oneshott Posts

"California voters rejected Proposition 19, the initiative that would legalize small amounts of recreational marijuana use statewide.

Fourteen years after approving marijuana for medical purposes, the state’s voters refused to make it legal for anyone 21 or older to grow, possess and use small amounts of pot. Possession would have been limited to less than an ounce, and cultivation to 25 square feet of private land, but marijuana would have remained illegal under federal law.

The measure would have allowed local governments to regulate and tax the commercial production, distribution and sale of pot to adults. Sales to minors would have been illegal, as would have possession on school grounds, use in public settings or smoking while minors are present.

It was being defeated by a wide margin late Tuesday night when none other than Gil Kerlikowske, the White House's drug policy director, weighed in.

E-mailed by a spokesman, Kerlikowske's two-sentence statement on Proposition 19 said: "Today, Californians recognized that legalizing marijuana will not make our citizens healthier, solve California’s budget crisis, or reduce drug related violence in Mexico. The Obama Administration has been clear in its opposition to marijuana legalization because research shows that marijuana use is associated with voluntary treatment admissions for addiction, fatal drugged driving accidents, mental illness, and emergency room admissions."

San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, who helped spearhead local opposition to Proposition 19, said people worried about what message it would send to their children and found fault with the way the measure was crafted.

“When people really looked at it, I think that they saw that the promises that it made to tax and regulate and control really were deceptive,” she said. “It doesn’t tax, it doesn’t regulate and it doesn’t control. It leaves it up to all the many, 400-plus local governments, at their own cost, to do that.”"