Mellowing Out on Marijuana

Those Rocky Mountains are getting higher. Two municipalities — Denver, Colorado, and the small town of Hailey, Idaho — passed pro-marijuana measures on election day this week, joining a growing number of liberal localities that are reducing or removing penalities on using pot. It's part of a slowly evolving populist rehabilitation of the drug. San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Monica in California, along with Missoula, Montana, and Seattle, Washington, have previously passed laws that give the lowest priority to enforcing existing marijuana laws.

Federal regulations, which supercede local ordinances, continue to prescribe heavy penalties — even in some cases death — for major dealers of illegal drugs, including marijuana. The federal penalty for possession of even a miniscule amount is a misdemeanor punishable by one year in prison and $1,000. Penalties are higher with cultivation, sale and crossing state lines. However, magistrates generally use state and local laws as sentencing guidelines — unless there is federal intervention, which doesn't occur in every drug case because they would increase court time and costs.

Read the full article on time.com here.

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