In a brief filed Friday with the United States Supreme Court, Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman responded to lawsuits from Nebraska and Oklahoma over Colorado’s marijuana laws. The Supreme Court should recognize she was right, let Colorado get back to sorting out its marijuana regulations – and let Nebraska and Oklahoma get back to minding their own business.
In the lawsuit, Nebraska and Oklahoma allege that Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana and the subsequent licensing of retail stores has caused their states to be inundated with marijuana, overwhelmed their law enforcement and, as such, constitute a threat to their sovereignty.
It is nonsense. Moreover, it is a dangerous affront to the concept of federalism.
In her brief, Coffman wrote that Nebraska and Oklahoma “filed this case in an attempt to reach across their borders and selectively invalidate state laws with which they disagree.” And it is hard to see it any other way.
Nebraska and Oklahoma do not like the idea of legal marijuana, and they presume that Colorado’s legalization of medical marijuana and marijuana for recreational use will spill over into their states.
Perhaps it will, but is the concern really that what will affect those states is not the pot itself but the legalization? Marijuana has been readily available, albeit illegally, for a long time. What our neighboring states might really fear is that their voters could decide Colorado’s experience with legalization is not so bad.
In any case, is that not what this is all supposed to be about? The phrase “laboratories of democracy” dates to a 1932 Supreme Court case, in which Justice Louis Brandeis described how a “state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
Colorado – and the rest of the country – soon will know how this state’s experiment with legalized marijuana has worked out. At that point, Colorado can revoke its legalization, modify the rules or simply carry on. Other states can ignore Colorado, follow or choose another direction. Brandeis might be proud.
Of course, it matters that Colorado voters did, in fact, choose this path, first by approving medical marijuana at the ballot box and then later by voting to legalize recreational pot.
Nebraska and Oklahoma nonetheless complain that Colorado’s recreational marijuana regulatory structure “has created a dangerous gap in the federal drug control system.” But Colorado is not a federal agency, and the federal government has given tacit approval to state legalization.
Moreover, as a friend of the court brief from Washington state and Oregon says, “Nebraska and Oklahoma retain the constitutional powers of every other sovereign state. ... Neither is powerless to address marijuana within their borders.”
The Supreme Court is not required to take up this case, and it would be best if it did not. Nebraska and Oklahoma have no legitimate complaint beyond simply not liking what Colorado voters did.