Legalize marijuana for recreational use

The initiative to legalize recreational marijuana submitted by the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol is expected to qualify with close to 200,000 signatures. It calls for legalizing the production and sale of marijuana for personal recreational use in Nevada.

If the government controls what you can put into your own body, it has unlimited power. Self-ownership and personal responsibility are the foundations of a free society. Nevada legalized medical marijuana more than 10 years ago, but is just now getting around to a legal infrastructure to grow and distribute the medicine. Recreational marijuana in Nevada would blow by that legal framework faster than Jason Statham in a Transporter flick.

The initiative unfortunately forbids public consumption, which is one of the few negatives of the Colorado and Washington state experiments. Pragmatic politics and bipartisan support are what is necessary to get actual laws passed. I get that. But why do we have to have a no fun legalization scheme? After all, alcohol, with regulation, is consumed in public. Nevada already has a gambling and brothel infrastructure in place. Are we going to raid brothels to catch pot smokers? Why can’t hotels organize marijuana events on their property?

Nevada is a pioneer in supporting driverless cars. What is wrong with smoking pot in a driverless car? They will be on the road within a few years. The initiative is silent about how to measure driver impairment, deferring completely to the legislature. Couldn’t we go a step further than the other states? In Colorado, the prohibitions on public consumption led to the edibles boom because tourists were buying edibles like pot brownies and cookies, so they could consume in public. Some became ill and a couple of deaths, such as falling off a balcony and even a murder, were linked to the slow-acting-but-potent edibles. Then the arguments and lawsuits over what is public versus private consumption followed. The Nevada initiative, like Washington state’s, also grandfathers in medical marijuana establishments as the only licensees for the first 18 months after implementation. This led to problems in Washington state. Since Nevada is new to medical marijuana production and distribution, this provision doesn’t make sense. New licensees should be allowed to apply freely.

While the Marijuana Policy Project organized the petitioning with bipartisan support, there is a very powerful opponent of marijuana reform in Las Vegas billionaire and Sands Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Aldelson is a major power broker in the Republican Party who just spent millions to defeat medical marijuana in Florida. He is extremely pro-Israel and has recently proposed that the U.S. nuke Iran to force it to come to favorable terms in the current negotiations over its nuclear capability. Adelson’s hatred of pot blinds him to the reality that Israel leads the world in medical marijuana research. He will undoubtedly spend millions to defeat recreational marijuana in Nevada.

Liberals and libertarians should be motivated to vote for legalization in a presidential election, but there is a strong conservative reason to vote yes as well. Watch and see if the Republican Congress negates the legalization of pot that just passed in Washington, D.C. Odds are it won’t. Many Nevada conservatives who do not like drugs would support poking some eyes in D.C. There is little in the Colorado and Washington state examples of legalization to raise serious concerns about rising crime, juvenile use or increased traffic accidents.

Absent serious public safety problems, federalism and individual rights will trump the conservative progressive ideal of government coercion to eliminate vices and mandate individual, instead of public, health.