New and events of the Philadelphia Bar Asso.
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(Constitutional Amendment 64) has brought $60 million in new tax revenue and a 77 percent drop in marijuana prosecutions. Crime and fatal car crashes are down. Life goes on in the Centennial State. Despite Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams's 2010 decision to stop prosecuting most minor pot possession cases, Philadelphia police still arrested and detained people in possession of any amount. Pittsburgh and Chicago have long been much more progressive in this regard, issuing only citations with no arrests. However, in an attempt to stop the senseless arrests of thousands of people a year, Philadelphia City Council passed an ordinance decriminalizing the possession of less than one ounce, and Mayor Michael Nutter approved it last October. Bills permitting sale for "medicinal purposes" are working their way through the Pennsylvania Legislature and Gov. Tom Wolf promises to approve. Commentators muse that Pennsylvania's "state store" system is the perfect vehicle for dispensing pot. This is a smoking-hot issue. Studies show more than 20 percent of the 314 million people in the United States use marijuana at least occasionally and over 150 million have inhaled at least once. With that kind of demand, capital, innovation and advocates for legalization are sure to be found. In Canada and the U.K., GW Pharmaceuticals sells Sativex®, a cannabis-based nose and mouth spray that might just make "rolling your own" a quaint, archaic phrase. All of these developments brought to mind my time working for the presidential commission that first recommended nationwide decriminalization of Cannabis Sativa 43 years ago. And, no, I was not a tester. Those who know me as a life-long liberal Democrat and card-carrying ACLU member are surprised that I once worked for Republican President Richard Milhous Nixon, the man who is said to have referred to my alma mater, Swarthmore College, as "The Kremlin on The Crum." Yes, 'tis true, this 36 the philadelphia lawyer Fall 2015