When marijuana legalization opponents think they might lose at the polls, they try to keep legalization initiatives off the ballot.
Their tactics for doing this typically run the gamut from the silly to the slimy. Their challenge to the Massachusetts legalization initiative petition, which was due to be argued before the Massachusetts Supreme Court on Wednesday, June 8, is a brazen mash-up of both.
A number of Massachusetts district attorneys are trying to keep the initiative sponsored by Massachusetts’ Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol off the ballot on grounds that the petition language summarizing the content of the initiative, which was approved by the State Attorney General before the petition was circulated, is deliberately misleading. They claim it didn’t inform voters that the initiative would allow the sale of marijuana and marijuana-infused products with THC content higher than 2.5 percent — which they claim is the only acceptable definition of “natural” marijuana.
According to Boston attorney John Scheft, who is representing the DAs, the initiative is misleading because voters haven’t been informed that high concentrations of THC could be infused into food or beverages if it passes.
“These items bear no resemblance to the leafy substance that nostalgic adults think this law will legalize,” Scheft said in a statement. “Nature’s pot should only have a maximum of 2.5 percent tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, which is the ingredient that gets people high.”
Scheft also claims that any marijuana plant that contains more than 2.5 percent THC should be termed hashish or tetrahydrocannabinol, instead of marijuana and the petition’s failure to embrace this distinction in its summary is misleading and a fatal flaw.
The 2.5 percent figure for “natural” marijuana apparently comes from a definition in Massachusetts criminal law that claims any “material” or “compound” that contains more than 2.5 percent THC should be called hashish or THC concentrate. Scheft is claiming that this should include marijuana plants with more than 2.5 percent THC in them.
The argument is just one more example of the sort of in-the-bone dishonesty and lying that has defined marijuana prohibition since its inception 70 years ago.
There isn’t anyone, including the folks in Scheft’s merry band of self-serving prosecutorial prohibitionists, who has ever called marijuana with more than 2.5 percent THC anything but marijuana.
I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that these DAs have charged tens of thousands of people caught with pot containing more than 2.5 percent THC with “marijuana” possession, not hashish possession. Because if they had, even a minimally competent defense attorney would have gotten the case tossed out of court.
A spokesman for the legalization campaign points out that the THC content of most marijuana flower hasn’t been as low as 2.5 percent since the 1970s and that a lot of today’s strains typically contain 17 to 28 percent THC.
This has been known for decades, if for no other reason than because legalization opponents have been howling about new, improved, high strength marijuana since the 1970s. So the initiative isn’t misleading anyone about the potency of today’s pot.
Moreover the initiative explicitly provides for the legalization and regulation of “marijuana products,” which includes everything from edibles to concentrates, and the summary language on the petition, which was approved by the state’s attorney general, speaks to the regulation of “marijuana products” in the first paragraph.
It should be clear by now that national anti-legalization organizations have decided that Massachusetts would be the place where they would mount a major effort to defeat a Colorado-style legalization initiative.
Their narrative so far involves a lot of lying about marijuana and the consequences of marijuana legalization in Colorado. No surprises there.
But the district attorneys’ attempt to get the petition thrown out takes anti-initiative lying to a whole new level. And it tells you much more about the content of their characters than the content of the initiative or the petition to put it on the ballot.
Prohibitionists politicians standing in the way of the citizens right to vote, will pay heavily at the polls. Enough locking people in cages over a plant far safer than tobacco, alcohol, OTC, and prescription pharmaceuticals. Enough of the failed war on drugs. Legalize 2016.
Such ignorance. The average THC content in fresh 3 thousand year old Hindu Kush or Indica strains in East Asia is closer to 18 per cent. It’s important to note that THC begins degrading into CBN immediately after harvest, and this prison grade scientist are 20 years behind. We do not have the ability to cause dramatic increase in horticulture of botany with any compound in any plant.
We cannot grow a potato that provides the recommended daily allowance of vitamins and minerals. What these lawmakers are suggesting has been done with cannabis plants is science fiction. It’s not difficult to breed roses for new colors but we have no ability to make a rose petal produce more than the trace of Vitamin C that nature gave it.
We have identified 3 psycho active compound in natural botanical marijuana. There are at least two different protein compounds to THC itself. Marijuana is a not toxic plant, therefore it cannot produce intoxication. Impairment or excited senses but it’s impossible to produce intoxication without a toxic. I city Justice Clarence Thomas testimony that he indeed has smoked marijuana and has never been intoxicated from the plant. Half the people who ran for the presidency this year said the same thing. The so called ”high” is closer to a Starbucks coffee buzz than even mild intoxication from a barbiturate. If we are using English then we must understand that alcohol for example is toxic. The drunk feeling is the body’s own immune reaction to the introduced toxin. In English, we call that intoxication.
It’s clear that politics is run amok in the state. The only question is whether people want to keep the corrupt system we have now with the gangs, or do we change that to an adult model of regulation. The rest of this is nonsense for the prison industry.