Pubdate: Tue, 22 Mar 2016
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2016 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Robert Barnes

COURT REJECTS NEIGHBORING STATES' CHALLENGE TO COLO. MARIJUANA LAWS

The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up a complaint from 
Colorado's neighbors that its decriminalization of certain marijuana 
uses and possession hurts those nearby states and undermines federal law.

The court without comment turned down the petition from Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Those states said that Colorado's relaxation of marijuana laws 
increased trafficking into their states, requiring them to expend 
significant "law enforcement, judicial system and penal system resources."

"The State of Colorado authorizes, oversees, protects, and profits 
from a sprawling $100-million per-month marijuana growing, 
processing, and retailing organization that exported thousands of 
pounds of marijuana to some 36 states in 2014," the states said in 
their petition to the court.

"If this entity were based south of our border, the federal 
government would prosecute it as a drug cartel."

Colorado voters in 2012 decriminalized the possession of one ounce of 
marijuana by residents of the state 21 or older. Colorado does not 
allow transporting pot out of the state.

The Obama administration said the change and the loosening of 
penalties in other states did not undermine federal drug laws and 
advised the court not to accept the case.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said Nebraska and Oklahoma 
had not shown the kind of direct injury that warrants granting what 
the court calls original jurisdiction to hear interstate disagreements.

"Entertaining the type of dispute at issue here - essentially that 
one state's laws make it more likely that third parties will violate 
federal and state law in another state - would represent a 
substantial and unwarranted expansion of this court's original 
jurisdiction," Verrilli said.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented from the 
decision not to take the case, saying the court had an obligation to 
settle such disputes between states.

"The plaintiffs have alleged significant harm to their sovereign 
interests caused by another state," Thomas wrote. "Whatever the 
merits of the plaintiff state's claims, we should let this complaint 
proceed further rather than denying leave without so much as a word 
of explanation."

The case is Nebraska v. Colorado.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom