Posted on 07/19/2010 3:39:40 AM PDT by Larry R. Johnson
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - After weathering the fear of federal prosecution and competition from drug cartels, California's medical marijuana growers see a new threat to their tenuous existence: the "Wal-Marting" of weed. "The Oakland City Council on Tuesday will look at licensing four production plants where pot would be grown, packaged and processed into items ranging from baked goods to body oil. Winning applicants would have to pay $211,000 in annual permit fees, carry $2 million worth of liability insurance and be prepared to devote up to 8 percent of gross sales to taxes." ... "Companies running the facilities must agree to give away some pot to low-income users, employ organic gardening methods to the extent possible and offset in some way the large amount of electricity needed to grow weed."
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.myway.com ...
Just wait until someone comes up with “Marijuana works better than Ritalin”....
This could have some positive unintended consequences if it leads to challenge of the federal government’s authority under the New Deal “substantial effects” doctrine of the Commerce Clause.
Although Amendment XVIII was repealed in 1933, the Congress in 1971 had not even a second thought about legislating with regard to weed.
What's the difference?
In the interests of full disclosure, I would support a state-level ban - but I submit that the Federal drug laws, along with almost everything else Congress does, are unconstitutional because they pretend to exercise powers not granted.
Like other farmers, you’ll have small growers petitioning their Congressman for price supports. So, you’ll be taxed too.
It is always the same. Gov rules and taxes drive up costs to final consumers but lower profits to manufactures. Small petition for price supports, so more taxes. Poor can’t afford tax and regulation driven up prices so need welfare program, so yet more taxes.
Being a ‘new’ industry, at least we are a decade away from a taxpayer bailout of Big Weed, Inc. So, we have that going for us, which is nice.
Indeed. The difference is that in 1917, the federal government had not yet "discovered" the power to regulate anything you do that they could imagine might have a "substantial effect on interstate commerce". Since then, they've developed an imagination to rival Lewis Carroll.
Agreed, but neither you nor I have attended Yale or Harvard Law, and what we think the Constitution says, isn’t what it says, because there is a specialized code/language/meaning in it that only elites can understand. ( Que Catholic Church and Latin, Communist Parties and Marxism, and other self supporting elitists over workers type textual Umba-gumbaism. )
Clarence Thomas did.
Justice Thomas, dissenting.
Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything–and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
snip
The majority’s rewriting of the Commerce Clause seems to be rooted in the belief that, unless the Commerce Clause covers the entire web of human activity, Congress will be left powerless to regulate the national economy effectively. Ante, at 15—16; Lopez, 514 U.S., at 573—574 (Kennedy, J., concurring). The interconnectedness of economic activity is not a modern phenomenon unfamiliar to the Framers. Id., at 590—593 (Thomas, J., concurring); Letter from J. Madison to S. Roane (Sept. 2, 1819), in 3 The Founders’ Constitution 259—260 (P. Kurland & R. Lerner eds. 1987). Moreover, the Framers understood what the majority does not appear to fully appreciate: There is a danger to concentrating too much, as well as too little, power in the Federal Government. This Court has carefully avoided stripping Congress of its ability to regulate interstate commerce, but it has casually allowed the Federal Government to strip States of their ability to regulate intrastate commerce–not to mention a host of local activities, like mere drug possession, that are not commercial.
One searches the Court’s opinion in vain for any hint of what aspect of American life is reserved to the States. Yet this Court knows that “ ‘[t]he Constitution created a Federal Government of limited powers.’ ” New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 155 (1992) (quoting Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U.S. 452, 457 (1991)). That is why today’s decision will add no measure of stability to our Commerce Clause jurisprudence: This Court is willing neither to enforce limits on federal power, nor to declare the Tenth Amendment a dead letter. If stability is possible, it is only by discarding the stand-alone substantial effects test and revisiting our definition of “Commerce among the several States.” Congress may regulate interstate commerce–not things that affect it, even when summed together, unless truly “necessary and proper” to regulating interstate commerce.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1454.ZD1.html
Good to see that kalifornicate is concentrating on the serious issues facing them. /S/S/S!
LLS
It’s almost as funny as the tobacco companies thinking they could support Marijuana Prohibition and it would never spread to cigarettes.
Ah yes, the one case where conserviatves think States DON’T have rights, and the Commerce Clause is all-encompassing.
Yeah, there were ‘Good Germans’ too. How did that work out?
We live under a regime, that rewards those that take it’s Kool-Aid.
Harvard and Yale, and even the Law itself today is but a PC test to see if the young buy into the racket. And if so, and if done well, will be rewarded all their lives. No different than young joining the Communist Party or the SS.
Tobacco profits went up after their deal with the government. ( They stopped new entrances, with lower prices from putting them under price pressure. Remember, they are not in the tobacco business first, that is secondary. First business is profits. )
So they got Attaboys from the gov by supporting the gov. Kept new product suppressed, and illegal, which kept that products price high, which made their prices seem not as high/costly/overpriced.
We remember that there were, and that they were right.
Watch/read “The Insider” with Russell Crowe as VP of a tobacco company. Their business was the delivery of the drug nicotine through cigarettes.
Marijuana is a delivery system for the drug THC.
Both tobacco products have that nasty side effect called lung cancer.
And if everyone suddenly got lung cancer, well that could have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
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