November 5, 2014

DC, Oregon, and Alaska Just Voted to Legalize Marijuana

But Congress could still bum their high in the nation’s capital.

Portlandia, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/30461729@N05/2886157280/in/photolist-5p3j1q-5oY2Bi-5p3iUQ-5p3iWU-8jjVYb-5p3bJG-5oXUqe-5p3iVd-5p3iW5-79Pd9j-5nDWTg-5pcvyz-5nDWWB-5qbX7L-8jgygD-8jjXas-5P3e4T-5oXUgF-5pBmhv-8jgG92-7pYoXp-5oXUoD-5rcvcp-5nJd93-5oXUjc-5oXUin-5nDX9r-5oXUoZ-5p3iZL-5o6nWo-5p3iWu-5p3bDs-5pcvyi-5p3iYQ-5nDWUM-5sFrtb-5oXUng-5P7uVh-5o28XD-gWUTKu-5p3bFN-kAVnzV-5wr6jM-5wgNC8-5P7uLA-5yZxoM-5hUxwc-68uHkN-5hpN2r-5hu8TA">SP4VP08</a>/Flickr, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/8566546692/in/photolist-e3Ubce-e3ZMF3-e3ZMSU-e3Uawi-e3ZLMQ-e3UaeX-atGRcZ-atH1PH">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Oregon and Alaska are renowned for their pot-smoking libertarians, hippies, and hipsters, but they’re no match for the blazer-and-khaki-clad stoners in the nation’s capital. That’s right. DC’s marijuana legalization measure, Initiative 71, which was predicted to sail through by a 2-1 margin, has officially passed by an even larger margin. Okay, not officially passed, but, you know, the big media guys called it and…and…what was I writing about again?

Oh, yeah. So, pot easily passes in DC and, by a smaller margin in Oregon, and by just two points in Alaska. How to explain this, other than Sen. Mitch McConnell’s well-known addiction to Grand Daddy Purp?

“Blacks make up about half of the district’s population, but accounted for 90 percent of its arrests for drug possession last year.”

If the DC vote caught you by surprise, then consider our capital’s long, intimate relationship with the cannabis plant. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. George Washington urged his gardener to “make the most” of Indian hemp seed, which, translated into modern English, obviously means cooking it into hash oil and smoking dabs from an oil rig. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you clearly don’t live in DC.) The point is, DC was cool before Portland even fucking existed.

When I was in college in the late 1990s, I visited DC, where I bought some low-grade pot from some young black dude on the street. Such purchases happen all the time in DC, and when things go wrong, it’s usually the young dealer, not the stoned college kid, who winds up in jail. The disparities are well known within the District’s African American community: Blacks make up about half of the DC population but accounted for 90 percent of its arrests for drug possession, according to a study last year. And while, according to the Washington Post, African Americans in the District once tended to oppose legalization for fear it could lead to more young blacks getting addicted, they now support it as the same rate as whites do.

The most obvious reason that DC suits could get legal pot is that there’s no rural DC—unless you count the cherry trees around the Washington Monument, which I don’t. However, this map shows the vast swath of Oregon hinterlands that backed Mitt Romney in 2012. That tiny blue sliver resembling the Gaza Strip is Portland.

Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland has already pledged to “blunt” legal pot in DC.

But pro-pot voters in DC still face an uphill battle. While Washington is the most liberal place in America after San Francisco, (so says The Economist), it is also home to Congress, a slightly less progressive institution, which happens to control the District’s purse strings and has 30 days to review and nullify any new DC law. Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, pictured above (he’s the guy without the tea), has pledged to “blunt” the DC pot rule, as Politico aptly put it. Getting the rest of Congress to follow suit might get a lot easier if, as some pro-pot campaigners fear, thousands of ecstatic stoners spark up on the streets tonight.

These legalization measures weren’t the only marijuana initiatives on the ballot Tuesday. Florida was supposed to be the first state in the South to legalize medical marijuana, but support for the measure took a nosedive, and it has lost by a fairly big margin. (Slate‘s Michael Ames blames “dysfunctional partisanship.”) There are also local measures on the ballot in several states. And for what it’s worth, a medical-marijuana referendum passed today by a 12-point margin in Guam, which is certain to give a boost to this song:

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate