It pretty much is an "after the fact remedy" because I don't think its right for the state to restrict behaviors that aren't coercive and that don't directly cause harm. That isn't subjective. That's a pretty solid line. And it doesn't only apply to civil penalties, but criminal penalties, as well. The reason I don't agree with regulating against things that can be potentially harmful is because everything can be potentially harmful. A large gathering can be potentially harmful. Loud music can be potentially harmful. Driving sober can be potentially harmful. Sex can be potentially harmful. To empower the state to regulate these type of behaviors leaves the door open for abuse. It establishes law that is entirely subjective. Even today, we're living with the results of empowering the state to make arbitrary law based on that criteria. There have been laws regulating what sexual acts are allowed and which are not. There have been laws regulating who is allowed to get married (an entirely voluntary union). And so on. And the worst part is that these regulations remain the law of the land until they are repealed (which is very rare). Perhaps we could agree that law and regulation shouldn't be permanent? Thomas Jefferson was of the opinion that all laws should expire after a generation, which he defined as 17 years, taking into account life spans, and various other criteria.
Let me ask you then though regarding behaviors like drunk driving which in and of itself are not harmful, but that has a high possibility of being harm then should the state regulate that? I don't think regulating something like drunk driving is subjective at all when it can be proven that such behavior is inherently irresponsible and dangerous to other people besides just the driver. While I think if we went down through a list of regulations you and I could probably agree on a lot that we feel are unnecessary and excessive but you are extending that to the point of basically arguing against all regulation of behavior prior to the fact of causing harm. To me that strikes me as an absolute that if enacted would have very dire consequences for society.
Ron Paul is not the tea party. The Tea Party today is against the legalization of mar1juana. Obama enforces the law as they are passed, as which is his job.
If you made these things on the state lever you'd create a massive litany of complex regulation that would drive the cost of doing business up incredibly. Could you imagine that if you legally dumped something in the water in Ohio, but it was against the law in Arkansas, and the chemical went down river? If every state had different clean air laws, a company would have to find equipment for each one. It just doesn't make sense to try to have 50 different ways to regulate commerce. Just like murder is a federal crime because you have to have consistency. So must commerce be because companies don't solely operate in one single state. Trying to do it at the state level would truly kill inter-state commerce and set us back to the 1800's.
The failures WRT drug policy go back nearly a century and cross parties and political lines. It is simply impossible to pin responsibility for the War on Drugs to any particular person or party. That being said... Nixon coined the term "War on Drugs" in 1972 after his own fact finding commission recommended that mar1juana be treated like alcohol or tobacco. Reagan severely ramped up the WoD strategy, at least partially in response to the death of Len Bias. Since then, not a single President or Congress has reduced the WoD in any significant way on the federal level. There have been several prominent anti-prohibition politicians, but none with the power to actually affect policy. Ron Paul has been the most consistently anti-prohibition politician on the Republican side on the federal level. Gary Johnson has been the same as Ron Paul as far as Governors. Barney Frank and Dennis Kucinic have been the most consistently anti-prohibition politicians on the Democratic side on the federal level. IMO, you need to take your drug war cudgel and start beating ALL of the politicians rather than just focusing on the fact that Obama, like Bush, Clinton, and Bush before him, have done nothing but continue the failed policies they inherited.
That familiar odor wafting from San Francisco street corners, storefronts, and the neighborhood growhouse? It's the smell of legality. Medical cannabis is the law of the land in California, 14 other states, and the District of Columbia. Yet, as many mar1juana users will tell you, protection under state law hasn't guaranteed protection under federal law at all. It was more obvious under the George W. Bush administration, which pledged to "ignore" state medical mar1juana laws and go after mar1juana users. For eight years, the federal government "subverted" the will of the states, according to the ACLU, and in the process ignored the Constitution's guarantees of state sovereignty, as many a pot user has tried to argue in court. So when Barack Obama's new administration delivered a message on medical mar1juana in February 2009, it was heard loud and clear: The federal government was getting out of the business of busting pot in California and other states where voters had approved medicinal application of the plant. Obama the candidate promised as much during the campaign, and now the new attorney general, Eric Holder, had made it so by issuing guidelines protecting those following state law. Federal policy on medical mar1juana had changed. For that campaign promise — and for pledges to end the Iraq war and reform health care — Obama won many votes from San Franciscans, including people like the 30 medical cannabis users gathered at a former brothel on Mission Street on a recent evening. The low- and no-income folk who constitute the patient advocacy and activist network Axis of Love cannot use their Medicare and Medi-Cal benefits to buy their preferred tonic — federal law makes it thus — and so they must rely on the charity of a few San Francisco cannabis dispensaries for their medicine. Pot and meals are dispensed daily, free of charge, under the supervision of activist Shona Gochenaur. "Obama got a ton of votes from our community," she says, "for the many campaign promises he made that things would change." That the man in the White House was even willing to put "medical" and "mar1juana" together in the same sentence was a step forward for California's cannabis advocates. They had endured such spectacles as the sentencing to five years in federal prison of a pair of El Dorado County providers — Mollie Fry, a breast cancer survivor, and Dale Schafer, a hemophiliac — and the DEA seizing six plants belonging to Angel Raich, who had an inoperable brain tumor. Legal outdoor growers were living in fear after an unprecedented string of DEA raids in the state's pot-producing counties in 2007. In the Bay Area, the U.S. Attorney's Office, headed in the last years of Bush's presidency by Reagan appointee Joseph Russoniello, sought stiff sentences against two brothers for running a dispensary in Hayward. To hear Obama say change had come to California's pot users was welcome balm indeed. That Obama's DEA had raided dispensaries in Los Angeles, Lake Tahoe, and San Francisco was an aberration, the White House said: Our guys aren't in yet. Enforcement is still needed. There are plenty of straight-up pot dealers out there, including some unscrupulous types posing as "medical" mar1juana enterprises, not to mention Mexican cartels growing thousands of plants in national forests. Exactly how many of these outlaws are getting busted, and how many legitimate, state-law-abiding operations get swept up with them, the government can't say. "We don't keep track of cases that way," says Jack Gillund, spokesman for the local U.S. attorney. One man sitting at Axis in what was once the brothel's waiting room, declining pulls from the bags full of mar1juana vapor the Axis members pass around, could tell you all about federal enforcement. If Scott Feil had the time, he'd explain how he was the first California medical cannabis dispensary owner to beat an alleged drug asset forfeiture in court, which found no wrongdoing at the dispensaries in Los Angeles and Ukiah he'd run in the infancy of the medical mar1juana movement. But he can't stay. "I've got this thing strapped to my ankle," he says by way of apology, lifting one trouser leg to reveal the homing device attached there. He is one of the Californians the Justice Department wants to put away for committing crimes for which the state of California provides business licenses. Feil can tell you that much of what is going on at Axis is a violation of the federal Controlled Substances Act, which neither Obama nor Holder have changed one bit. He is one of at least 74 state-licensed medical mar1juana providers raided nationwide under the Obama administration. "Everybody assumes that the president and Holder were saying, 'It's okay, it's okay,'" he says. "But that's absolutely not what they're saying. Yet that's the way the public heard it. Thousands of people think that." Put another way, "the United States government said it was okay for me to grow weed," says Tom Carter, a Lake County contractor who faces 10 years for allegedly selling 500 mar1juana clones — tiny seedlings that are not counted as mar1juana under state possession laws — to an undercover federal agent posing as the owner of a legal dispensary. "And now they're coming back and saying that I can't? That's bull****." "Know what I think?" he adds. "Barack Obama and Eric Holder are lying sacks of ****." http://www.sfweekly.com/content/printVersion/2434690/
I'm not disagreeing with you that, just like every other federal administration in the last century, Obama is on the wrong side of this issue. However, blaming Obama for the entirety of the drug war or even just for the raids on mar1juana dispensaries is silly demagoguery. You are doing it because you are a partisan when you could be fighting the drug war because it is the right thing to do.
I am blaming federal law ("too big to fail" bureaucracies). When you minimize and localize the government, it is easier to control by the people. I was initially replying to a post about "regulation".
This post makes it sound like you are just mad but don't really have a clue what you are mad about. I'm not saying that's the case, but when you talk about "too big to fail bureaucracies" it sounds like you think that's what was saved and termed too big to fail. What the govt. said was too big to fail were certain corporations. They never claimed any govt. bureaucracy was too big to fail or Federal Law for that matter.
