https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
The Supreme Court somehow held that the feds can regulate what you do in your own home (in this case, growing marijuana for personal use) because it could have a butterfly effect on the interstate price. (Constitutionally, the feds can only regulate _interstate_ commerce.)
That's ultimately what keeps things like MJ illegal. There are just far too many people that will get upset about it if it were made federally legal.
My state, Idaho, has one such politician that is constantly bringing up and trying to find ways to keep the wacky tabacy out of the state. Including trying to amend the state constitution for it. He does this because he's mormon and the mormons are scared of the devil's lettuce.
This is situation where well thought out (and moderately constrained) referendum process can help achieve the majority desire for a policy that would not otherwise be considered important enough to drive the selection of representatives.
And the 2nd chapter of it is after the ballot measure passed, the state liquor commission drug its heels for a couple years, because most of their executives are far more conservative than the median voter here (a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).
Eventually the state legislature got fed up with the obstructionism and passed a "ok, we're just doing it how CO did, stop stalling" bill.
And here we are. The sky didn't fall.
There's a lotta ways ballot measures can go into stupidity, but this is an instance where it helped force the bureaucracy to align with the majority voter position.
edit: Well, I should note the Utah vote was only for "medical" MJ.
That's why the guy in my state, C. Scott Grow, has also been fighting to make ballot initiatives harder. He's terrified that an MJ initiative would make it's way in that way.
Reverse nominal determinism
HOAs, the lowest level of US government.
It reads less like a coherent political philosophy and more like someone who's been hitting the sacrament a little too hard this morning.
I smoke your "sacrament" daily, and cigarettes, and I'm terrified that people will think you're representative of either of those classes, or even a minority of them.
Most people in this thread broadly agree with you that marijuana should be legal. You're somehow picking fights with your own allies because they had the audacity to say they don't like the smell, or that driving impaired is bad. You're not defending freedom, you're being contrarian and hostile to anyone who doesn't arrive at your exact position with your exact intensity.
And the driving thing isn't a matter of opinion. "I've done it for decades and never caused an accident" is the exact argument every drunk driver makes right up until they do. Your anecdotal survival is not evidence of safety.
You're OK with people being thrown in prison, because you don't like the smell.
And you wonder why people call you a selfish nation full of selfish people.
It’s not random we call it ‘dank’ or ‘skunk’ and if it’s good it should piss off your neighbours.
It’s 2026. Dry flower vapes get you higher, with less product, and sparing the lungs. They have a smell more in line with popcorn than a cigarette. They come in everything from one-hitter to portable-volcano. Fans exist too.
This may be subjective as I have tried just about every dry vape out there and each time the high is underwhelming. For me, the traditional bong hit is king.
This is the foundational reasoning for making perfume, air fresheners, deodorant, and scented cleaning supplies illegal to possess or use.
> The right to waft my smells in any direction ends where your nose begins.
- Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin or Mark Twain or someone
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cannabis/health-effects/secondhand-smoke...
And you, of your own free choice, would have the choice to either follow the rules or go live somewhere else. The person you are responding to doesn't have an issue with you smoking in your own purchased home. Instead this was about apartment complexes.
And it wouldn't even have to be a law applied to you. It could be applied to the apartment complex. Apartment complexes already have to follow lots of laws. So they could simply be required to have this as a rule.
And then you, could make your libertarian choice to live there or not. Its not your apartment complex after all. And since its someone else property, they would absolutely have the free to make you not do this in their own property.
We can and do have public nuisance laws which kick in when an individual is impinging upon the health, safety, comfort etc. of other people. This exists in jurisdictions all over the world for all kinds of things, the penalties are usually minor and applied only to repeat offenders. It is completely reasonable for someone to support the idea of these applying to marijuana use, in fact, in most jurisdictions where marijuana is legal, they probably already do. Yes, repeatedly stink up your neighbor's apartment and you may get a warning followed by a fine, deal with it. Your parent is not a Nazi and is not throwing stoners in prison. Perhaps go touch grass instead of smoking it now and then.
Personally I don't mind, almost the opposite, but for people who don't like the smell, obviously they feel differently. Good thing we can have different policies in different places, and people can generally, one way or another, move themselves to other places. Could be easier, but could also be way worse.
Sometimes you just need to find the right equipment :)
weed -> possibly negative effect on civilization ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2424288/) , certainly not a requirement.
Having an IQ over room temp would be a good reason. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/secondhand-smoke/health.html
Right wing Fox News watching racist sexist ististist Troglodyte: Secondhand smoke is generally harmless, except perhaps in cases of poor ventilation, constant exposure, etc.
Midwit: OMG...SMH...no! Study after study have shown... The government says... CDC experts say...
150 IQ genius: Secondhand smoke is generally harmless, except perhaps in cases of poor ventilation, constant exposure, etc.
Isn't it usually illegal to smoke things like cigarettes inside rented homes, legality aside? And don't most people rent? That seems like a whole can to deal with.
What is actually disgusting and happens often in the streets is the smell of ordinary cigarette smoke.
I’m pro legalization but definitely not pro reckless behavior like that
Who is telling you this?
Uncle Scam, of course. That trustworthy individual, via some government funded studies he paid for. Nobody ever wants to hear the weed smoker's opinion, out of an arrogant self-centered presumption that he's not intelligent enough to legitimately have one.
Weed does not negatively affect my ability to drive. At all. It simply doesn't. I've been doing so safely for decades at this point. It's fine.
You heard the bullshit, and now you've heard the truth. Whatever you choose to believe is irrelevant to me. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing regardless.
I smoke every day, all day. My balance, reflexes, coordination are better than yours likely ever were to begin with, even while I'm high. Should you be banned from driving because you're not on my level and are therefore a danger to me?
If my vehicle is moving down the road in a safe manner and not swerving all over the place, or going dangerously slow/fast, and if in every way I demonstrate safe and careful driving, then no moral busybody citing fake studies/government propaganda has any right to interfere with my life on any level.
Certainly not in a free nation, as the USA falsely and arrogantly claims to be, as it deliberately chooses to persecute and/or wage war against different peoples worldwide for its own selfish ends, as it always has throughout its corrupt history. It's a nation of crooks headed by the biggest gang of thieves, as it always has been, and as all governments are.
Ironically things might have turned out different if people had instead chosen to smoke weed and sit quietly contemplating the futility of their existence. But that's not something most want to do.
Some of these perfumes that people drench themselves with smell disgusting to me. But I don't look for them to be thrown in prison or taxed for it.
If you like the smell of tobacco (and I do also) then you'd better band together with weed smokers regardless of whether you like weed or not, before the Karens succeed in making it all illegal and banned along with anything else that helps one escape from the prison they are building.
You might get a whiff here and there, but you're going to encounter a lot of smells you don't like here and there.
A farmer was told he could only grow X acres of feed on his own land; feed that he had no intention of selling and was being fed entirely to his own livestock on the same land.
This seems to overturn that in part, but until Wickard is overturned, and the interstate commerce clause reigned in, there will be weird side effects of it like this.
That's a Supreme Court opinion that only applies if the new case reaches their docket and gets reaffirmed.
ACB talked a strong originalist game during her confirmation but since shown it’s not her core philosophy. Although Roberts appears inclined to rein in the administrative state, he’s aligned chaotic neutral and thinks himself too clever.
Already down 4-3 and having to persuade both Barrett and Roberts to join a ruling overturning parts of Wickard, another Dobbs seems wildly unlikely even though both precedents were poorly reasoned. At best, they agree to some marginal or technical reduction in scope. It seems equally likely that she sides with the four, in which case, what does Roberts do? He may need to make it 6-3 to control who writes the opinion. Such strong numbers would be unfavorable enough on the surface that he might persuade her back to an even more tepid limitation. The concurring opinions that it would induce from Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would be entertaining reading, at least.
As noted by other commenters, the concept of federal control of interstate commerce was intended to prevent states from interfering with trade between themselves and other states, and to create some "higher" authority for aspects of commerce that truly transcended state borders and control.
Most of what has happened in terms of programs and regulations fits very comfortably into that understanding. What doesn't, which I don't think is a lot, should probably go away anyway.
This doesn't work when bigots are willing to pay a premium for discriminatory services.
Also, do you feel the same way about the FHA and Title VII? Those also involve regulating what you can choose to do with your private property, but I don't want to assume that you don't consider housing and employment to be distinct from, say, hotels and grocery stores.
But Raich is significantly more egregious: the theory on which the government won Wickard v. Filburn, that private consumption of wheat could affect the interstate market for wheat, doesn't even apply, because there can be no interstate market in a substance that is illegal to trade.
There is in fact an interstate market in many substances that are illegal to trade because laws against things do not make those things fail to exist.
https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/issues/detail/ream-v-us-dep...
See the opening brief.
If the law is broken, fix the law. Don't pervert logic to pretend that the existing law dictates what you want is correct.
If Roe v Wade is based on faulty logic, cool - overturn it. But it then becomes Congress's responsibility to replace it with the correct version.
The federal government isn't supposed to police people's personal behavior. "Federal" comes from "federation" as in, the group of states in the union. It's the job of the legislature to write the laws, the job of the judiciary to interpret the laws, and the job of the states to do these things for areas that don't rise to the level enumerated in the Constitution.
When you get it twisted, you end up with this tug-of-war where corrupt politicians try to put biased judges on the bench to mold the rules to their whims without actually having to pass them.
If you follow that argument to its conclusion, you end up at: fixing the law requires amending the Constitution, and if the law for amending the constitution is broken, the remedy is revolution. Most participants prefer the current practice instead.
Links:
discusses some of the treaties:
https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/InternationalDrugControlTreaties...
History of illegalization of pot:
That said, I agree that it's overused. I personally think that the 9th amendment should be used in a lot of cases, like civil rights, instead of the interstate commerce law.
The supreme court, however, has basically decided that the 9th amendment doesn't really exist.
Ultimately none of us signed the constitution and all of those people that did are dead. It is a religious artifact used by the whig -god people to argue they are right. Not something followed with faith to the historical context nor literal contract.
(edit: to below trying to compare bad-faith ICC to good-faith general welfare, you must apply similar levels of creativity and bad faith. Ban things through high or impossible to pay taxation. "Tax" behavior to force people to do something in a certain way, make very heavy penalties for not paying the tax, and also make it extremely difficult to buy the tax stamps (this is how they did drug control until they decided to use the new fraud of "interstate" commerce).
Federalist No. 41 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed41.asp
Gen Z / Alpha have embraced X-"realism" and fully accept essentialism/reject "intersectionality". They're far more conservative/prudish than millennials, even at their young age.
This does not meet up with my experience with them at all.
Just quick check, what percentage of onlyfans creators are Gen Z / Alpha vs other nonsense year demographics?
Second, there is a growing divide between gen Z males that are skewing conservative in some ways. Their church/religious attendance is up, but overall attendance is still down.
Gen Z females that are the most liberal demographic in history.
The split is both political/social.
(US analysis)
This was debunked, at least in the UK. Not sure about the US but I'll bet it's the same sham (church sponsored) statistics.
I think more of each generation is coming to realise that religion is an outmoded parasite.
So I found this footnote:
> The government does not challenge the district court’s Commerce Clause analysis on appeal. Accordingly, any such argument is forfeited, and we do not address it.
That's interesting. Here's a legal analysis that does bring up the Commerce Clause and Filburn [3]. I really wonder why the government didn't raise this issue.
I knew just from the headline this was going to be a 5th Circuit decision, and it was. This is the same circuit that is perfectly fine to override "state's rights" for other issues.
[1]:https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-10760-CV0.pd...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
[3]: https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/reviving-the-commerce-clause-one...
So SCOTUS basically solved this by saying the law had to say "in interstate commerce" but it is basically just there as a talisman to ward away challenges, a distinction without any difference as it becomes a tautology.
There's arguably some merit to your position, but the argument that some case law is invalid because it doesn't meet the definition of a term defined in other case law is circular and incoherent.
Please endeavor to say only true things. The truth matters.
> to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes"
On one hand you should have a right to buy whatever you want at 21( which should be the minimum enlistment age), but I’d be concerned about Billy selling homemade GPLs or whatever.
No, that's not what's being said. If you grow your own plant for personal use, there's no need for the federal government to be involved. If you grow that plant and then try to sell it, then there's some commerce which does fall under some regulation (we'll leave the interstate nuances aside). Having the fed being allowed to say you cannot grow in your house is one step away from saying you are only allowed to perform missionary position (no other positions are allowed) between the hours of 7-8pm, but not at all on Sunday.
In many communities you have a guy who cooks plates of food and sells them. While technically this is illegal with out a permit, it’s usually tolerated.
I’m all for the legalization of everything for adults, but it’s a very complex issue. Education is the way here, not punishment
There are specific prohibitions on certain categories of state laws, like granting titles of nobility, creating non-gold/silver currencies, etc. The federal government cannot constitutionally regulate sex positions, because anything not explicitly covered in the Constitution is reserved to the states, or the people. In that broad grant, however, the states individually can make or avoid making law on any topic.
As others have mentioned, the Supreme Court has frequently worked around the Constitution for reasons that made sense to them at the time, including the original ruling that this one overturns.
That being said, there's probably not a constitutional way to enforce laws regulating sex positions. Even if you don't agree that such laws are clearly discriminatory in intent (let alone impact), the privacy violations necessary to prove guilt "Beyond a reasonable doubt" almost certainly violate the Fourth Amendment, and any theory of harm would implicitly (if not explicitly) rest on religion.
This is all assuming you don't accept Griswold as a reasonable constitutional argument that pretty obviously would extend to the kinds of sex people have.
Right, but until someone gets arrested for this, nobody has standing to challenge the constitutionality of the law itself. It is one of those unenforceable laws. Even biblical law required witnesses (never just one) before being able to prove adultery.
This is pretty much already the case with marijuana, where it's illegal at the federal level, but in practice if it's legal in your state then it's legal.
Would it be better with a BSD license?
> [Judge Edith Jones] also said that under the government’s logic, Congress could criminalize virtually any in-home activity
* the murder is of a federal judge or a federal law enforcement official
* the killing is of an immediate family member of a federal law enforcement official
* the murder is of an elected or appointed federal official
* the killing is committed during a bank robbery
* the killing takes place aboard a ship at sea
* the murder was designed to influence a court case
* the killing takes place on federal property > The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol. The biggest risk in home distilling is fire.
My grandpa drank a shot of schnapps every night and called it his medicine. I thought it was a euphemism but apparently he was actually taking an antidote prophylactically. You can't be too careful. He never once got methanol poisoning.
Pretty sure this was a relic of prohibition right? The feds would contaminate ethanol with methanol to keep people from drinking it, but then they hurt a bunch of people and never faced any consequences...
We still do this now. We don't do it because alcohol is illegal, we do it because we levy higher taxes on non-poisonous alcohol, and if someone decides to drink the poisoned alcohol, they deserve what they get.
Would using pectinase to break it down first reduce the risk?
I looked this up, it is directionally correct but if you are in a hospital setting they have better options https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482121/
Seems like these sorts of "yes it could be unsafe in theory but the reality of physics and incentives make this mostly irrelevant" type things get missed far too often certain parts of the internet to be coincidence.
That said, the fact that it dropped on a weekend did it no favors the first time around.
Dashboard: https://imgur.com/a/so7iZJX
Sanitizer run: https://imgur.com/a/iWDlNfb
Quite a lot of fun actually.
For those wondering, the opinion[0] doesn't address the Commerce Clause power (and Wickard and Raich) becaue the government abandoned that argument. See footnote 5.
The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.
(I argued both cases.)
[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-10760-CV0.pd...
[1] https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/issues/detail/ream-v-us-dep...
I think it is kind of magical to witness the process. I only experimented a few times, and never aged it, so every was very sharp. The best was a sharp brandy made from a bottle of wine I bought. The worst was using a leftover keg of beer, which bittered the copper pipe, so everything after tasted like gin.
I would recommend people try it. You can make one out of copper pipe from a hardware store, a few fittings and a pressure cooker. Be safe, of course, and remember that ethanol is used as a preventative for methanol poisoning :)
Next best was cheap tokaij furmint, distilled once and then mixed back into some of the undistilled wine. Basically the same thing as pineau de charante, but Hungarian and on the kitchen table.
I don't drink anymore, but man I loved distilling. It's like magic.
Decisions in other circuits can be very persuasive to other circuits but they're not required to agree the same way a Supreme Court ruling is binding. Circuit splits are moderately common and usually trigger a review by the supreme court if an appeal wasn't filed for the earlier decisions.
They were not how this situation was handled for nearly all of the existence of the United States.
Note that unless you think nothing of spending 20 million dollars on lawyers this is probably not something that you want to fight.
Now we have the weird situation where the constitution is more patchwork because you have to get rulings in all the Circuits or wait for one case to make it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Regardless of what you think about nationwide injunctions, your original assertion that “prior to this year,” a decision by a federal appellate court would apply the entire country is categorically false.
(Except for relevant connections around sharing your creations with neighbors and/or internationally inspired novel spirits.)
If you air dropped me into a random village in Africa I doubt I could 'code for cassava' but I could almost certainly make a living if I knew how to set up a basic pot still and safely create booze.
TLDL: During prohibition, US government required adding 5% methanol to industrial alcohol, hoping that this would stop bootleggers from selling it as liquor. It was sold anyway, resulting in many deaths.
So cheaper in a circuitous way.
My state (Missouri) has the most lax home distilling state laws in the nation, which allow residents to produce up to 500 bottles per year. Well, at least theoretically, since the federal ban takes precedence.
If you're into home brewing or distilling, the first and only comment people completely unfamiliar with the process say is something about going blind because of methanol. It's disappointing because the process is so rich with history and really interesting problems to solve but the zeitgeist is completely poisoned by prohibition-era propaganda.
I live in a city with 2 distilleries. You can smell when they're dealing with the mash because everyone in town can smell it. Also, we all get some black mold (not the really bad one) all over our siding which I think is some byproduct of the fermentation step.
My father worked in the oil business. As a chemical engineer, he was brewing his own moonshine (Poitín [pronounced 'poh-cheen'] in Ireland, Sidiki [means 'friend'] in Arabic language countries) since he was in university. In Saudi Arabia, there were frequent home fires in the western-expatriate communities. Newspapers reported them as "unattended cooking pot" fires. It happened several times per year in the Ras Tanura community they last lived in.
> The fungus can be removed from buildings using high pressure water jets, bleach, etc. According to a report from the Kentucky government, it has not been shown to cause anything other than cosmetic effects thanks to its mode of nutrition via the carboniferous atmosphere, rather than the decay of building materials in general.
It reaches higher up the siding than I can reach with household cleaners. It makes the house look dirty. Which I really don't care about, since most folks in the neighborhood have the same schmutz on their homes. It doesn't seem to like cement, so sidewalks & foundations aren't affected (that I can see).
1. Most use propane burners (the exact thing you'd use for homebrewing which is already legal and safe, and also similar to what some large turkey fryers use) which can be risky, but some are electric (120v or 240v).
2. Stills are an open system insofar as there is a way for pressure to escape - if you're goofing things up, you might vaporize and not recondense your ethanol (eg, because you have the heat way too high and/or aren't doing a good job of cooling down the vapors), and it's possible for that vapor to start on fire. I've seen it happen, and it's certainly a spectacle but wasn't particularly dangerous.
3. The distillate itself (ie, ethanol) is usually pretty potent, especially the foreshots and heads. Let's say 70%+. Especially as it's coming out, it's still prone to evaporation, and you could have a combustible/explosive risk here, but I've never seen this to be an actual problem.
today's home stills are usually plug-in resistance heated chambers with a still head, and are very high quality. my flame-out was from a pot still that was sealed with flour and water, not a modern still.