RAD initiatives to re-legalize drugs are Constitutional!!!!

When any person files an initiative the Arizona Legislative Council will review it for constitutional problems and other problems if you want them to.

Before I filed my initiative to re-legalize marijuana I emailed it to Mike Braun and asked him to review it.

For some reason they never reviewed it and I wrote him a week or so ago asking the status of it.

He came back and said it got lost in the cracks and was never reviewed.

He said that they would review it right away and get back to me as soon as possible.

He just got back with me and sent me the PDF document of their review.

Their only real complaint is that legalizing marijuana conflicts with Federal law.

But we all knew that and it was expected. For that matter the initiative from MPP or Marijuana Project Policy will have that same problem.

The did come back with a bunch of minor English changes which don't effect the initiative or my intent of the initiate to cause complete re-legalization of marijuana.

For example I use the word "re-legalize" because I want people to know when they sign the petition that marijuana USED to be legal.

The suggested changing the word "re-legalize" to just "legalize".

I attached a copy of the PDF document Mike Braun sent me to this email.

For the record the marijuana initiative is number C-02-2016.

A copy of the original initiate is on the web at this URL: http://relegalize.100webspace.net/legalize_marijuana.php

If anybody has any questions or comments please send them to me.

If anybody has any strong desires to re-write the initiative please contact me. Or bring it up at the next RAD meeting.

I doubt if we have collected more then a couple thousand signatures. So if we rewrite it to use their language it won't set up back that far.

Even though I am a crazy Libertarian compared to most of you I will like to re-legalize marijuana, and for that matter re-legalize all drugs the right way.

The initiative to re-legalize all drugs is identical to the one to re-legalize marijuana so I suspect the wording on it is also Constitutional.

Here is a link to the PDF file the folks at the Arizona Legislative Council sent us.

RAD initiatives to don't conflict with Federal law

Under Federal law marijuana and other drugs are illegal.

While both of the RAD initiatives have the words re-legalize drugs in then, technically neither RAD initiative legalizes drugs in Arizona.

Both RAD initiatives forbid the state of Arizona from taxing or regulating drugs.

So while the initiates don't legalize drugs with words saying drugs are legal, the initiatives effectively make drugs legal, by forbidding the govenrment of Arizona from regulating them.

And that is why I believe neither RAD initiative conflicts with Federal law.

The following article gets into a lot of technical details which relate to how the Arizona RAD initiative relates to Federal law.