CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Idiotic statists still prosecuting over marijuana, which is about to be legal  Fri Nov 30, 2012 4:35 am | |
| Anthony Orozco, 19, a community college student and soccer player in southeastern Colorado, is facing criminal charges for something that will soon be legal across this state: the possession of a few nuggets of marijuana and a pipe he used to smoke it.
Mr. Orozco said that one day in September he and a few friends were driving in Lamar, on the plains near the Kansas border, when they were pulled over. After the police officer found marijuana in the car, Mr. Orozco was issued a summons for possession and drug paraphernalia — petty offenses that each carry a $100 fine — and given a court date.
“We get treated like criminals,” Mr. Orozco said.
But is he one? In the uncertain weeks after Colorado’s vote to legalize small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, the answer in hundreds of minor drug cases depends less on the law than on location.
Hundreds of misdemeanor marijuana cases are already being dropped here and in Washington State, which approved a similar measure. Police departments have stopped charging adults 21 years and older for small-scale possession that will be legally sanctioned once the laws take effect in the coming weeks.
But prosecutors in more conservative precincts in Colorado have vowed to press ahead with existing marijuana cases and are still citing people for possession. At the same time, several towns from the Denver suburbs to the Western mountains are voting to block new, state-licensed retail marijuana shops from opening in their communities.
“This thing is evolving so quickly that I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” said Daniel J. Oates, the police chief in Aurora, just east of Denver.
Regulators in Washington State are also scratching their heads. And they are looking for guidance on how to set up a system of licenses for production, manufacturing, distribution and sales — all by a deadline of Dec. 1, 2013. They say that Colorado, for better or worse, is ahead of most states in regulating marijuana, first for medical use and now recreationally.
“Colorado has a more regulated market, so they will be a good guide,” said Brian E. Smith, a spokesman for the Washington State Liquor Control Board. But no place or system, Mr. Smith conceded, can do more than suggest what might work. “There’s no real precedent for us to follow,” he said.
Washington’s law, called I-502, takes effect on Dec. 6, which also leaves a year of limbo during which the state licensing system will not yet exist, but legalized possession will. And there are thorny mechanical questions that must be resolved during that time, like how to balance the state’s mandate of “adequate access” to licensed marijuana with its prohibitions on cannabis businesses within 1,000 feet of a school, park, playground or child care center.
“Nowhere will it be more difficult to site a licensed cannabis business than in urban areas, particularly in the Seattle metropolitan area,” said Ben Livingston, a spokesman for the Center for Legal Cannabis, a recently formed research group.
On Nov. 21, Chief Oates in Aurora sent his officers an e-mail announcing that the city attorney would no longer be prosecuting small marijuana violations for anyone 21 years or older, and that the police would stop charging people for those crimes “effective immediately.”
Chief Oates said that the police would enforce city codes regulating medical marijuana growers, and that they would still pursue drug traffickers and dealers.
In northern Colorado’s Weld County, the district attorney, Ken Buck, represents a stricter view. After the vote, he said his office would continue pursuing marijuana possession cases, mostly as a way to press users into getting treatment. Right now, 119 people face charges of possessing two ounces or less of marijuana, though many are facing other charges.
“Our office has an obligation to prosecute offenses that were crimes at the time they occurred,” Mr. Buck said in a statement.
The response has been complicated even in places like rural Mesa County, where voters rejected the marijuana initiative. The police in Grand Junction, the county’s largest city, are no longer citing adults for possession of small amounts. The county’s district attorney, Pete Hautzinger, supported that decision, but also decided not to dismiss all of the pending possession cases.
“I do not think I’m wasting my time continuing to enforce the law until it changes,” he said.
More statist filth here: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/us/colorado-authorities-seek-way-forward-on-marijuana.html |
|
