Anti-Legalization Lawsuit Shows Conservative Constitutionalists Have Marijuana-Related Memory Loss
Forsaking federalism, Oklahoma and Nebraska demand that Colorado stop regulating the cannabis industry.
Last month the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court not to hear Oklahoma and Nebraska's lawsuit challenging marijuana legalization in Colorado, saying their complaints about cannabis coming over the border do not constitute a genuine interstate controversy. Last week Oklahoma and Nebraska responded, likening legal marijuana to state-authorized air pollution that ineluctably wafts onto their territory. In my latest Forbes column, I explain why the two pot-phobic states are wrong in thinking they have a right to impose their policy preferences on their neighbor:
Last week, two days before Mexican authorities recaptured Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt pointed to another drug lord, this one hiding in plain sight: John Hickenlooper, a.k.a. the governor of Colorado. "The State of Colorado authorizes, oversees, protects, and profits from a sprawling $100-million-per-month marijuana growing, processing, and retailing organization that exported thousands of pounds of marijuana to some 36 States in 2014," Pruitt writes in a Supreme Court brief joined by Nebraska Attorney General Douglas Peterson. "If this entity were based south of our border, the federal government would prosecute it as a drug cartel."
Hickenlooper actually was a drug dealer of sorts before he got into politics, having cofounded Wynkoop Brewing Company, a Denver brewpub, in 1988. But he ended up running the drug trafficking organization described in Pruitt's brief by accident. He was elected governor two years before Colorado voters decided, against his advice, to legalize marijuana. Pruitt and Peterson are trying to overturn that result, claiming that it hurt Oklahoma and Nebraska by encouraging an influx of Colorado cannabis. Their argument shows how readily some conservative Republicans let their anti-pot prejudices override their federalist principles.
