SALON

Thursday, Dec 6, 2012 2:10 PM UTC

Marijuana legalization kicks in for Washington

Crowds gathered at midnight in Seattle for celebratory joints, but the law is still under review VIDEO

By

Topics: Video, marijuana, Marijuana Legalization, washington state, War on Drugs, Colorado,

Marijuana legalization kicks in for Washington (Credit: Shuttestock)

Marijuana legalization went into effect Thursday in Washington state and, according to reports, hundreds gathered under Seattle’s Space Needle to spark up in unison as the clock struck midnight.

Last month, voters in Washington and Colorado chose to legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana to adults aged over 21. In both states licenses will be granted to pot growers and sellers to legally distribute the product, which, like alcohol and tobacco, will be taxed. Colorado’s legalization measure is set to go into effect early next month. Smoking pot in public remains illegal in both states but, as the AP noted, there was “nary a police officer in sight” during the celebration early Thursday morning — the Seattle Police Department told its 1,300 officers that until further notice they were not to issue citations for public marijuana use.

“Tonight is a night for celebration, reflection, and appreciation,” Vivian McPeak of cannabis policy reform group Seattle Hempfest wrote in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. “There will be plenty of time for the struggle to end these archaic, Orwellian laws that make criminals out of decent people, and complete the task of legalization,” she added, highlighting that the implementation of legalization measures is “only the beginning of the end.”

While personal possession of up to an ounce of the drug is now legal, the state is yet to put the mechanisms in place to allow for legal selling. According to the AP:

I-502 [the legalization bill] gives the state a year to come up with a system of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores, with the marijuana taxed 25 percent at each stage. Analysts have estimated that a legal pot market could bring Washington hundreds of millions of dollars a year in new tax revenue for schools, health care and basic government functions.

The Seattle Times called it “a strange gap year in Washington’s grand experiment” — namely that recreational marijuana could be legally possessed, but not sold, posing questions about legal procurement until state sanctioned vendors are established. “The only clearly legal way — at least, under state law — is for a medical marijuana patient to get medicine from a collective garden,” the paper noted. But as Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes acknowledged Wednesday, “Washington state is awash, as are most states, in marijuana, which is one of the points about what prohibition has failed in its purpose.”

Meanwhile, although marijuana possession remains illegal under federal law, the Department of Justice has not moved to block legalization measures in either Washington or Colorado. But the DoJ asserted that federal law remains unchanged and the state laws are still being reviewed. As Hempfest’s McPeak put it, legalization going in to effect in Washington is “a huge deal, a potential game changer, but only if people realize that this is in no way the end of pot prohibition.”

This video captured the festive scene in Seattle last night:

Continue Reading Close

Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email nlennard@salon.com. More Natasha Lennard.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations