Taint wrote:

Because they were charged by the Feds, not by the state. In California, what they were doing isn't illegal, but of course, by federal standards it is. The article does a pretty shitty job of explaining that.

So did the California legislators and those that brought the measure to a vote.  People were outraged when the Feds started picking people up for growing medicinal marijuana for sale, but as far as I'm concerned the real assholes are not the Feds but the people who let it come to a law without letting people know that they were still subject to prosecution.

Well we'd better hurry.  The queue is almost full.  We're going to have to buy an external Constitutional Crisis enclosure, but we're running out of SCSI* IDs.

*Supreme Court System Interface

Johnny Rotten wrote:

The groundbreaking CA law was created by a binding referendrum not legislators. And while binding refs have serious problems with  special intrests railroading them through, in this case it was probably a good thing. Imagine what our politicians would have crafted to get their undeserved share of the pot pie.

Everyone in the medical marijuana business knew at the time that it ran afoul of federal law. That it  would serve as a fedralism test. The only surprise was when and how vigorous the Bush admin's response would be in the face of Medical pot's gowing political popularity.  Correct me if I am wrong but some of the problems with the CA law were caused deliberately because they needed to minimmize State reghulation and oversite so the Feds couldn't use a state's regulation system to prossecute users, careproviders and suppliers.

Yeah, I remembered that after I posted, but I didn't bother to edit because Taint had already replied.   I stand by what I said, though.  I don't think the majority of the people voting had any idea that they were voting to take a stand towards giving the states the power over drug enforcement and laws.  And yes, referendums can be relatively easily misused, as with the case of the referendum outlawing gay marriage, which if I remember was passed in an off-season vote with record low turnout, making it easy to energize a particular group and push it through.