a general fear in the
population, which they assert has resulted in people living in a different manner than pre-2009. Now, people are more reluctant to be on the streets for
fear they may be victimized. This fear, Reyna and Luna say, has impacted the community in general, damaging the overall social fabric.[28]
CADHAC has also witnessed an increase in the number of cases of people with PTSD, which Reyna and
Luna directly relate to the presence of violence and high incidences of disappearances, torture, abuse of authority, extrajudicial executions, and
domestic violence. Governmental institutions, they declare, were not prepared to handle the violence’s ramifications and have had to learn on the fly.
Reyna and Luna also likened Mexico to a war zone, and spoke of an inter-generational impact
that violence will have, saying, “It will take many years for the population to recuperate from
this wound that is still open.”[29] Moving Forward In the near-term, the immediate goal for Mexico needs to be the strengthening of
police and judicial institutions to betterprotect and provide justice for victims of violent crime. Mexico’s powerful criminal
organizations must be prevented from waging war against the citizenry with near
total impunity.
Statutory change is key to end prohibition – the CSA itself chills
access to marijuana
Gettman, 14 [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. Any scheduling of
marijuana in the Controlled Substances Act is a threat to
state
laws
medical marijuana use and
medical marijuana
. 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
If
Congress is willing and able to pass a law providing protection for state programs and medical
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.
why not just remove marijuana from the CSA and
provide such protections?
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
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 halfwill be no legal medical use under federal law until there is FDA approval of corporate, patented, pharmaceutical cannabis products.
.
measures, nor tinkering around with the CSA to provide the appearance
of
action 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
marijuana
is reduced and made much more complicated as tighter controls are
enacted
medical
under state programs
. 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
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
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
It’s time to change
probably not.
or eliminate medical
,
. State level reform has changed the playing field in significant and profound ways.
federal law to address the legitimate needs of patients in every state .
This means
removing marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act
and federal passage of a new
piece of legislation granting every American access to marijuana in a legal regulated market.
Specific engagement with the nuances of institutional reform serves
to repurpose broader systems towards desirable ends
Ferguson, 11 [Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, 11 (The Uses of Neoliberalism,
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp 166–184]
If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of
grounded political struggle—not only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to
change it —then there is much to be said for focusing, as I have here, on
mundane, real-
world debates around policy and politics, even if doing so inevitably puts us on the
compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high ground of
revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also insist that there is more at stake in the examples I have discussed here
than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically poor, or a technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine
victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There
is much in
the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries that
would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance
from the issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the “informal”, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to
pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the
vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor, ¶ in a context where many of the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible
for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding the mass support that alone could make it a
central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the technocrats’ dreams of relieving
poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit pale and washed out,
compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and lately
personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming).¶ My
real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has
little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is
most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that they illustrate a process
through which specific governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become
used to associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda
(“neoliberalism”) may be in the process of being peeled away from that agenda, and put to very
different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of
developing new progressive arts of government , ought to find this turn of events of
considerable interest.¶ As Steven Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question the
assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic “neoliberal” politicaleconomic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific “neoliberal” techniques , on the other.
Close attention to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by
supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case, fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the
relationship between the technical and the political-economic “ is much more polymorphous and unstable
than is assumed in much critical geographical work”, and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact
“deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I suggested in referencing the
role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare states, social technologies need not have any essential or
eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed. Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no
essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial measure) because it was
available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use. Specific
ways of solving or posing governmental
problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an almost
infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as with any other sort of technology, it is not
the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do. ¶ Foucault (2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality
by insisting that the
answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet another search
through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation . “[I]f
there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But
invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of
bricolage (Le ́vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally
intended for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we
might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such tinkering, keeping all the
while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what
kinds of purposes they might serve . If we can go beyond seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil
essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific governmental
techniques , we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed, and put to work
in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word. If
so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first
appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.
Institutions are inevitable and pragmatic engagement best facilitates
change – deferring responsibility for the sake of philosophical
interrogation leads to policy failure
Themba-Nixon 2K – Makani Themba-Nixon, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy
Means for Organizing,” Colorlines. Oakland: Jul 31, 2000. Vol. 3, Iss. 2; pg. 12
Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing
the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated
from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win
racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and
double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding
In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation.
priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us
know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about
Many of us were too busy to tune
into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members
are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being
pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this . And so we got involved in policyas defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight
with initiatives of our own . Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth
development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way
onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for
community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco
industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems
and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention
policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher
moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors.
These are just a few of the examples that
demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national
policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target
of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots
organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their
constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is
quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually
than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty.
constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local
Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the
areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences
to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for
accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still,
there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized
environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will
require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for.
Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive
manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real
consequences if the agreement is broken . After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a
handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the
technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot
initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy
work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of
government.
organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation.
we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring
us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so.
Perhaps most important,
Situating educational experimentation in the context of political
actions reframes agency in a mutually beneficial way
Zanotti 14 (Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and
teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and
the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency
in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304, obtained via school library being
awesome.)
In a similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has highlighted
the problematic aspects of assessing
political agency based upon actors’ intention and focused on contexts as the yardstick for
assessing political actions . 79 For Steele, ‘‘as actors practice their agency within the space of a
public sphere, intentionality—at best—becomes dynamic as new spaces in that sphere open up.
Intentions, even if they are genuine, become largely irrelevant in such a dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm
of human interaction.’’ 80 In shifting attention from ‘‘intention’’ to the context that made some
actions possible, Steele sees agency as a ‘‘redescription’’ of existing conditions, rather than the
total ‘‘rejection’’ of or ‘‘opposition’’ to a totalizing ‘‘script.’’ As a consequence, Steele advocates ‘‘pragmatist humility’’
for politicians and scholars as well. 81 In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and
multifarious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated
responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of power aimed at the construction of new
openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which are always to
an extent unpredictable. Political agency here is not imagined as a quest for individual
authenticity in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive Leviathan aimed at the creation of a
‘‘better totality’’ where subjects can float freed of ‘‘oppression,’’ or a multitude made into a
unified ‘‘subject’’ will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent
social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with freedom non-substantialist positions
open the way for conceptualizing political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis.
The ethical virtue that is called for is ‘‘pragmatist humility,’’ that is the patience of playing with the cards that are
dealt to us, enacting redescriptions and devising
tactics for tinkering 82 with
what exists in specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their critical
stance, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist
ontologies that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay
processes of coconstitution and the importance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very
space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically limit the possibility for
imagining political agency outside the liberal straightjacket. They represent international liberal biopolitical
and governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively
oppress ‘‘subjects,’’ that are in turn imagined as free ‘‘by nature.’’ Transformations of power modalities through
multifarious tactics of hybridization and redescriptions are not considered as options. The complexity of
politics is reduced to homogenizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements
are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments.
Our rhetorical strategy attempts to channel the process of
competition into a productive politics – retaining a forum of
argumentative disagreement retains debates radical potential
Crosswhite 2 (James Crosswhite, Professor, Department of English, University of Oregon,
Ph.D. Philosophy, UC San Diego, B.A. Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz, “Conflict in Concert: Fighting
Hannah Arendt's Good Fight,” JAC, 22(4), Fall 2002, pp.948-959,
http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol22.4/crosswhite-conflict.pdf)
Early in her essay, and again at the end, Roberts-Miller shakes hands with her opponent and acknowledges that there is a legitimate
grievance against agonistic rhetoric. The basic problem with valuing agonistic rhetoric is that one seems at the same time to be
promoting mere wrangling. The opponents of agonistic rhetoric have opposed it on these grounds. One
needs a way to
distinguish between agonistic rhetoric that is merely succeed-at-all-costs-andnever-give-in combat and agonistic rhetoric that uses competition and struggle to
accomplish something greater than simple conquest. She is not sure that she has a satisfying way of
addressing this problem, but she cites a passage from John Locke in which the essence of wrangling is that the wranglers are
incapable of changing their minds, of being convinced by opposing arguments. Later in her essay, in her gloss on a passage from
Arendt, she develops this important feature of agonistic discourse: "It is not asymmetric manipulation of others ... it must be a world
into which one enters and by which one can be changed" (593). This is a familiar condition by which argumentation theorists
attempt to delineate just what argumentation is. If
the interlocutors are not willing to change their minds,
then they are not engaged in argumentation. Near the end of her article, she regrets that Arendt did not do more to
distinguish polemical agonism from wrangling, and then she drops the discussion. It would of course be very interesting to hear
more about this. The agonistic/collaborative distinction is made in large part, according to Roberts-Miller herself, because one
cannot distinguish the valuable kind of rhetoric from the destructive kind. If neither Arendt nor Roberts-Miller can address this,
then something is seriously amiss. At this point, it is just impossible not to regret that the last half-century's resurgence of
argumentation theory is not more broadly acknowledged by those who make a profession of rhetoric , writing, and literacy. Chaim
Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca labor carefully in The New Rhetoric to describe what makes possible the "contact of minds"
that is a condition for the possibility of genuine argumentation. Franz van Eemeren and the late Rob Grootendorst worked for years
on their "pragma-dialectical" rules for argumentative discourse. And more recently, in The New Dialectic, Douglas Walton has
systematized his thinking on the rules for argumentative dialogues and distinguished the rules for eristic dialogues from the rules for
inquiry dialogues, deliberative dialogues, and other kinds of argumentative discourse. It would be interesting to know whether
Roberts- Miller would find in this work a way to elaborate the concept of polemical agonism and save it from its indistinguishability
from wrangling. However the threat of agonism's logical indistinguishability from wrangling is only part of the problem. There
also a psychological dimension to the objection to agonistic argumentation. Some people are just
is
psychologically defeated by it. Their experience-in childhood, in a bad marriage, in the course of life in general, or
even in court and with lawyers, and perhaps in education-is to have been outdone by argumentation. It has not been a
way for them to gain a hearing, or a way to negotiate, or a way to resolve conflict, or a way
to learn, or a way to gain self-knowledge. They have succumbed to the threat that Socrates
feared for his own interlocutors- misology, the hatred of arguments-because of the experience of
being constantly defeated by them and by those who wield them with virtuosity .
This is not a problem that can be directly addressed by theorizing and
argumentation , although the theory of argumentation is quite an important part of it. It requires rather a
practical kind of wisdom and virtuous action . When Socrates breaks off the argument with young Theaetetus in
Plato's dialogue of that name, it is because he understands Theaetetus and his condition, the stage of his formation, and the threat of
misology, and because he has the virtue to act on the younger man's behalf,
to keep a space open for his
individual development . One of the less noted objections to agonistic rhetoric is that it damages those who are
defeated by it, that it creates an association between reason and failure, reason and psychological pain. It would be interesting to
hear Roberts-Miller address this objection. What would it take not only to
theorize a logical distinction between
agonistic rhetoric and wrangling but also to make use of the distinction in our practice and
teaching? The central move in Roberts-Miller's deployment of Arendt's thinking is to accept the distinction
between agonistic and collaborative rhetoric but to present arguments that reverse the value hierarchy
that the split sets up: to replace "much of our dislike of conflict with a dislike of consensus." Here
she gives us Arendt at her most Heideggerian. Human beings are beset by a powerful drift toward conformity
that is an evasion of individual responsibility. This drift is not simply a superficial, external conformity but a deep
one in which our thinking becomes the thinking of no one in particular and in which our individual identities meld in an anonymous
social self. Ironically, this conformity is so deep that we can be most social even while most isolated; in fact, conformity depends in
part on a certain kind of isolation, an
unwillingness to express our disagreements and test them by
arguments in some public way. Instead, one's social and institutional identities pretty much
determine how one should think and act on almost all occasions. This conformist sociality is the
absolutization of bureaucracy and the apotheosis of collaborationism. In Arendt's and Roberts-Miller's hands, the idea of the
collaborative takes on all the resonance the word had when it was used of those who capitulated
to the Nazis. One can almost see and hear scenes from The Sorrow and the Pity as one ponders these Arendtian ideas. And, of
course, Arendt's prime exhibit of "collaborative man" is the desk murderer Adolph Eichmann, the perfect administrator
who, even after recognizing his complicity in the murder of millions, could understand his guilt
only as the guilt of obedience to his superiors, the guilt of doing his official duties. Eichmann is the thoroughly
historicist, perfectly formed social constructionist. To the challenge that he should have spoken out against what was going on, he
replied: "Under the circumstances then prevailing such an attitude was not possible. Nor did anyone behave in this fashion. From
my experience I know that the possibility, which was alleged only after the War, of opposing orders is a self-protective fairy tale. "
Arendt's argument depends on Eichmann's words never losing their power to chill us. And so Roberts-Miller looks to Arendt for help
in "replacing our mistrust of conflict with a mistrust of consensus." What Eichmann and collaborationism both lack
is a
capacity for being hospitable to a conflict of ideas. True individuality (and not the passive
isolation of the "personal"; even Eichmann was not "personally" in favor of the persecution of the Jews) requires
active political interaction that involves conflict and competition and the struggle and testing of
competing perspectives in argumentation. True individuality requires risk-the exposure of our
individual thoughts to the sometimes painful experience of their public examination. This is the
heroism of thinking. One always risks losing and having to change. However, as Stanley Cavell would point out,
this is also the joy and adventure of individuality: to change, to imagine oneself as on some kind of path, to think of change as
(sometimes painful) transformation. This
conflict, says Roberts-Miller, need not be forced. It is the form taken by open
this
can all take place only when there is some kind of social space for it and when
there are individuals capable of it . And so, says Roberts-Miller, we should trust collaborationism less and look
acknowledgment of difference. We find identities in the course of these conflicts; we set out on paths toward ourselves. And
to the agonism that allows for individuality and openness to difference. In some ways, I am perhaps the worst person to comment on
this argument because I so wholeheartedly endorse it and because my own interest is in amplifying and promoting it. It is hard to
think of what major shift in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies would be more salutary than the one Roberts-Miller is leading us
toward here. However, for just this reason I find her qualifications and reservations about this project almost incomprehensible. A
primary Roberts-Miller fret is that this ideal of agonistic rhetoric is somehow "elitist." In the context of this doubt, she describes
agonism as requiring that one "simultaneously trust and doubt one's perceptions, rely on one's own judgments and consider the
judgments of others, think for oneself and imagine how others think" (597). Now, since she is promoting a greater mistrust of
collaborationism and a greater trust of the agonistic, it is hard to see how this in itself might be "elitist." Nowhere
is a
demonstrated capacity for agonistic rhetoric represented as a qualification for political
participation or social privilege. Why should the mere argument that agonistic rhetoric has
important social, political, and individual value be suspected of furthering some kind of elitism?
If there is a kind of discourse that undermines the thoughtless intellectual and practical
conformity on which totalitarianisms of all kinds depend, and if this kind of discourse develops
human individuality and allows for the expression of the differences on which the idea of a free
society depends, then its value goes way beyond the interests of some elite faction. Part of RobertsMiller' s discussion suggests that perhaps not everyone can engage in Arendtian "thought" of this kind, that the ideal is somehow too
high. However, it is difficult to see how this counts against the ideal. The ideal of informed voters going through careful deliberations
about social and political goods when they vote is also an "elitist" ideal if elitism simply means that not all voters are capable of this.
Many of the most worthwhile social ideals for which human beings strive—tolerance, freedom,
justice—are beyond the current capabilities of many people, even the people that are striving for
them. This does not mean that the ideal cannot orient their thinking and their action or their work on
law and policy – or their teaching and writing. Part of this vague notion that agonistic rhetoric is
somehow elitist rests on a reified and destructively essentialist idea of what human beings are
capable of. To say that agonistic rhetoric is not a kind of thought in which everyone can engage is
to try to confine human beings to a current historical situation and educational system that are
not the results but the causes of this purported incapacity. If agonistic rhetoric is really what Roberts-Miller
says it is, then the point would seem to be to change our educational practices and work tirelessly to
amplify the attractiveness of agonistic rhetoric in all the spheres where it might have some effect.
If there are those who are incapable of both thinking for themselves and imagining how others
think, incapable of the internal dialogue of reason, incapable of the transformation that occurs when we risk
our perspectives in the attempt to understand the perspectives of others (and, as Gadamer says, simply to
understand is to be transformed and partly convinced), then what is education for but to develop the capacity
for this? I take it that someone who sees the truth in Arendt's description of thoughtlessness will not be involved in education that
is simply aimed toward producing efficient laborers who will fill the slots that the reigning bureaucracies have identified as needing
to be filled (see Gadamer 379,567). Roberts-Miller cites a telling passage from Arendt: "As a living experience, thought has always
been assumed, perhaps wrongly, to be known only to the few" (597). First, we must accentuate the "perhaps wrongly!" It is not
presumptuous to believe that people everywhere have struggled to develop Arendtian "thinking," and that they have struggled, too,
to participate in agonistic rhetoric, and that where they have failed to do so, it is because they were held back, either materially or
socially, by design or by misfortune. However, this passage is also reminiscent of the Kantian ideas of freedom and morality. Even
though we have no sense experience of freedom, even though it is an idea of "reason" alone, and so according to Kant should not be a
fact, he still regards freedom as a fact because it is proved by morality itself. And even if no one has ever acted morally, freely, and
Kant at one point openly doubts whether anyone ever has, it would still be a fact because freedom is necessary for morality, and to
deny it altogether is to deny what moral experience we do have. The tradition of critical theory that follows from Kant, the tradition
in which Arendt herself partly stands, makes a great deal of these kinds of ideas. Herbert Marcuse sometimes calls them "utopian,"
but he does this in the context of a rehabilitation of utopian thinking. In his view, whether
utopian ideals are realizable
or not, they still provide a critical standard by which we can measure our current social
condition and the direction in which our political programs are taking us. They provide a
measure. They are partly constitutive of our thought and action, which would be very different
without them. Jiirgen Habermas uses the idea of an ideal speech situation in much the same way. He knows that this idea is
"counterfactual," that there has never in reality been such a situation. However, if it is an illusion, it is a "constitutive
illusion" that gives us a more complete understanding of our actual situation by providing a
measure, for insofar as our actual communicative situations fail to realize this ideal, they are
potentially criticizable. It is finally up to actual interlocutors to decide how much falling short is tolerable in each situation.
Agonistic rhetoric and Arendtian thought are themselves ideas of this sort, capable of lighting up a
direction for educational efforts and providing a measure for the actual thinking and
communication we are attempting to understand and evaluate. They are not the only such ideas,
but as Roberts-Miller argues, they are significant ones, and, I would add, significantly undervalued
just now, when cultural and political and economic conflicts are too easily
conceptualized-on all sides-on the model of a clash of civilizations which only
violence can adequately address . As Arendt wrote: "We do not know where ... developments will lead us, but we
know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence" (87). Power, for Arendt, is the ability to
act in concert, and the agonistic rhetoric of the public sphere is the ability to have conflict-inconcert. The issue is not elitism. The issue on an educational level is how to address the situation of
those who have not yet developed their capacity for this kind of thinking and argumentation-and
I don't believe that there is a general educational-bureaucratic solution or a scientific pedagogy
that will come to the rescue here. I am much more inclined to the Socratic view that you have to know the psyche with
which you are dealing. Because individuals vary so greatly in their psychological formation
around experiences of argumentative discourse, and because the rhetorical
psyche also fractures along all the usual multiple and unsystematic lines of race,
gender, and so on, this will always be a matter that individual teachers must
address with individuals and classes as best they can-and against whatever
educational-bureaucratic power has installed itself and its general "solutions" at the time. The
issue on a political level is always to fight to keep this public sphere open . The
courage and vigilance required here have not been exaggerated. There are a few other remaining challenges
in Roberts-Miller's argument. In her own polemical agonism, she exaggerates the distinction between the agonistic and the
collaborative. Anyone who thinks through the relation between agonistic and collaborative rhetoric more thoroughly will find a great
deal of the collaborative in the agonistic and the agonistic in the collaborative – enough, perhaps, to begin to destabilize the
distinction itself. In fact, agonistic
rhetoric may require a depth of cooperation and mutual practical
respect that collaborative rhetoric does not. After all, the practical respect required to go on
discoursing with someone who does not agree with you requires a more profound moral relation
than that required to go on speaking with someone with whom you are reaching an agreement.
There are many other deep interactions and inter-identities to be explored in these concepts. Any program that would
follow from Roberts-Miller's arguments would have to be aware of these to be practicable at anything more than
an abstract level. In fact, it is here that we encounter another of the formal ironies in Roberts-Miller's approach. At her most
polemical moment, when she begins the hyperdistinguishing that finds a new binary in agonistic rhetoric itself, she at the same time
begins to reconcile the social and the individual, the collaborative and the agonistic. The new pair is persuasive agonism (associated
with John Gage) and polemical agonism (associated with Hannah Arendt). Persuasive
agonism is aimed at gaining
the agreement of others and so the criterion of its success is persuasion. Polemical agonismis
aimed partly at the invention and clarification of the ideas themselves, as well as at their public
testing and further develop ment. The criterion of success is the quality of the subsequent
controversy. Although this distinction doesn't quite capture the Gagean position (since Gage describes the argumentation he
teaches as a way of discovering the best grounds for a position), it does allow Roberts-Miller a very interesting
and Quintilianesque move that tells us how speaking well is different from speaking persuasively,
for persuasion is not the ultimate goal. Polemical agonism is not the asymmetric work of
a single rhetor bent on overpowering an interlocutor in a competition. Instead, its
success lies in the continuing agreement of the conflicting parties to persevere in
argumentation, to go on testing ideas together . This new distinction allows Roberts-Miller to find in
polemical agonism a deeper kind of "collaboration," a conflict-in-concert. Polemical agonism is not the
simple resolution of conflict in agreement but the continuation of conflict in a creative and
valuable way, a way of having conflict that requires deep kinds of cooperation. Now, one could try to undermine this new pair in
the usual ways. For example, it is difficult to imagine how polemical agonism would take place unless it somehow integrated
persuasive agonism. Without
the provisional goal of persuasion, it is hard to see how polemical
agonism could achieve its aim of sustaining a high quality of public controversy. The athletic analogy
comes to mind here. We play to win because that is how the best playing gets
accomplished . And in the end this is the position Roberts-Miller herself takes when she writes that Arendtian rhetoric
leads not to ultimate Truth but to decisions, for decisions come only when we do come to
agreement, only when an argument does persuade--and yet, as Roberts-Miller also points out, these
decisions must be reconsidered later, and so a continuing controversy must be possible. This
is certainly an integrating of the polemical and the persuasive. Perhaps the most striking fact about Roberts-Miller's overall
argument is not just that it is so timely and appropriate but that it implicitly forecasts a reconvention of rhetoric itself. I have already
mentioned that argumentation studies have for the last half-century labored to develop theories of argumentation that would
capture much of what Roberts-Miller needs to flesh out this case for agonistic rhetoric and to distinguish it from wrangling.
However, this work is still too little known among rhetoricians and receives little detailed attention in their literature. Yet, it
represents perhaps the greatest development of rhetoric in our lifetimes. And then, from another side, there
has been a
complicated and troubling discussion of the relations among language, discourse, power, and
violence that would intensify and deepen this worry that Roberts-Miller has about domination and
wrangling. From Walter Benjamin through Arendt's own important elaboration of the distinction between power
and violence, through the conversation between Levinas and Derrida on metaphysics and violence, to Foucault's
back and forth on power and violence, all the way to two recent books on just this issue, Beatrice Hanssen's Critique of Violence and
Hent De Vries's Religion and Violence-both of which
try to organize and sustain the controversy on exactly
the issue of the difference between debate and discussion, on the one hand, and domination and
violence and entrenched antagonisms on the other-the ideal of something like an agonistic
rhetoric has been at stake. At the unstable center of this highly developed controversy, the difference and identity
of violence and power hold sway. Arendt had a big stake in this, and insisted on the difference between power and violence and on a
polemical agonism
helps to sustain societies in which power keeps violence at bay . When Foucault was confronted
form of power in which people could act in concert-a form of power not at all unrelated to the way
with Arendt's idea, he of course could not consent to this valorizing even of the provisional consensus that comes out of polemical
agonism because Foucault had great difficulty acknowledging that power might not involve domination. His finessing of the issue
was to say that "perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality" (379). As Derrida finesses the
same issue, one can hope to avoid only "the worst violence" and hope "to choose the lesser violence within an economy of violence"
(152, 313n.). Is it utopian to imagine that Roberts-Miller's call for a new trust of conflict, a call for an integration of Arendt's
"thought" into rhetorical studies, might be a forecast of a more general call to reconvene rhetoric itself, to call back argumentation
studies and the now decades-long conflicts in critical theory and post-structuralism into the history of rhetoric, where they belong?
There are powerful arguments to be made on behalf of the general approach of Hannah Arendt to show how discourse-and
argumentation in particular-can be a way of having conflict, conflict that might otherwise
be carried out in actual violence or some other kind of overt domination . And not only
are there powerful arguments to be made, but there are powerful attractions in the kind of sociality opened
up by those discursive practices, many of them described in a compelling way by Roberts-Miller. One can always
take the critical position and search out the domination lurking in every concrete experience of
peace and freedom, but this is only natural. Real wisdom lies in knowing when and where to do
this. In the end, thinking all of this through will mean seeing how agonism thought through
becomes acting-in-concert and how the critique of domination thought through becomes, as
Foucault shows in his refusal of both polemics and of consensus, a way of keeping the fight going. There is reason to
believe that the recent popular favoring of collaboration is a kind of practical acting-out of a fear of domination, but a discourse
founded in a vision that sees only domination in agonistic rhetoric and so has to seclude itself in
a carefully controlled process of deindividualization so only the collaborative can dominate will
not easily survive this thinking-through. Whether and how an agonism motivated by the ideals so well expressed by Patricia
Roberts-Miller in her essay will itself survive a careful thinking-through remains to be seen. But she has my fighting gratitude for
making such a thought-provoking case.
The ballot is a referendum of the desirability of our heuristic of
government as it pertains the desirability of legalization – this
channels debate into a recognition of difference that otherwise erupts
into open hostility
Kalyvas, 09 (Andreas Kalyvas, Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of
Politics, The New School for Social Research, Ph.D. Political Science, Columbia University, M.A.
Columbia University, B.A. National and Kapodistrian, University of Athens, Greece, “The
Democratic Narcissus: The Agonism of the Ancients Compared to that of the (Post)Moderns,” in
Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap, Ashgate Publishing, 2009, p.31-36, Google
Book)
Undoubtedly, the emphasis on disagreement, contestation and strife remains constant in contemporary agonistic theories and testifies to a conceptual
continuity. Agonism,
ancient and 'postmodern" alike, consists of confrontational strategies and
adversarial acts. Both Ancients and ‘postmoderns' view political conflict as central to democracy. They understand
politics as the enactment of public disagreement and dissent . Reminiscent of classical agonism's
inclusion of the lower popular social strata into political adversarial contests, 'postmodern' agonism solicits the inclusion of
difference and otherness in the public realm. Its call for the politicization of identities
echoes ancient agonism's politicization of Narcissus. It incites a multiplicity of particularities
and cultures to participate within a common symbolic space and display themselves in the
course of public debate and political strife against each other. Notwithstanding these affinities and continuities, the
current revival of the agon in political theory does not suggest a nostalgic appeal to a pre-modern Greek past. It does not indicate yet another neoclassical revival. Quite the opposite. I would argue, it represents a 'de-Hellenization’ of agonism, a considerable divestment of its ancient significations
and a radical redefinition. At least four broad changes are involved in the post-structural appropriation. Although they do not appear together in all
contemporary agonistic theories, they indicate certain of their most vocal and influential properties. First, there
is a comprehensive
shift regarding the subject of the agon from the individual person to the identity of a group, that
is, to a collective entity with a shared sense of existence (but see Deranty and Renault in this volume).
‘Postmodern’ agonism focuses on ‘contending identities' or 'opposing hegemonic projects’ rather
than concrete individuals and their narcissistic urges (Connolly 1991, 166: Mouffe 2005, 21). Whereas for the Ancients,
the agon was predominantly understood and practised in personalistic idioms, for the contemporary proponents it designates
mostly subject positions and relationships of collective identity formation. For instance, Honig (1995,155)
writes ‘agonistic feminism also departs from the implied individualism of Arendt’s pariah ... The identities engaged by agonistic feminists are shared,
public practices not merely markers of individual personalities.’ After the long-fought battles against the theo-philosophy of the subject and free will,
this de-centring of ancient agonism and its disassociation from agonistic individualism should not come as a surprise. Second, and quite predictably,
the strong connotations of masculinity and the aesthetics of manliness are denounced and often replaced by an expressivist concept of agonistic
subjectivity, with a much greater emphasis on playfulness, virtuosity, acting and gaming ( fully 1999; Huizinga 1950, 11). With the ‘postmoderns', the
actor comes to replace the athlete: the dancer and the flute-player supplant the wrestler and the boxer. Equally telling is the purge of the agon from its
archaic and classical invocations of heroism. The ‘postmodern’ agon 'does not usually take heroism’ (Connolly 2008, 209); it seeks to be post- or antiheroic. It does not describe extraordinary acts and exceptional endeavours beyond measure. And although an aesthetical appreciation is still expressed
in certain agonistic theories today, something their critics are always eager to point out. it is of an altogether different kind. Neither masculine nor
martial, ‘postmodern’
agonism seems at times to indulge in the celebration of diversity, fluid
identities and dissension. Third, the concrete outcome of ancient contest, the telos of the agon - to
win by defeating one's opponents is almost being displaced in favour of the more
abstract notion of disruption, subversion, and perpetual contestation of existing power
relations, fixed identities, and closed meanings. Here, the reason for this change could be the anti-teleological current in
post-structural thinking, its critique of philosophies of history and its commitment to contingency and indeterminacy. Whereas in antiquity the political
agon was intrinsically related to victory and success and as a type of performance it clearly consisted of instrumental and utilitarian significations, in
contemporary theories agonism
becomes conflated to pure performativity. independently of concrete
outcomes. Fourth, the gains or benefits of agonism have also shifted. From a positive contest for
greatness, glory and prominence, the agon is mostly converted into a reactive resistance
against the negative and anti-political forces of rational consensus, deliberation, neutrality and
abstract universalism, often associated to liberal normative discourses. The broader agonistic
effects of social admiration and praise are retrofitted and transformed into a struggle for
inclusion, recognition and respect (Connolly 1995b, note 40, 235). In certain cases, however, this transfiguration retains some of its
past connotations, as for instance in Honig's (1995, 159) suggestion for an alternative reading of ‘distinction*, which draws nearer to the Ancients: ‘The
agonal passion for distinction, which so moved Arendt’s theoretical account, may also be read as a struggle for individuation, for emergence as a
distinct self.' These four moves
away from ancient democratic agonism suggest a radical re-orientation
toward questions of power and culture, identity formation and exclusion. What the anthropological narcissistic
drive was for the ancients, identity and its exclusion are for the ‘postmodems*. Hence, a key theoretical innovation of the
‘postmodern’ accounts is to have brought into attention the relevance of identity and difference
to agonistic politics. Agonal democracy, in its various guises, addresses the possibility of
constructing a relatively stable, plural and inclusive political order without generating sameness
and an oppressive consensus, that is, without eradicating disagreement and contestation in the
name of an over-assertive and universal good, it is still participatory and democratic. Politicization and
conflict become the vital mechanisms of political inclusion and social integration in the face of pluralism and diversity. The ‘postmodern* agon provides
a relative solution to this predicament as the classical agon was a solution to the conundrum of narcissism and civic virtue, the tension between the
drive for pre-eminence and the principle of equality. For contemporary approaches, exclusion represents the main threat to politics. Against this risk,
agonistic contest is treated as a force that disturbs, relativizes and de-naturalizes the fixity of established identities, allowing for a more hospitable and
inclusive attitude toward the other. Agonistic practices, it is argued, ‘challenge existing distributions of power, disrupt the hegemonic social, and
proliferate political spaces when they interrupt the routine, predictability, and repetition on which ... dominant patterns of private realm identity
depend' (Honig 1993b, 532; Connolly 1991, 193, 200). Inclusion and respect for the other is the ultimate prize of this kind of agonism and democracy is
praised for the space it creates within which a greater expression of identities is realized through their confrontational interactions. ‘Postmodern’
agonism, therefore, expresses the hope that the politicization of difference and the intensification of strife will foster inclusion, secure plurality, and
safeguard differences (Honig 1993b, 532; Connolly 2004, 510-11). In its strongest version, agonism cultivates an ethical respect for one's opponent and
keeps open the politics of renewal and augmentation. William Connolly expresses this faith better than anyone else, when he asserts that: in a
democratic, pluralizing ethos, agents of enactment would exercise a certain forbearance in pressing their claims, and agents of reception would exercise
a reciprocal generosity in responding to productions that disrupt what they arc. This agonistic reciprocity is the pathos of distance in politics. (Connolly
1995b, 193; see also, Connolly 2005, 123-8) This optimism is coupled by a dear normative orientation, shared by most agonistic theories today.
Democratic agonism does not seek to describe real existing democracies but rather to point at a normative vision. Democracy ought to be a permanent
and open-ended contest among identities and particularities struggling over self-affirmation, recognition, inclusion, power distribution and the
definition of collective meaning. If one probes deeper, one discovers that this normative ideal is derived from the fundamental value ascribed to the
principle of the greatest inclusion of differences, which itself presupposes a particular ontology of life. Life is abundant, plural and rich and so should be
the best political regime. This celebration of otherness and the worth of its inclusion in the public realm is perhaps one of the most original aspects of
contemporary agonistic theories compared to the Ancients. It is here that the departure from ancient democratic agonism becomes more poignant. I
only can briefly clarify certain crucial points of divergence, in need of further elaboration elsewhere. The first pertains to a
certain optimism
of the ‘postmodern’ agonists that departs significantly from the pessimism that informed ancicnt agonistic culture. This discrepancy is
due, I think, to the fact that contemporary theories have disassociated the agon from the logic of winning and
losing, of victory and defeat, pain and agony. It is as if no one wins and, respectively, no one
loses; or better, for the ‘postmodems’ everybody wins. The experience of defeat is eliminated
from the democratic agon and with it the feelings of shame and humiliation,
stigmatization and inner exclusion which the ancient agon generated. Also lost is the motivation
for victory, with its symbolic pleasures, libidinal investment and civic rewards. Likewise, contemporary
discourses on agonism, with the exception of Chantal Mouffe, have done away with the realistic attitude of the Ancients toward the inexorable presence
of Narcissus in the human and the individual urge to distinguish oneself from others. It should be reminded that ancient democratic agonism was
primarily a form of a necessary, pragmatic accommodation informed by a mytho- philosophical anthropology. It was based on a descriptive
understanding of human nature and for this reason it lacked the celebration of otherness that is so central to contemporary approaches. In fact,
agonistic theories today assume that conflict will mostly be good and advantageous as they interconnect and bind rivals together and cultivate respect
among contending identities. This assumption, however, remains to be proven. What guarantees that conflict will make identities more receptive and
respectful to otherness instead of inducing them to an existential entrenchment by closing up on themselves in an effort to defend their views, values,
and ways of life, especially when they are confronted with more powerful identities? Disagreement and
confrontation might as
well accentuate differences by making collective identities better realize what they do not share
with others and what unique beliefs and axiological world-views distinguish them from their
opponents (Wenman 2003, 172-4). Agonism could as well foster exclusion rather than inclusion. It is not clear, therefore, why conflict
destabilizes and challenges the fixity of group identities, encouraging the inclusion of and respect for ethical and cultural differences.
Politicization could lead to polarization, the polemization of political contests, to hostility and
aggression, and finally to factionalization and violent dissolution (Deveaux 1999, 15; Schaap 2007,
68). This precisely is what many thinkers and historians in the course of Western political theory
perceived as the fatal cause of the decline of ancient democracies. For this reason the Ancients
developed a complex institutional system, what I described as a counter-narcissistic legal
apparatus, to contain the agony of agonism as they were worried about the destructive effects of
the agon. The ‘postmoderns’ do not exhibit the same institutional imagination as they primarily share a
positive view of political contest and public confrontation. Hence, an institutional and legal deficit is evident in their approaches. Adopting a rather
abstract and normative discourse they tend to subordinate political reality and the intricacies of institutional design to philosophical speculation. As a
result, the institutionalization of agonal democracy remains an unfulfilled promise (Schaap 2007, 68-9). Finally, by eliminating Narcissus from the
agon, ‘postmodern’ theories dispense with a theory of civic motivation like the one developed by the Ancients. Given the fact that the agonistic politics
of confrontation and contestation might be quite demanding, arduous and sometimes painful, contemporary perspectives cannot account for those who
might chose a more passive, peaceful, and tranquil non- political life. Especially so, when ‘postmodern' agonism endorses plural identities, which
means, it accepts a plurality of cultural, ethical and religious groups, some which may not appreciate the political life of the agon as fitting to their
particular world-views, values and beliefs. Would then democratic agonism appeal to the superiority of a singular concept of the good, that of the agon,
at the detriment of all those identities that opt for a non-agonistic, consensual, even private life (Deveaux 1999, 5; Connolly 2008, 210)?
Without the passions of the Narcissus and an appropriate institutional structure that drives
individuals to compete and struggle for greatness by participating and accomplishing
positive deeds for their political community, ‘postmodern’ theories of agonism face an important
challenge: to reconcile the worth of the agon with a plurality of identities that may not be as
sympathetic or inclined to confrontational and argumentative politics. These differences
between the two kinds of democratic agonism, however, should not be overstated nor projected
to the entire range of ‘postmodern’ agonistic theories. In fact, in one particular version the spirit of
classical democratic agonism re-asserts itself, even if indirectly and reluctantly. Mere I have in mind Chantal
Mouffe’s work, which stands apart from the other theories of agonism although it certainly
shares certain central ontological and political attributes. Mouffe’s approach is predominantly pragmatic
rather than normative or celebratory and here lies its core affinity with the Ancients and its
disagreement with her contemporaries. The value and merit of democratic agonism does not
pertain merely to how inclusive it is or how many differences it incorporates into
the public sphere. Instead, Mouffe recognizes the inexorable fact of exclusion and its necessary
role in consolidating collective identities and political unity. Contrary to other contemporary thinkers of democratic
agonism. Mouffe (2005, 15-16) takes seriously the irreducibility of an outside that can neither be fully
incorporated, eradicated or repressed. And since there is no objective, transcendental or rational ground to reconcile or overcome
differences, antagonism remains ineradicable in political life, an everlasting presence and challenge to politics. For Mouffe, the main
task of radical democracy is to allow agonism while taming and containing antagonism. Agonism
is precisely what makes possible the conflictual character of politics without falling into a
destructive war of all against all. By turning the enemy into an adversary and antagonism into
agonism, democracy enables a regulated conflict among competing hegemonic projects to unfold
while taming its disruptive and destructive tendencies (Mouffe 2005,20): Envisaged from the point of view of ‘agonistic
pluralism', the aim of democratic politics is to construct the ‘them’ in such a way that is no longer
perceived as an enemy to be destroyed but as an adversary, that is, somebody whose ideas we
combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question . (Mouffe 2000.
102) Mouffe’s agonistic democracy seeks to avoid both de-politicization and over- politicization in
an effort to keep political confrontation alive without being destroyed by it. The agon, which
occupies a middle position between deliberative models of rational consensus on
the one hand and identity politics on the other, aims at deflating conflicts through
inclusion and politicization but without erasing them. Reminiscent of the Ancients’ realism that the narcissistic passion to
excel may engulf politics if left to its own devices, Mouffe’s (2005. 21) version is predicated on a similar prudential rule that ‘antagonistic conflicts are
by
directly discussing the role and significance of passions and affects in politics, Mouffe moves closer to the
Ancients with her psychoanalytically oriented approach that takes into consideration the libidinal
forces of identification, reminiscent of the force of Narcissus. Agonistic democracy acknowledges the
libidinal pleasure of identification while it seeks to curb its dangerous and violent
impulses. ‘Understood in an agonistic way’, she claims, ‘democratic institutions can contribute
less likely to emerge as long as agonistic legitimate political channels for dissenting voices exist’ (but see Breen in this volume). In addition,
to this disarming of the libidinal forces leading towards hostility which are always
present in human societies’ (MoufTe 2005, 26). Without the good Eris (agonism/the adversary) there is only a bad Eris
(antagonism/the enemy). Agonal plural democracy aims to transform conflict into a form of regulated
public contest in order to avoid the eruption of violent antagonisms into politics . Thus,
Mouffe’s pragmatic and realist theory of plural c democracy, informed by a similar awareness of the threatening and unpredictable potentialities of the
political, retains certain affinities with classical democratic agonism, mediating between Ancients and ‘postmodems’.
Legal strategy is a process and a constant struggle, not an end-point –
risks of cooption, rollback and masking exist only because
progressives turned away from state-based legal strategies.
Lobel, 7 - Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego (Orly, “THE PARADOX OF
EXTRALEGAL ACTIVISM: CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE
POLITICS“ HARVARD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 120:937,
http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf)
Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform. Although
the new
extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to legal reform models and as capable of
producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited improvement in
existing social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be explained in terms of the most profound
risk of the typology — that of legitimation. The common pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an
inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to
assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities translate into a more complete
transformation. This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to rely on an aggregate approach
— an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something substantial. In fact, the
myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of change being produced , while the broader
pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential
of change. There are few instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic
arrangements and macro-redistribution. Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as though the
scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become
related and part of a whole through mere reframing. At the same time, the
elephant in the room — the rising level of
economic inequality — is left unaddressed and comes to be understood as natural and
inevitable .225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists decry as losers’
self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the
product of their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing
the boundaries of their willed reality. The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often
fundamentally performative, obscuring the distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The
manifestations of extralegal activism — the law and organizing model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and
norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate nongovernmental sphere of action — all produce a fantasy that
change can be brought about through small-scale, decentralized transformation .
The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the audience is national and global. In the
context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which
utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works on American cities and neighborhoods in
trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each individual story could translate into a “time of the nation” body of
knowledge and motivation.227 In contemporary legal thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger,
translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new localstatenational federations have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary
federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth century are in decline.228 There is, therefore, an absence of links between the local
and the national, an absent intermediate public sphere, which has been termed “the missing middle” by Professor Theda
Skocpol.229 New social movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing significant institutional
change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the ideas of contingency,
pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale dynamics simply an evasion of the
need to engage in broader substantive debate? It is important for next-generation progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a
critical legal consciousness, to recognize that not all extralegal associational life is transformative. We must differentiate, for
example, between inward-looking groups, which tend to be self- regarding and depoliticized, and social movements that participate
in political activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing realities.231 We must differentiate between
professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments of the community.232 As
described above, extralegal activism tends to operate on a more divided and hence a smaller scale than earlier social movements,
which had national reform agendas. Consequently, within critical discourse there is a need to recognize the limited capacity of smallscale action. We should question the narrative that imagines consciousness-raising as directly translating into action and action as
directly translating into change. Certainly not
every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is
questionable whether forms of activism that are opposed to programmatic reconstruction of a
social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when groups are situated in
opposition to any form of institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they
are fighting against and merely producing moot activism that settles for what seems
possible within the narrow space that is left in a rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is
consequently coopted, and contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of selfmystification. V. RESTORING CRITICAL OPTIMISM IN THE LEGAL FIELD “La critique est aisée; l’art difficile.” A critique of
cooptation often takes an uneasy path. Critique has always been and remains not simply an intellectual
exercise but a political and moral act. The question we must constantly pose is how critical
accounts of social reform models contribute to our ability to produce scholarship and action that
will be constructive. To critique the ability of law to produce social change is inevitably to
raise the question of alternatives . In and of itself, the exploration of the limits of law and the search for new
possibilities is an insightful field of inquiry. However, the contemporary message that emerges from critical
legal consciousness analysis has often resulted in the distortion of the critical arguments
themselves. This distortion denies the potential of legal change in order to illuminate
what has yet to be achieved or even imagined . Most importantly, cooptation analysis is not
unique to legal reform but can be extended to any process of social action and engagement.
When claims of legal cooptation are compared to possible alternative forms of activism, the
false necessity embedded in the contemporary story emerges — a story that privileges informal
extralegal forms as transformative while assuming that a conservative tilt exists in formal legal
paths. In the triangular conundrum of “law and social change,” law is regularly the first to be questioned, deconstructed, and then
critically dismissed. The other two components of the equation — social and change — are often presumed to be immutable and
unambiguous. Understanding
the limits of legal change reveals the dangers of absolute reliance on
one system and the need, in any effort for social reform, to contextualize the discourse, to
avoid evasive, open-ended slogans, and to develop greater sensitivity to indirect effects and
multiple courses of action. Despite its weaknesses, however, law is an optimistic discipline. It
operates both in the present and in the future. Order without law is often the privilege of the strong. Marginalized groups
have used legal reform precisely because they lacked power. Despite limitations, these groups
have often successfully secured their interests through legislative and judicial victories. Rather
than experiencing a disabling disenchantment with the legal system, we can learn from both the
successes and failures of past models, with the aim of constantly redefining the
boundaries of legal reform and making visible law’s broad reach.
2ac
AT: Second off
Cole memo Fails
Kamin, 14 [Sam Kamin, Professor and Director, Constitutional Rights and Remedies
Program, University of Denver, Sturm College of Law; J.D., Ph.D., University of California,
Berkeley, “Cooperative Federalism and State Marijuana Regulation”, University of Colorado Law
Review, Fall, 85 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1105, Lexis]
II. A Step in the Right Direction - But Problems Remain By forestalling, at least for now, the threat of federal injunctive suit, the second Cole memo removed much of the
uncertainty that has governed federal-state interaction in this area for the last five years. Although the memo was too long in coming, it made clear that the federal government
would give the states an opportunity to prove themselves capable of managing the negative externalities of marijuana legalization, regulation, and taxation. As such, it is a
no similar memorandum could remove the ancillary consequences of marijuana remaining a Schedule I narcotic under the CSA.
As marijuana-law reform moves from a focus on medical use to an increasing emphasis on adult or recreational use, it confronts the
consequences of marijuana's continuing federal prohibition. This Part sets forth some of the principal problems caused by
marijuana's continued prohibition before turning to a solution in the next Part. A. Consequences for the Industry 1. Contracting
Because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, much of the predictability that comes
from enforceable contracts is unavailable to marijuana practitioners. In 2012, for example,
an Arizona state court refused to enforce a loan agreement between two Arizona residents and a
Colorado marijuana dispensary on the basis that the contract was void as against public policy.
positive, cooperative vision for the future of marijuana regulation in this country. n32 But the second Cole memo did not - and
n33 Although this ruling had the effect of [*1114] providing a windfall to the illegally-operating dispensary, the court felt itself without recourse; so long as the trafficking of
marijuana remains illegal under federal law, contracts designed to facilitate that conduct remain void. This result reminds us why the
enforceability of
contracts is important not just to the parties but to society more generally. When those who have loaned $ 500,000 (the amount in issue
in the Arizona case) to a cash business find themselves without recourse to the courts, they might be tempted to engage in what the law euphemistically refers to as "self-help."
2. Banking Marijuana businesses are
also currently denied one of the most basic of business needs: access to banking services. As has been widely reported, n34 threats
of money-laundering prosecution from the federal government n35 have made banks gun-shy
about lending to marijuana businesses. Currently, in Colorado, no bank will do business with
marijuana businesses. n36 There are many negative consequences of withholding banking services
from marijuana businesses. Principally, the lack of banking services keeps marijuana businesses
operating in the shadows of society. As cash businesses, they are targets for violent crime. Faced with
Everyone is better off when contracts are enforced by courts rather than by individuals with an ax to grind.
this ever-present threat, marijuana business operators are left with [*1115] a Hobson's choice: they can either remain cash businesses and accept the risk and stigma that comes
with that, or they can attempt to bank surreptitiously, through the use of their personal accounts or holding companies designed to purge the taint of marijuana transactions.
These latter options, of course, open practitioners to the same threat of money-laundering charges that led to the unavailability of banking services in the first place. The
governors of Colorado and Washington appealed to the federal government for assistance with this problem, n37 and in February of 2014 the Department of Justice and the
Department of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network released memos purporting to permit banks to do business with those in the marijuana industry. n38
the banking memos, like the second Cole memo which preceded it, stopped short of removing the specter of
future enforcement actions. n39 One leading bank official was immediately quoted as saying, "We're still not going to bank them." n40 3. Legal
Services The legal minefield described in the previous Section calls out for experienced legal counsel to help marijuana practitioners negotiate the complicated, everchanging web of marijuana rules and regulations. Marijuana's continuing illegality makes the provision of these legal
services particularly fraught, however. As long as marijuana remains a prohibited substance and as long as the CSA continues to criminalize those who aid and abet marijuana distribution
or [*1116] join in a conspiracy to distribute it - lawyers who assist their marijuana clients in setting
up or running marijuana businesses necessarily put themselves at risk. Although the second Cole memo declares that
states decriminalizing marijuana would generally be permitted to enforce marijuana laws themselves, the specter of federal prosecution
of marijuana lawyers for aiding and abetting the illegal conduct of their clients continues to
loom . Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.2(d) n41 and its state analogs prohibit attorneys from knowingly facilitating criminal conduct. A literal reading of that rule
However,
would preclude a lawyer from providing any assistance - e.g., drafting contracts, negotiating leases - to clients whom the attorney knows are engaged in on-going violations of the
CSA. In fact, there is a split of authority among those states that have considered whether providing legal services to the marijuana industry violates a lawyer's obligations under
the rules of professional responsibility. n42 Colorado, having previously found such conduct to violate its state ethics rules, n43 later amended those [*1117] rules to explicitly
permit lawyers to serve marijuana industry clients. n44 As I have argued elsewhere, I believe that other, countervailing policy considerations argue against such a literal reading
of Rule 1.2(d) and its state-law equivalents. n45 Because states that are legalizing marijuana - either for medical patients or for adult users - are creating a complex regulatory
apparatus, fairness requires the assistance of lawyers in navigating that system. Without the assistance of competent counsel, a state regulatory regime becomes a trap for the
unwary. Furthermore, denying competent legal counsel to those engaged in the marijuana industry can have profound distributive effects. Powerful actors will be able either to
secure legal assistance or to proceed without it; those without the same means will necessarily be disadvantaged and subject to considerable risk. Nonetheless,
marijuana's continuing federal illegality means that attorneys may be unwilling to serve those
who are in critical need of legal services. B. Consequences for Marijuana Users While negative externalities
discussed above primarily affect marijuana practitioners, the consequences are no less profound for those simply wishing to consume marijuana in compliance with their state's
are real and will persist so long as marijuana remains prohibited by the CSA;
promises from the federal government to let the states [*1118] take the lead in marijuana
enforcement simply do not undo the consequences of federal prohibition . 1.
Employment Currently, one of the biggest impediments to the legalization of marijuana in the states is the fact that those who test positive for
marijuana can lose their employment even if their conduct is entirely consistent with state law. In
laws. These consequences
Colorado, both state n46 and federal courts n47 have held that Colorado's "lawful off-duty conduct" statute does not govern the consumption of marijuana. Because the
possession of marijuana remains illegal under federal law, these courts have reasoned that consuming marijuana is not "lawful" conduct, even if it does not violate state law.
Furthermore, the Colorado courts have concluded that an individual fired for testing positive for marijuana is ineligible for unemployment benefits under the same reasoning,
2. Probation/Parole Similarly, state courts have used
marijuana's continuing illegality at the federal level to deny otherwise qualified criminal
defendants probation or parole. n49 Because it is generally a standard condition of supervised release - either following a term of imprisonment or in
even if that individual is a marijuana patient acting in compliance with state law. n48
lieu of one - that the defendant agree to commit no new offenses during the period of [*1119] release, n50 courts have held that a defendant's positive test for marijuana permits
his re-arrest. Unless or until legislatures in marijuana states make explicit provision for marijuana use consistent with state law, n51 the federal prohibition will continue to cast
3. Public Services Generally A
number of other public benefits, from public housing to student loans to government
employment, are conditioned on the recipient's abstinence from illegal-drug use. For example, the federal
a shadow over the availability of supervised release for those using marijuana either medically or recreationally.
program that helps fund local public housing agencies (PHAs) forbids those agencies from admitting into public housing facilities families that include members who use
marijuana. n52 While PHAs have the discretion not to evict residents who use medical marijuana, n53 that discretion does not extend to admitting marijuana users into public
housing even where their use is compliant with state law. A single medical marijuana patient, in other words, can make an entire [*1120] family ineligible to receive public
the continued
prohibition of marijuana at the federal level leads to unsettled expectations , not just for those trying to
housing, as long as marijuana remains illegal under federal law. 4. Conclusion This non-exhaustive list of examples of consequences makes clear that
make a living in the marijuana industry but also for those who would take advantage of state laws permitting marijuana use. Deputy Attorney General Cole stated that
federal policy is to let states achieve federal goals through the taxing and regulation of marijuana
rather than state-level prohibition, but the criminality of marijuana at the federal level makes
such experimentation essentially impossible in practice . The following Part proposes a cooperative federalism
approach to marijuana regulation. If states that wish to opt out of the CSA are permitted to do so , if that law simply does not
apply within those states, then they will truly be able to function as laboratories of ideas with regard
to marijuana regulation and taxation. III. A Solution: Making the Second Cole Memo Law The second Cole memo is a cooperative step toward
solving the apparent contradiction created when states legalize a drug that the federal government continues to prohibit. This concluding Part sketches a solution that I hope to
I propose that Congress amend the CSA in a manner that allows states to opt
out of its marijuana provisions. The federal government has already set forth the criteria to be
used in determining whether a state is regulating marijuana in a manner consistent with federal
priorities. Under this approach, Congress would authorize the Attorney General, or some other executive
official, to certify that a state is regulating marijuana in a manner consistent with federal priorities .
n55 Upon certification, the state's regulations would [*1121] become the sole regulations governing
marijuana within that state. Those state provisions, rather than the CSA, would then
apply to the manufacture, distribution, and use of marijuana. n56 While this approach might
closely resemble the status quo in which states are allowed to experiment with marijuana
legalization so long as they keep in mind and help achieve federal goals, it has one crucial
difference. Under the current approach, states are allowed to experiment with marijuana law
reform through an act of prosecutorial grace. Those using, selling, or manufacturing
marijuana under state law are not subject to criminal prosecution simply because federal
prosecutors have chosen not to prosecute them. This decision can be undone by yet another
memo. A newly elected president may chart a new policy course or may invoke the wiggleroom written into the second Cole memo. Thus, those using or selling marijuana pursuant to
state law could be arrested and prosecuted without any change in federal law . But more
than that, the problem with the status quo is that marijuana possession, manufacture, and
expand upon in a later article. n54
distribution remain illegal under the second Cole memo. Even if the government keeps its promise
not to intervene in states that have enacted robust marijuana regulations, the continuance of
federal marijuana prohibition has a profound effect in those states. Only by making
marijuana truly legal in those states, by allowing qualified states to opt out of the CSA, can the
[*1122] states truly be empowered to chart their own policy direction .
CSA removal causes a shift to decentralized federalism which best
promotes innovation
Shechtman, 12 [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.
Notably, 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
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
Drug Policy Ironically,
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 policies56 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,
repeal of the CSA (as it relates to marijuana) 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 8-often 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
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
environmental standards
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 environmentalmarijuana 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,
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
125 policed
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
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
current administration's tolerant Executive Order' 39 and general federal reliance on state enforcement.140 Though
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.
AT: First
The ballot is a referendum on the normative desirability of the 1ac’s
strategy
Moore, 99 [John prof @ Cambridge with Johan Muller, University of Cape Town “The
Discourse of Voice and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Education,”
British Journal of Sociology of Education 20 (2) p. 199-200]
The pedagogic device (Bernstein, 1990) of voice discourse promotes a methodology in which the
explication of a method's social location precludes the need to examine the
content of its data as grounds for valid explanation. Who says it is what counts, not what is
said. This approach favours an ethnography that claims to reveal the cultural specificity of the category--the
'voice' of membership. What is held to be the facts, to be the case, is only so-and can only be so-from a particular
perspective. The world thus viewed is a patchwork of incommensurable and exclusive voices or
standpoints. Through the process of sub-division, increasingly more particularised identity categories
come into being, each claiming the unique specificity of its distinctive experience and the knowledge
authorised by it. The consequence of the abolition of the knowledge boundary that follows from the epistemological theses of
postmodernism is the increasing specialisation of social categories (see Maton, 1998). Maton describes this process of proliferation
in terms of the way such 'knower' discourses, ... base
their legitimation upon the privileged insight of
a knower, and work at maintaining strong boundaries around their definition of this knowerthey celebrate difference where 'truth' is defined by the 'knower' or 'voice'. As each voice is brought
into the choir, the category of the privileged 'knower' becomes smaller, each strongly bounded from one
another, for each 'voice' has its own privileged and specialised knowledge. The client 'knower' group thus fragments, each fragment
with its own representative ... The procession of the excluded thus becomes, in terms of the privileged 'knower', an accretion of
adjectives, the 'hyphenation' which knower modes often proclaim as progress. In summary, with the emergence of each new category
of knower, the categories of knowers become smaller, leading to proliferation and fragmentation within the knowledge formation.
(ibid., p. 17) As Maton argues, this move promotes
a fundamental change in the principle of legitimationfrom what is known (and how) to who knows it. The device that welds knowledge to
standpoint, voice and experience, produces a result that is inherently unstable, because the
anchor for the voice is an interior authenticity that can never be demonstrated, only
claimed (Taylor, 1992; Siegel, 1997; Fuss, 1990, 1995). Since all such claims are power claims, the
authenticity of the voice is constantly prone to a purifying challenge, 'If you do not
believe it you are not one of us' (Hammersly & Gomm, 1997, para. 3.3) that gears down to ever more
rarefied specialisations or iterations of the voice category; an unstoppable spiral that Bernstein (1997, p. 176) has
referred to as the 'shrinking of the moral imagination [10]. As Bernstein puts it, 'The voice of a social category
(academic discourse, gender subject, occupational subject) is constructed by the degree of specialisation of the discursive rules
If categories of either agents or discourse are
specialised, then each category necessarily has its own specific identity and its own specific
boundaries. The speciality of each category is created, maintained and reproduced only if the
relations between the categories of which a given category is a member are preserved. What is to be preserved? The
regulating and legitimising the form of communication' (1990, p.23).
insulation between the categories. It is the strength of the insulation that creates a space in which a category can become specific. If a
category wishes to increase its specificity, it has to appropriate the means to produce the necessary insulation that is the prior
condition to its appropriating specificity. (ibid.) Collection codes employ an organisation of knowledge to specialise categories of
person, integrated codes employ an organisation of persons to specialise categories of knowledge (Bernstein, 1977, pp. 106-111).
The instability of the social categories associated with voice discourse reflects the fact that there
is no stable and agreed-upon way of constructing such categories. By their nature, they are
always open to contestation and further fragmentation. In principle, there is no terminal point
where 'identities' can finally come to rest. It is for this reason that this position can reappear so
frequently across time and space within the intellectual field-the same move can be repeated
endlessly under the disguise of 'difference'. In Bernstein's terms, the organisation of knowledge is,
most significantly, a device for the regulation of consciousness. The pedagogic device is thus a symbolic
ruler of consciousness in its selective creation, positioning and oppositioning of pedagogic subjects. It is the
con- dition for the production, reproduction, and transformation of culture. The question is: whose ruler, what
consciousness? (1990, p. 189) The relativistic challenge to epistemologically grounded strong
classifications of knowledge removes the means whereby social categories and their relations can be
strongly theorised and effectively researched in a form that is other than arbitrary and can be challenged by
anyone choosing to assert an alternative perspective or standpoint.
The opportunity cost of their framework is the AFF –the perms
combinination solves
Deudney 13 – (2013, Daniel, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in
Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, “Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and
Republican Greenpeace,” http://www.theory-talks.org/2013/11/theory-talk-60_9211.html)
In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our
appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this
renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their
emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological
assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects. Unfortunately,
this
turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a
pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided
decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing
about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being
eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons,
space, and the environment , theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be
difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely
disappear . The recent ‘re-discovery of the material’ associated with various self-styled ‘new materialists’ is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and
constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out. A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the
material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt’s main book,
Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and
sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader’s
surprise, the material, in the form of ‘common fate’ produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding
ontologically incommensurate
and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These ‘unlikes’ are
inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined . There are a vast
number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in
the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and
under-acknowledged. But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call ‘practical
contemporary change in world politics. My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several
naturalism’—human social agency is understood to be occurring ‘between two natures’: on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature
composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this
frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of ‘natural needs,’ most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality,
by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering
this question requires the formulation of various ‘historical materialist’ propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the
These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or
what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the
question of ‘what is to be done’ given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I
think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing
when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures,
identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to
practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts.
continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the
globalization of machine civilization on earth. Since this set of arguments is framed within a
mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy
of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on ‘deconstructing’ various identities and
ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped
potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to
make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary
human situation in what might be termed a ‘constructive constructivism’. This concerns a large
practical theory agenda —and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary
problems —revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly
disseminated.
Pro-cartel propaganda has flooded Mexico and is beginning to
saturate America – correctives like the plan that accurately describe
Mexican violence and its potential risks are crucial
Guevara 13 [Journal of Strategic Security, Volume 6, Number 5 Fall 2013 Supplement: Ninth
Annual, IAFIE Conference: Expanding the Frontiers of¶ Intelligence Education, Article 17,
„Propaganda in Mexico’s Drug War,”¶ America Y. Guevara, ManTech International Corporation]
As a result of governmental pressure, cartels
evolved from criminal organizations to¶ organizations with
capabilities to conduct intelligence, enforcement and propaganda¶ operations. This new level of
sophistication has unprecedented and unidentified¶ outcomes. Mexican drug cartels have
actively sought to transform the Mexican populace¶ with their intense forms of propaganda as
they use violence, introduced the “narco”¶ concept, the narco-culture, narco-saints, intimidation
tactics, and intent to control the¶ media . Their use of propaganda is also intended to create
immense fear among rivaling¶ cartels and public/elected officials, defend their plazas, and
provide a warning sign for¶ those who dare cross their path. The question arises: To what extent has Mexican
drug¶ cartel propaganda become embedded in mainstream Mexico and what are the cartel’s¶ benefits for using these tactics?¶
Significance¶ The
long-term consequences of cartel propaganda are still unknown. This new form of¶
criminality has the potential to threaten the United States homeland security as the narcolifestyle,¶
its messages and its violence spills over the borderland and into mainstream¶
society. Much to the intent of the cartels, a large degree of Mexican citizens have become¶
desensitized favorably to them due to their use of propaganda as their music, clothing, ¶ and
religious aspects spread become embedded in Mexican mainstream society
. As¶ acceptance of the cartels grows, so do their capabilities to recruit, glamorize the cartel¶ lifestyle, influence Mexican government
measures as well as decrease the effectiveness¶ of government countermeasures. The
fear of international spread is
grand, as the border¶ region tends to contain a large number of Mexican immigrants who still
maintain ties to¶ Mexico. Contact with the border nation-state is constant and difficult to limit.
The spread¶ of this virus continues to spread we can soon find our society infected with its¶ consequences as only a wire fence
physically limits the United States from Mexico. The¶ vulnerability is high as the constant flow of ideas and people are not limited by
this¶ physical separation.¶ The
Mexican drug cartels have blurred the lines between criminality,
insurgency, and¶ terrorism further raising the national security importance of this topic. The
cartels engage¶ in terrorist tactics to psychologically intimidate and manipulate rivals, journalist, and¶ government officials by using
improvised explosive devices (IEDs), massive displays of¶ violence, narco-demonstrations and roadblocks. Cartels
use
insurgency tools by targeting¶ government officials through kidnapping or execution to produce
a change in power¶ structure that better suits the cartels objectives further eroding the Mexican
state.¶ Government officials are forced to act by the infamous phrase “plata o plomo”¶ demanding a decision between death or
becoming a forced accomplice. The best¶ initiative is to further investigate the cartels’ propaganda campaigns, understand them and¶
keep a vigilant eye on their affects, especially in the borderland in order to prevent cartel¶ message infiltration. Ultimately, the
relevance of propaganda to the United States¶ national security is that of preventing problem crossover by tracking the evolution of
the¶ propaganda while the target demographic for said campaigns remains outside of the¶ United States.
Outcomes matter, not intentions -- legalization is a good starting
point
Wilkinson 2013 (Will; Leveraging racism; Jun 11;
www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/marijuana-legalisation; kdf)
This Bill Maher monologue, nominating marijuana legalisation as "the next gay marriage...the next obvious civil-rights issue that
needs to fall", beautifully encapsulates the shifting tactics of savvy legalisation advocates. Mr Maher jokes openly (starting at about
2.20) about the sham, de facto legalisation brought about by California's medical-marijuana system, frankly suggesting that concern
for the comfort and welfare of the sick and suffering was a pretext for people like him to acquire weed legally. He then goes on to
profess solemnly his concern for "the three-quarters of a million people who are arrested for simple possession every year, and the
fact that blacks are arrested at seven times the rate of whites, which is a subtle way to suppress the black vote, because 48 states limit
voting rights for convicted felons". Marijuana
prohibition: racist and undemocratic! You know what? It is
outrageous. Legalisation supporters are going to get plenty of mileage out of this. Perhaps it will even push
legalisation efforts past the intense moral objections of prohibitionists. But what about the shameless opportunism
of privileged middle-class stoners (or rich ones, like Mr Maher) suddenly up in arms about the systemic
racism of the American criminal-justice system? We should welcome it. We should cheer it, even
if it begins in bad faith. Indignant exhortation only gets us so far. The best hope for justice is always an
alliance with self-interest. It's unlikely that my legalisation activist friends would have come to
care much about the cruelty of denying marijuana to the sick, but they came to care, genuinely
and deeply. Once they saw the strategic sense of focusing first on the legalisation of medical
marijuana, the needless suffering caused by prohibition truly engaged their empathy and
compassion. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people too weak to fight for themselves had legions
fighting sincerely on their behalf. The legalisation movement's strategic turn toward the racism
of America's criminal-justice system is heartening for similar reasons. Institutionalised racism is
America's great wickedness, and it remains braided through everyday American life, but its salience has faded
for most. If the prospect of one day smoking a spliff with impunity is what it takes to get college
kids outraged about the fact that the war on drugs turned out to be the second coming of Jim
Crow, so be it. Sick people don't care why we came to want to help them. The unjustly jailed
won't care why we came to set them free.
We recognize the disparate impact that marijuana has on diferrent
people – targeting solutions for reform doesn’t trade off with other
solutions
Jarecki 14
[08/02/14, Eugene Jarecki is a New York-based writer and film-maker. His Grierson, Emmy and Sundance-winning works include Why We Fight,
The Trials of Henry Kissinger and The House I Live In, “As the marijuana economy takes off, let's not forget the casualties of the US war on drugs”,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugs-eugene-jarecki]
Throughout America's history, official
and unofficial systems of racial oppression have arisen, been
challenged, and then gone underground, shape-shifting themselves to return
another day. In the modern era, as lawyer Michelle Alexander has argued in her book The New Jim Crow, the drug war
stepped in to become the latest system . In 1971, as the gains of the civil rights movement for
black Americans and other minorities might have seemed to usher America into a post-racial
age, the drug war renewed the nation's commitment , however subtly, to the obstruction of
black progress. Today as the marijuana economies in Colorado and Washington begin to take
flight, Alexander noted the inescapable undertow of race that continues to haunt this moment of
apparent progress at play: "Forty years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their
families and futures destroyed … Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing." Over
those four decades, the war on drugs has failed abjectly in its stated mission – addressing a legitimate concern about rates of US addiction – but
succeeded overwhelmingly in what would appear its de facto goals – making drug crime the primary preoccupation of law enforcement, flooding
the courts with drug cases and overcrowding prisons with the world's largest population of inmates, more than 50% on drug-related charges.
Taken together, these accomplishments have produced a system of mass incarceration that costs taxpayers an estimated $51bn a year,
becoming one of the nation's leading employers. Within its walls, black
Americans represent more than 50% of those
sentenced for drug crimes, despite the fact that black people represent only 13% of the
population and do not use drugs more or less than white people. A decade ago, when I began investigating the
drug war in what would become my documentary The House I Live In, acquaintances were intrigued. They knew I was neither a drug user nor a
dealer. They also knew that I was a comfortable white American, and thus highly unlikely to have been affected by the drug war personally.
Inevitably, the
question would arise about whether I was an advocate of marijuana legalisation,
which had then become a primary focus for most reformers. I responded always with
indignation, saying that I did not support legalising marijuana if that meant simply giving
dreadlocked white snowboarders easier access to weed. Rather, I was concerned with the drug war's
implications for poor and minority Americans, whose communities had been ravaged by the
war's destructive machinery. I also saw a philosophic error in separating marijuana from other
drugs. Part of what is assumed by advocates of the drug war is that the government has a legitimate role determining what substance an adult
can choose to put in his or her body in the exercise of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Arguing that one drug
should be legalised while others not seems to elide this question of public policy. And this elision is
dangerous, first because it enables the country to avoid a deeper dialogue about the illegality of
drugs per se and, second, because I feared it could let steam out of the debate about the drug war
more broadly, reducing public pressure for its overhaul. Worse, I even feared that by going easy on
weed we would tighten the screws on the rest, keeping the system and its predations intact . I've
since changed my mind on the importance of marijuana as a target for reformers ,
owing to what I've learned about the role it plays in driving the cycle of personal,
family and community destruction on which the war thrives . "Gateway drug" has been the
term often used by drug warriors to suggest that, with one puff of a joint, a young person may find himself hurtling down a road to hard drugs.
Despite this notion's popularity, it has
little or no basis in science. Yet marijuana is a gateway drug for
countless young Americans into a lifetime of involvement with the criminal justice
system. For many, an arrest for possession at a young age can start a chain reaction that leads first
to drastically reduced employability and then to a higher likelihood of becoming engaged in the
underground economy of drug distribution, often the only job available. Once this happens, it becomes
almost a fait accompli that that person will spend a serious portion of his life rotating in and out
of the system. The numbers speak volumes . Of the 2.2 million prisoners serving in the US,
nearly 25% were convicted of marijuana possession . Legalisation, were it retroactive, would
dramatically reduce prisoner numbers while profoundly stemming the tide .
The aff is the largest step towards ending institutional racism—
Franklin and Title 2014 (Neill and Shaleen; 3 Reasons Marijuana Legalization in
Colorado Is Good for People of Color; Jan 23; www.huffingtonpost.com/neillfranklin/marijuana-legalization-race-racism-minorities_b_4651456.html; kdf)
For the first time, President Obama acknowledged this week that the prohibition of marijuana is unfairly enforced against AfricanAmericans and Latinos, and for that reason, he says, legalization in Colorado and Washington should go forward. Without explicitly
endorsing the laws, he told the New Yorker, "it's important for [them] to go forward because it's important for society not to have a
situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished." As the
president acknowledged, marijuana prohibition targets black and brown people (even though marijuana users are equally or more
likely to be white). Ending prohibition through passing legalization laws, as Colorado and Washington have, will reduce this racial
disparity. The
war on drugs, as we all know, has led to mass criminalization and incarceration for
people of color. The legalization of marijuana, which took effect for the first time in the country in Colorado on
January 1, is one step toward ending that war. While the new law won't eradicate systemic racism
in our criminal justice system completely, it is one of the most effective things we can do to
address it. Here are three concrete ways that Colorado's law is good for people of color. 1. The new law means there will be no
more arrests for marijuana possession in Colorado. Under Colorado's new law, residents 21 or older can produce, possess, use and
sell up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. This change will have a real and measurable impact on people of color in Colorado, where
the racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests have been reprehensible. In the last ten years, Colorado police arrested blacks
for marijuana possession at more than three times the rate they arrested whites, even though whites used marijuana at higher rates.
As noted by the NAACP in its endorsement of the legalization law, it's particularly bad in Denver, where almost one-third of the
people arrested for private adult possession marijuana are black, though they make up only 11% of the population. These arrests can
have devastating and long-lasting consequences. An arrest record can affect the ability to get a job, housing, student loans and public
benefits. As law professor Michelle Alexander describes, people (largely black and brown) who acquire a criminal record simply for
being caught with marijuana are relegated to a permanent second-class status. When we make marijuana legal, we stop those arrests
from happening. 2. Unlike under decriminalization, the new law means there will be no more arrests for mere marijuana possession
in Colorado, period. In the Jan. 6 article "#Breaking Black: Why Colorado's weed laws may backfire for black Americans," Goldie
Taylor mistakenly suggests that Colorado's new legalization law may "further tip the scales in favor of a privileged class already
largely safe from criminalization." Much
of the stubborn "this-changes-nothing" belief about the new law
stems from confusion between decriminalization and legalization. There is a profound
difference between the hodgepodge of laws known collectively as "decriminalization" passed in
several states over the past 30 years, and Colorado's unprecedented legalization law. Decriminalization
usually refers to a change in the law which removes criminal but not civil penalties for
marijuana possession, allowing police to issue civil fines (similar to speeding tickets), or require drug
education or expensive treatment programs in lieu of being arrested. Because of the ambiguity in some
states with decriminalization, cops still arrest users with small amounts of marijuana due to technicalities, such as having illegal
paraphernalia, or for having marijuana in "public view" after asking them to empty their pockets. One only need look as far as the
infamous stop-and-frisk law in New York, where marijuana is decriminalized, to see how these ambiguities might be abused to the
detriment of people of color. In Colorado, however, the marijuana industry is now legal and above-ground. People therefore have a
right to possess and use marijuana products, although as with alcohol, there are restrictions relating to things like age, driving, and
public use. Police won't be able to racially profile by claiming they smelled marijuana or saw it in plain view. 3. We will reduce real
problems associated with the illicit market. As marijuana users shift to making purchases at regulated stores, we'll start to see
improvement in problems that were blamed on marijuana but are in fact consequences of its prohibition. The violence related to the
street-corner drug trade will begin to fall as the illicit market is slowly replaced by well-guarded stores with cameras and security
systems. And consumers will now know what they're getting; instead of buying whatever's in a baggie, they have the benefit of
choosing from a wide variety of marijuana products at the price level and potency they desire. Goldie Taylor made the dubious claim
that since marijuana prices were initially high in Colorado's new stores, the creation of a legal market won't affect the existing illicit
market. But despite sensational headlines, prices for marijuana are just like anything else. They respond to levels of supply and
demand. In the first couple weeks, prices were high because only a small fraction of marijuana businesses in Colorado opened, and
what looked like every user in the state was in line to make a purchase on the day the historic law took effect. As the novelty-fueled
demand levels off and the rest of the stores across the state begin to open, increasing supply, prices will drop. For their money,
purchasers can conveniently buy a product they know is tested and unadulterated. And for those who don't want to buy at a store,
Colorado residents over 21 are permitted to grow up to six marijuana plants at home. Make
no mistake: communities of
color, particularly young black men, continue to face injustice in the form of the drug war, and
marijuana legalization has not fixed that.
Even around marijuana laws alone, there
is much more work to do. But the voters of Colorado deserve to
be applauded for demanding an end to the thousands of racially disparate marijuana possession
arrests of its citizens each year.
1ar
AT: Follow On
Their delay arguments take out the neg’s offense but not the aff—
legalization is inevitable at the state level because of voter pressure,
but federal inertia means only CSA removal solves
Vitiello, 13 [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.
We will concede this—2ac Schechtman in 2ac
Shechtman 2012 (Matthew, “Joint Authority? The Case for State-Based Marijuana
Regulation”, Tennessee Journal of Law & Policy Volume 8 | Issue 1 Article 4,
http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1135&context=tjlp)
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.
Federalism externally turns and outweighs case
EPSTEIN and LOYOLA 2014 (RICHARD, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New
York University, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the
James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of
Chicago and MARIO, senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “Saving Federalism”,
National Affairs, ISSUE NUMBER 20 ~ SUMMER 2014,
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/saving-federalism)
It is particularly vital to disentangle the operations of state and federal governments. It is one
thing for the federal government to locate a research institute at a state university or manage
multiple federal, state, and local agencies in response to a disaster. It is quite another to
systematically integrate the finances of governments with separate taxing authorities. As
Michael Greve convincingly argues in his 2012 book, The Upside Down Constitution, the
intermingling of state and federal finances has led to a disastrous and unsustainable fiscal
dysfunction across the whole government. The money Washington sends to the states is not
"assistance"; it is rent for the use of state agencies as field offices of the federal government, in
transactions that contain a strong element of coercion. Much the same is true for cooperative
regulatory programs under "conditional preemption." The separation of state and federal
government is every bit as vital as the separation of powers within government, and given the
much greater disparities in bargaining power, judicial policing of that troubled boundary is as
indispensable for long-term national prosperity as for federalism itself.2