Elections this November saw the legalization of recreational cannabis in Colorado and Washington state, as well as numerous ballot referendums approving medical marijuana use across the country, but questions remain about where Wisconsin stands in a country increasingly more accepting of the drug.
Since 1996, when California became the first state to legalize medicinal marijuana, state drug laws across the country have trended toward more relaxed policies. Currently, 18 states allow medicinal marijuana, and campaigns throughout the remaining 32 are pushing for more pot-friendly legislation.
The rise in pro-marijuana legislation correlates with public opinion; a 2011 Gallup poll found that approximately 50 percent of Americans supported legalizing the drug, while only 46 percent opposed, the first time in the poll’s 43-year history supporters were the majority. Recent polls have shown similar support.
Despite growing pro-marijuana sentiment, Wisconsin still enforces statewide prohibition of the drug.
Wisconsin legislators have unsuccessfully proposed their own version of marijuana legalization, the Jacki Rickert Medical Marijuana Act, since the early 2000s, and Dane County approved a medical marijuana ballot initiative in 2010. But National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws lawyer Jerry Frederick remains skeptical a law will be passed here any time soon.
“With the Republican lean in the state, especially with the current governor, it seems unlikely,” Frederick said. “Maybe if the state politics get changed up, but as it stands now, I wouldn’t count on it.”
In 2010 and 12, marijuana legislation in both the state Senate and Assembly failed to make it out of committee and did not face a full vote.
Marijuana is currently decriminalized in Madison, Milwaukee and La Crosse, meaning that while the drug is not legal to possess, being caught with it results in a fine and lighter legal punishment as opposed to criminal charges. Madison is the most lenient of the three, allowing people to possess up to 112 grams of marijuana.
Despite political opposition in Wisconsin, state medicinal marijuana laws have been accepted around the country for over a decade now, and on Nov. 6, voters in Colorado and Washington became the first to legalize recreational marijuana use.
The new measures in Colorado and Washington, respectively known as Amendment 64 and Initiative 502, will attempt to tax and regulate the drug similarly to alcohol, declaring that only adults over the age of 21 may purchase marijuana and can only do so at government licensed locations.
The potential tax bounty was a key selling point for voters in both states. Washington’s I-502 applies a 25 percent tax on marijuana transactions, and tax money from marijuana sales in Colorado will be used for public education funding.
Despite the increasing popularity of state-level marijuana legalization, the plant remains illegal under federal law. The Controlled Substances Act considers marijuana a schedule one drug, defining it as a dangerous and addictive substance without any medical value.
Thus, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA, enforces the Act nationwide, cracking down on illegal or unlicensed large-scale marijuana producers and traffickers, even in states that have legalized marijuana.
Special Agent and Public Information Officer of the Denver Field Division of the DEA Paul Roach explained that while the DEA focuses primarily on the activities of major drug trafficking groups, such as those of the highly organized Mexican cartels, the new laws may complicate his work.
“There have been cases regarding abuses of the medicinal marijuana system that have resulted in the need for us to step in,” said Roach, “and if it happens to be that large-scale organizations here in Colorado abuse these new laws, that they sell marijuana to other states or are transporting to other states in a quantity that warrants our own investigation, we will definitely go after them.”
In both states the measures have allotted one year from the election for officials to create a regulating bureaucracy for marijuana.
Time will tell what the new laws in Colorado and Washington will mean for the nation’s drug policy, but Colorado governor John Hickenlooper warned in a Nov. 6 statement, “Don’t break out the Cheetos and Goldfish too quickly.”
