NEW DELHI: What two American states, Washington and Colorado, have decided to do - legalize recreational use of marijuana - was the norm in India until 1985. All cannabis derivatives - marijuana (grass or ganja), hashish (charas) and bhang - were legally sold in this country. As a matter of fact, most state governments had their own retail shops to sell these drugs. India has known, consumed and celebrated ganja, charas and bhang for millennia.

Their consumption was never regarded as socially deviant behaviour any more than drinking alcohol was. If there was any bias against ganja or charas, it was that these were often viewed as the poor man's intoxicant by the upper classes. But come Holi, these prejudices would melt away as rich and poor savoured the joyous high of bhang. Even now, despite a legal ban, recreational use of these drugs is widespread in India.

...Since 1961, the US has been campaigning for a global law against all drugs, both hard and soft. Given that ganja, charas and bhang were a way of life in India, we opposed the drastic measure. But by the early '80s, American society was grappling with some drug problems and opinion had grown against the "excesses" of the hippie generation. In 1985, the Rajiv Gandhi government buckled under the pressure and enacted a law called the Narcotic Drugs & Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.

It was a poor law that clubbed marijuana, hashish and bhang with hard drugs like smack, heroin, cocaine and crack, and banned them all. The minimum punishment for violation of the NDPS Act was 10 years of jail (it has since been relaxed and the crackdown on marijuana has eased somewhat). What happened as a result of this law was that almost overnight the entire trade shifted from peddling grass or charas to smack or worse. This was because while the risk was the same, profits from the hard-killer drugs were ten times higher.

And suddenly, there was a drugs problem in India...

At the beginning of the 21st Century, America seems poised to make a serious change in our State and National policies surrounding the use and distribution marijuana. For the first time, a majority of the American public supports not just the decriminalization of marijuana or the medical use of marijuana, but full legalization, including new regulations to allow state governments to tax marijuana sales.

Yet, like in many other areas of the law, the federal government remains behind the times in matching the changes state governments have implemented. So far, seven states have decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, and sixteen more, as well as the District of Columbia, have legalized
marijuana for medicinal purposes.Some of these laws have been crafted and passed by state legislatures, but most have been enacted through popular referenda.Popular referenda are allowed in 23 states and currently appear to provide the most successful method of achieving marijuana reform at the state level.

...The CSA is the principal legal means by which the federal government continues to enforce prohibition, but it does not explain why the federal government has the power to wage the war on drugs. It should be remembered that prior to the 1930‟s, the federal government required a Constitutional Amendment to implement a national prohibition of an intoxicating product. At the core of the federal government‟s current power in this sphere lie the legal doctrines of preemption and federal supremacy. To determine why the federal government has the right to interfere with any state‟s administration of its own medical marijuana laws and to prohibit marijuana at the national level, we must look to three specific provisions of the Constitution: the Commerce Clause, the Supremacy Clause, and the Necessary and Proper Clause.

These three clauses, when interpreted together, have provided the federal government with the power to implement many of the most important pieces of federal legislation since the end of the 1930‟s, such as the “New Deal” under President Roosevelt, as well as early progressive laws such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.As far as marijuana reform is concerned, however, this expansive federal power has provided the federal government a justification, and the power, to enforce national prohibition...

There is a story that they tell in Georgia politics about the first time that Barack Obama was inaugurated as this most improbable president of the United States. Shortly before the ceremony, they say, he met with John Lewis, the congressman and American hero who was nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama as he marched to demand the right simply to vote. The two huddled in the corner and the president-elect wrote something on Lewis's inaugural program. He walked away, and Lewis showed the program to the friends who had come with him.

"Because of you," it said. "Barack Obama."

Part of what drives people crazy about him — and if you wanted to see crazy, you should have seen the fugue state that overcame the Fox election all-stars last night, because I've seen jollier police lineups — is that he so clearly understands his own genuine historical stature, and that he wears it so easily, and that he uses it so deftly. It is not obvious. He does not use it brutally or obviously. It is just... there with him, a long and deep reservoir of violence and sorrow and tragedy and triumph out of which comes almost everything he does. He came into this office a figure of history, unlike anyone who's become president since George Washington. The simple event of him remains a great gravitational force in our politics. It changes the other parts of our politics in their customary orbits. It happens so easily and so in the manner of an immutable physical law that you hardly notice that it has happened until you realize that what you thought you knew about the country and its people had been shifted by degrees until it is in a completely different place.

...The creative project of self-government — hard and frustrating but necessary — is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene. This whole campaign has been a referendum on that project, as though the political commonwealth were a sewer bond or a school construction bill that was submitted to the voters for their approval. That was the entire campaign. That was the issue underlying all the others. That was the fight that Romney and his party quite deliberately picked, reckoning that we had tired of all that hard and frustrating but necessary work the project involved. That was the question that was settled so definitively last night.

Voters in Colorado, Oregon and Washington are all considering measures that would effectively end marijuana prohibition in their respective states. Marijuana legalization has become an issue that defies the stereotypes of party lines, garnering the support of key progressives and conservatives in Colorado, Washington and Oregon. And although all three states have pot initiatives on their ballots, Colorado and Washington's pot ballot measures appear to be quite popular with voters, according to recent polling.

If marijuana is legalized in Colorado under Amendment 64 it would be taxed and regulated similar to alcohol and tobacco. It would give state and local governments the ability to control and tax the sale of small amounts of marijuana to adults age 21 and older. According to the Associated Press, analysts project that that tax revenue could generate somewhere between $5 million and $22 million a year in the state. An economist whose study was funded by a pro-pot group projects as much as a $60 million boost by 2017.

However, the big unknown still is if the federal government would allow a regulated marijuana market to take shape. Attorney General Eric Holder, who was a vocal opponent of California's legalization initiative in 2010 saying he would "vigorously enforce" federal marijuana prohibition, has continued to remain silent on the issue this year.

In September, Holder was urged by by nine former heads of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to take a stand against marijuana legalization again. "To continue to remain silent conveys to the American public and the global community a tacit acceptance of these dangerous initiatives," the nine said in the letter to holder obtained by Reuters.

Peter Bensinger, the moderater of the call and former administrator of the DEA during President Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations, began the call. "Federal law, the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions say that this cannot be done because federal law preempts state law."

Bensinger added: "And there is a bigger danger that touches every one of us -- legalizing marijuana threatens public health and safety. In states that have legalized medical marijuana, drug driving arrests, accidents, and drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed. Drug treatment admissions are up and the number of teens using this gateway drug is up dramatically."

Bensinger was joined by a host of speakers including Bill Bennet and John Walters, former directors of the While House Office of National Drug Control Policy; Chief Richard Beary of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP); Dr. Robert L. DuPont, founding director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and who was also representing the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and several others.

Researchers looked at marijuana use among youth between 1993 and 2009, a time when 13 states legalized the drug for medical use. They found no correlation between legalization of the drug and increased use among teens in a given state.

In fact, slight drops in teen use were seen in some states where marijuana was legalized.

"We are confident that marijuana use by teenagers does not increase when a state legalizes medical marijuana," said study researcher D. Mark Anderson, assistant professor of health economics and risky behavior at Montana State University.

The researchers used data from the Youth Risky Behavior Survey, conducted by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The survey collects self-reported data from a nationally representative sample of high school students on various risky behaviors.

The passage of one or both of these statewide measures this Tuesday will be both historic and game-changing. Here’s why.

While a minority of marijuana law reform activists has griped that these measures do not go far enough, the reality is that their passage will provide cannabis consumers with unprecedented legal protections. Presently, no state legally defines cannabis as a legal commodity. Some state laws do provide for a legal exception that allows for certain qualified patients to possess specific amounts of cannabis as needed. But none of these states define cannabis itself as a legal product that may be lawfully possessed and consumed by adults.

The difference is hardly one of semantics. Consider this: Even in California, the state that is considered by many to possess the most liberal medical marijuana laws, police (and state law) define cannabis, even when present in only minor amounts, as contraband. This means that the presumption of law enforcement and prosecutors is that a person possesses or cultivates cannabis unlawfully. The burden, therefore, is on the would-be defendant to establish that they are legally exempt under the law as a qualified patient. In some cases, this might mean showing proper paperwork to a police officer. (The arresting officer may or may not choose to accept this paperwork as legitimate.) In other case, it may entail having to prove one’s case in a court of law. Either way, the mindset of the state is clear: cannabis is illegal – unless it can be established otherwise.

Passage of either Amendment 64 or I-502 completely changes this dynamic. Rather than presuming cannabis to be illicit, and that those who possess it are engaged in illegal activity, passage of these measures will mandate law enforcement and prosecutors to presume that cannabis is in fact legal, and that those who possess it in personal use quantities are engaged in legal activity, unless the state can show that there are extenuating circumstances proving otherwise (e.g., a person possessed a greater quantity of cannabis than is allowed under state law).