It seems like an unambiguous political loser for the Republicans if he actually starts having people arrested. They'll probably have to bust some white people if they want to make it stick in court.

I keep meaning to try some, but my neighbor's kids haven't come back from college in a while.

1 before reading about this mass arrest in Georgia.

I don't understand 1 at all. Proving that someone at a marijuana store in Colorado sold marijuana -- many ounces per day, 40 hours a week -- has got to be the easiest thing imaginable. Pick a defendant of color to prosecute, maybe someone who owns a firearm, and the chances of nullification fall apart.

There was a newspaper article here about how you had to choose between (legal medical) marijuana and owning a gun. Since there's no effective way to police private-party gun sales, I didn't pay any attention until now.

I see it as a real public good to give stressed out people the option to self-medicate through weed and not just alcohol. I'm not kidding one bit.

Of course you're not kidding! There is good emerging evidence to this effect, that it substitutes for both alcohol and opioids.

4: Not sure what's ambiguous. There is a practical, legal limit to the degree to which you can enforce laws exclusively against blacks. (I mean, IANAL and I believe YA, but surely you can't enforce a law with racial selectivity that is too obvious.)

So at least some white people in states with legal pot will be busted. Stuff white people like: pot, Republicans, other white people. If carried out, this kind of enforcement will surely shave off a slice of Republican support.

6: I'd drink less if pot were legal.

I'd drink more, because I wouldn't want to hurt alcohol's feelings.

There are simultaneous rumblings on US Attorneys, which matters a lot for enforcement (viz. Melinda Haag). Nobody new is slated as permanent in CA, but the Bay Area acting USA just abruptly announced his departure today without a replacement, and an interim was named for greater LA.

I've never drank pot.

Remember the wise words of Freewheelin' Franklin. Smokin' pot and drinkin' beer together is like pissin' into the wind!

Fine if you aren't wearing pants?

Always face the wind?

You could probably piss into the wind if you were at a 90 degree angle to the wind. If you were a dude.

According to people I know who are knowledgeable about these things, these rules are already being enforced nationally around USAO offices, even though most federal prosecutors (at least here) have almost zero personal interest in seeking maximum sentences for low-level drug crimes, or indeed in prosecuting them at all. Apparently this has pissed off judges who are now less likely to sign off on plea bargains and to reject sentencing recommendations, but since the federal law is extremely bad on these issues to begin with a more angry judiciary doesn't come close to helping enough to offset the damage done to individual lives. I still don't think they're likely to actually prosecute wholly legal (under State law) pot transactions, but who knows, and the feds can do enough to drive a lot of the financing and maybe supply of the legal pot distribution networks underground, increasing criminality for basically no good reason whatsoever.

Strike the "basically."

Let's all just piss on Jeff Sessions.

1 before reading about this mass arrest in Georgia.

Shaun King is a disingenuous hack. There was a bit more going on at that party. The cops got called to that party because of a report of shots being fired. They got some weed and a gun at initial contact. They then wrote a warrant for the house and got cocaine and two more guns, one of which was stolen.

7.1 I think the bar is pretty high. But yes, I expect to see a number of lower caste white defendants caught up in this as well.

We saw this exact movie in Montana in 2011/12, when the feds rolled up much of the "legal" marijuana business.

19 That still doesn't sound like adequate grounds to arrest 70 people.

most federal prosecutors (at least here) have almost zero personal interest in seeking maximum sentences for low-level drug crimes, or indeed in prosecuting them at all

Around here you almost always need some kind of nexus to gangs and/or guns to have any kind of decent odds of taking a guy to federal court.

21: The weed charge is how they rounded everyone up. But they're doing it to clear out a party with multiple guns and shots being fired, probably to send a message. I'm guessing that's not their first call to that house.

I don't see that the police have any business at all arresting people as to whom there isn't some sort of real evidence of a crime committed by the person. Anyone who makes an arrest of someone with no real evidence of criminality 'to send a message' or because they've been to the house before should find a different job.

24: The police are in the business of order maintenance and neighborhood safety and large house parties involving a bunch of drugs and gun play are a blight on both. 0 tolerance shouldn't be a daily routine but it's absolutely how you address neighborhood blights like crack houses and houses hosting parties where people are shooting at each other.

>According to jail records, of the 63 people who had been processed at the jail by Monday night, all of them were charged with a single count of possession of less than 1 ounce of marijuana.

People are saying that running on pot legalization is an obvious political winner for Dems in '18 and '20, and they're probably right, and that would almost certainly be good. But Christ I find pot culture intolerable and the smell of weed super-gross, and the promise of both growing ever more ubiquitous to be utterly despairful.

We should probably have a thread on this, but my vote for Dem platform--beyond root-and-branch destruction of Trumpism, which is IMO vital and also a good idea electorally--is basically VRA, ERA, and pot. That gets you minorities, women, and everybody under 50, plus a bunch of white people above 50 (who are probably already Dem-leaning, but could use the extra boost).

"VRA" and "ERA" are obviously stand-ins for a raft of proposals*, and I don't think that actual formulation is a political winner, but as a shorthand? I think that's it. All 3 are substantively the right thing to do and also activate voting blocs that already lean Dem, but don't always turn out and are skeptical of political parties in general.

* in particular, I want massive emphasis on voting rights, from restoring pre-clearance to gerrymandering to voting rights for felons to moving Election Day and PR and DC statehood. IMO it's been political malpractice that they haven't been campaigning on this stuff since '00.

27 was me*.

*or was that obvious?

VRA and ERA are great, but they're relatively procedural. We need to also look toward how the base (esp. PoC/women) want their lives to actually change as a result of restoration of voting rights and equality. Pot is one of those, but also health care, childcare, better wages and hours.

I'm concerned about this Sessions thing because I'm already going to have a hard time making my stash last until May, which (I think) is when Massachusetts should be opening up some dope shops across the border. But if the Feds make that not happen, there is a serious risk that I could run out, as my other options for scoring a bag are even more inconvenient.

Although I do have some bitcoin residue on a hard drive somewhere. Maybe I could scrape that together and order some internet weed.

The residue has the concentrated bits.

22 - you should try these days and see what you can get. Apparently they really are insisting that AUSAs prosecute for minor cocaine deals or possession.

I really should have tried pot when I was younger. It just never came up when I was around except the once when we had a certified expert (California college student) tell us the weed was no good.

Californians are spoiled. They never had to smoke Mexican brickweed like the honest folks in the rest of the country.

They certainly weren't enthused when they heard "we pulled it out of ditch on the way here."

Anyway, two of my roommates pulled up a whole plant of ditchweed, put it in the open back of a pickup, and drove into town with it.

They didn't even try to smoke it. They were athletes and afraid of drug tests.

It saddens me that athletes have to put up with that bullshit. Testing for performance enhancing drugs is one thing. But testing for weed is unfair.

good point - Texas really can't afford to be another 30 years behind.

What if time is a circle though?

Go back to Ravenclaw.

But Hufflepuff has better weed.

If you don't like the smell of weed, I've got good news for you: modern oil infusions for vaping (not to mention edibles) don't particularly smell like weed. This is one of the benefits of legal, industrialized weed production.

You're, like, missing the point, man.

If it's legal, you don't need to worry that people will smell it on you.

46: Well maybe. Booze is legal but generally speaking it's a bad idea to smell of it during a job interview or while we're at work. We all can't work at universities, Moby.

Point taken. Something needs to be the vodka of marijuana.

It's actually against the rules to drink while working. I looked it up.

There's no rules against using pot while working. That I could find.

48: We had a guy here years ago who apparently swore by peppermint schnapps on the job because he said people assumed they were smelling gum or breath mints.

I guess the general rule about no control substances applies. But if they legalize it, then we can get stoned at work.

51: It's like drinking candy cane vomit. I don't recommend it.

I think all the east coast people are hiding from bomb cyclone.

At my university department the booze gets opened on a weekly basis at 4pm Friday, and occasionally earlier if the room concurs there's good cause. But I think weed, even unsmelly weed infusions, would make management uneasy.

Actually yeah, in December 2016 the university police sent around an email saying, "Yes, weed has been voted legal in California, but for real university policy mumble mumble."

I'm not entirely sure how much state-legal marijuana changes the logic of traffic stops. It's still illegal to drive under the influence, and in CA, probably the other states, there is an open-container law. Not sure based on that what the smell would empower an officer to do.

Get a contact high?

My work still has a no smoking, including vaping, policy. That's probably sufficient to prevent casual office drug use. (I doubt anybody want to risk overdoing it with brownies.)

51: also the policy of many of my seventh-grade classmates.

(I doubt anybody want to risk overdoing it with brownies.)

Anybody puts baked goods on the counter by the break room, I eat three of them. That's my policy.

To be clear: I will always risk overdoing it with non-psychotropic brownies.

My policy doesn't discriminate. And I had to make a written policy because people kept asking my I got such a large share of the food.

I am considering implementing a similar policy, viz. if you are eating at your desk, and I can smell it, I get to eat some. (We have a lunch area with tables and chairs on the same floor; despite this people insist on cooking smoked fish, of all things, and bringing it back to their desks to eat.)

I didn't think you even needed to cook fish that was already smoked.

There is absolutely no excuse for some group of politicians to not have made this into a national issue right now. Arkansas made medical marijuana legal recently, joining a not inconsiderable number of red states that have done so. If you're a pragmatic politician looking for a legislative win this seems an obvious slam dunk.

Shaun King is a disingenuous hack.

Eh. King has issues with accuracy, but he didn't arrest anybody on false charges, and the inaccuracy in his story seems to track both with the original story told by the TV station and with the story of the defendants.

"Crowd control" is a poor excuse for false arrest, and given the cops' willingness to make stuff up, I don't see any particular reason to trust their post hoc self-justifications either.

If you searched everyone at any local bar around here on a weekend knight, I'd be shocked if you only found some cocaine and one stolen gun.

I'm sure that any arrests will be of budtenders and not venture capitalists, which will be quite annoying.

a weekend knight

Even the instruments of theocratic oppression now can only afford to do it as a side gig.

I think that King is mostly a good amplifier of incidents that need a signal boost.

68: sounds like that's something the police should do, then.

72: No, it really doesn't.

48: Around here that would be cannabis fruit roll-ups. Kinda taste like Fernet.

Oh I like Jim Hill, he's a good friend of mine
That's why I am hiking down Jim Hill's main line

74: Isn't science great.

Nah both cocaine and stolen guns are good.

I draw the line at stolen cocaine.

I killed the blog with moral posturing.

Property is theft, man: all guns are stolen.

I'm visiting my friends with new twin babies and so haven't had my hands free much this weekend. Posting will resume after!

Don't touch them too much or the mother won't recognize them as hers.