Month: July 2021

The Mexican Supreme Court first ruled that marijuana prohibition was unconstitutional in 2015. That decision became binding nationwide three years later, when the court gave the Mexican Congress 90 days to pass a legalization bill. Legislators missed that deadline and several others, and last week the court lost patience, ordering the federal government to issue permits that will allow cannabis consumers to possess and grow marijuana at home.

Similar permits have been available since 2015, but until now they were limited to marijuana users who had filed lawsuits and obtained injunctions. Commercial cultivation and distribution remain illegal.

“There will be no permits for planting outdoors,” Mexican drug policy activist Lisa Sánchez told Vice. “There will be no participation of companies. Marijuana is not going to be sold in retail…You can’t consume marijuana in public space. And health crimes, drug crimes, these remain intact. Thus, marijuana trafficking will continue to be a crime in Mexico, weed dealing will continue to be a crime in Mexico, [and] the eradication of illicit crops will continue to be an activity of the Mexican government.”

Mexico legalized limited medical use of marijuana in 2017. Last year President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confidently predicted that the legislature would approve a framework for licensing and regulating recreational marijuana suppliers in early 2021. But legislators still had not agreed on the details when the most recent court-imposed deadline came and went on April 30, and this time they did not request an extension.

Under a bill that the Mexican Senate approved last November, adults 18 or older would be allowed to buy marijuana from state-licensed retailers, possess up to 28 grams (about an ounce), and grow up to six plants for personal use. The Chamber of Deputies failed to act on the bill by the December 15 deadline, which the Supreme Court then extended yet again. In March, the lower chamber approved a different bill that has since been stalled in the Senate.

López Obrador said he would respect the Supreme Court’s ruling, but he suggested that corrective legislation or a public referendum might be appropriate, depending on how the cannabis permits work out. “Of course we’re going to respect what the court has decided, and we’re going to evaluate,” he said at a news conference last week. “We’re going to see what effects it has. If we see…that it’s not working to address the serious problem of drug addiction, that it’s not working to stop violence, then we would act.” That is a strange way of framing the issue, since the court-ordered possession and home cultivation permits do not address the black market, except to the extent that homegrown marijuana reduces demand for illegally produced pot.

If legislators ever get their act together, Mexico will be by far the most populous country to legalize recreational marijuana at the national level, joining Canada and Uruguay on the short list of governments that have taken that step. Mexican legalization would create a contiguous weed-friendly zone stretching 4,800 miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala to Cape Columbia on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut. That zone includes every U.S. state on the Pacific Coast.

Mexico might be the third country to legalize marijuana—or possibly the fourth, if Israeli legislators follow through on a legalization plan that was endorsed last fall by both of the major parties that controlled the government at the time. The new governing coalition, a hodgepodge of right-wing and left-wing parties, is also officially in favor of legalization.

In the U.S., 18 states, representing 44 percent of the national population, now allow recreational use of marijuana, but the federal ban remains in place. Since President Joe Biden wants to keep it that way and congressional Democrats who favor legalization are not making a serious effort to attract Republican support, the conflict between federal and state marijuana laws is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

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The public debate over critical race theory (CRT) is in large part a semantics argument, with the anti-CRT faction attempting to include “all of the various cultural insanities” people hear about in the media under the banner of CRT while the other side protests that it’s technically a much more limited concept confined to elite education. Progressives are essentially correct that the definition of CRT is being tortured to match conservative grievances, but conservatives are justified in feeling aggrieved by some of these things, and thus the argument is quite tedious.

That said, the National Education Association (NEA) appears to have accepted the conservative framing of CRT: namely, that it’s not merely confined to academia but is in fact also being taught in K-12 schools. And the NEA thinks this is a good thing that should be defended.

At its yearly annual meeting, conducted virtually over the past few days, the NEA adopted New Business Item 39, which essentially calls for the organization to defend the teaching of critical race theory.

“It is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory,” says the item.

Consistent with its defense of CRT, the NEA will also provide a study “that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” The implication is that these critiques are aspects of critical race theory, which in a weird way makes this an example of the activist left basically accepting the activist right’s new working definition of CRT as “all of the various cultural insanities.”

This is no small matter, given that many progressives have rested their entire defense of CRT on the idea that it’s a very narrowly defined aspect of elite law school training. Judd Legum, formerly of ThinkProgress, has said the notion that CRT is taught in K-12 schools is a lie. During an extended and furiously unproductive debate on the subject, MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused Manhattan Institute scholar Christopher Rufo—the leading anti-CRT activist—of “making up your own thing, labeling it something that already existed as a name, slapped that brand name on it, and turned it into a successful political strategy.”

I think this accusation is basically correct, and Rufo occasionally appears to admit as much. But if the NEA asserts that CRT is a much broader concept—encompassing anti-capitalism and anti-ableism—and a vital tool for fostering “honesty” in K-12 education, the organization is essentially validating conservative parents’ concerns.

This does not mean that state legislatures are the proper remedies for the problem: For more, read Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams in The New York Times. It remains the case that giving families greater choice and control over their children’s education vis-a-vis school choice is the best solution to fundamental disagreements about curriculum and teaching practices.

But the NEA is an extremely powerful union and one that works on behalf of public employees, not students or their parents. (As former Reason staffer Corey DeAngelis has pointed out, the organization once voted down a motion that would have made “student learning the priority of the Association.”) We should believe its members when they allude to the fact that they are prepared to defend the broader, crazier version of CRT in the classroom.

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Ten years ago, Leah Gilliam of Nashville purchased a vanity license plate which reads 69PWNDU. She claims it’s quite innocent—merely a mashup of her passions for space travel and gaming: “69” for the 1969 moon landing, plus “pwnd” (meaning to be “completely annihilated or dominated”), with reference to a devastating video game defeat.

It was all fun and games until Gilliam received a threatening letter from Tennessee state officials in May, requiring that she return her plates lest she be rendered unable to renew her vehicle registration. After a decade of driving with them affixed to her car, the state had deemed her novelty plates offensive.

But Gilliam will not give up 69PWNDU without a fight. Last Monday, she sued the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Revenue and the state’s attorney general for allegedly violating her First Amendment rights.

According to her lawsuit, “The summary revocation of Ms. Gilliam’s vanity plate—Ms. Gilliam’s free speech—carries surpassing importance, because loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, constitutes irreparable injury.”

In a statement, her attorney, David A. Horowitz, upheld that “The First Amendment forbids the government from discriminating against citizens based on the viewpoints they express. Ms. Gilliam’s harmless vanity plate is transparently protected by the First Amendment.”

But while Tennessee is cracking down on a decade-old indecency, Colorado is taking quite the different approach to risqué vanity plates. In April, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles auctioned off 14 marijuana-related vanity plates, with BONG, GREEN, and HERB all up for grabs.

The auction ended on April 20. Some received upward of 150 bids, with ISIT420 being sold for $6,630, the highest amount. Proceeds were donated to the Colorado Disability Funding Committee. A second 4/20 auction is reportedly in the works for 2022, proving some states have a better sense of humor—and sense of the First Amendment—than others.

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You can read the whole Complaint, in Criss-A-Less, Inc. d/b/a Third Planet Sci-Fi & Fantasy Superstore v. ASDN Houston, LLC d/b/a Crowne Plaza River Oaks; the comic version is at pp. 6-18, preceded with:

V. ORIGIN STORY

23. Defendant, Pacifica has previously filed special exceptions, complaining that it could not sufficiently understand the claims and allegations against it. To aid in clarifying the facts of this case, plaintiffs provide the facts in illustrated form.

As you might gather, this sort of filing can be risky, if the judge thinks it’s undignified or just a waste of time. On the other hand, it’s the Third Amended Complaint, so they know who the judge is (Judge Mike Engelhart), and presumably know something about his sensibilities; I take it they have a good sense whether he’ll be amused. Plus they doubtless expected this to lead to publicity (I read about this on law.com [Angela Morris], and I expect other outlets have picked it up), and presumably they’ve concluded that the publicity will be valuable to their client.

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