REASON
State legislators in Rhode Island and Maine will announce bills tomorrow to legalize recreational marijuana, a spokesperson for the Marijuana Policy Project announced today.
Actually, the bills will be 'announced tomorrow" but the legislative sessions don't begin for a little bit and that's when the actual biils will be introduced. Details, details,
With the successes in Colorado and Washington State, I have anticipated more states wising up.
Marijuana isn't going to get any less popular, know: now that people know what it is really like, there is no putting the 'toothpaste of knowledge back in the tube".
MPP says that "similar proposals will be submitted in at least two other states — Vermont and Massachusetts." A ballot initiative legalizing medical marijuana passed in Massachusetts last week with more than 60 percent of the vote. Maine voters voted to expand the state's 1999 medical marijuana law in 2009 to include dispensaries. The Rhode Island legislature passed medical marijuana legislation earlier this year.
18 US States currently have medical marijuana laws and 2 have actually legalized and 2 to 4 more are already in the 'announcement stages'. So we have 20 states - two-fifths of the nation - with marijuana reform of some form or another and, obviouisly, more on the way.
Former Police officer and Head of LEAP talks about the 'win-win situation with the new laws in COlorado and Washington:
Tuesday night on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, former Baltimore police officer Neill Franklin called on President Barack Obama to push for drug policy reform.
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“It’s a win-win because it has been drug prohibition like with marijuana that has driven a wedge in between police and community,” he explained. “Number one, police can get back to the business that they want to do and that is to protect people from violent people — rape, robbery, murder, crimes against our children, domestic violence. We can get back to the business of that.”
“Most of us didn’t sign on this job to arrest people for smoking pot,” Franklin continued. “It gives us an opportunity to repair the damage that has been done between police and community. You know, racial profiling, the foundation for racial profiling today in this country is the drug war.”
It is clearly my hope that over the next 6-10 years that the sheer number of states relegalizing will simply overwhelm the heinous, mean-spirited dumbfuck morons at the federal level to give up their huge commitment to dumbfuckery and finally let Americans have marijuana - without us being shot to death, arrested, ruined, or otherwise needlessly harassed - since we aren't really doing anything wrong.