{"id":40978,"date":"2020-02-01T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-01T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2020\/02\/01\/austin-votes-to-decriminalize-cannabis\/"},"modified":"2020-02-02T00:37:27","modified_gmt":"2020-02-02T08:37:27","slug":"austin-votes-to-decriminalize-cannabis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2020\/02\/01\/austin-votes-to-decriminalize-cannabis\/","title":{"rendered":"Austin Votes to Decriminalize Cannabis"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Last week, the city council in Austin, Texas \u2014 almost certainly the most progressive city in a slowly changing, but still undeniably conservative state \u2014\u00a0voted unanimously in favor of hardcore conservative values<\/a>: no more would the city pay for lab tests necessary to differentiate illegal cannabis from state-legal hemp. Small government, personal responsibility, and fiscal restraint. And, consistent with these mores, de-facto marijuana decriminalization, and in Texas!<\/p>\n

Elation lasted just about 24 hours. The following day, Brian Manley, Austin\u2019s chief of police, called a press conference. Big government and the nanny state would continue unabated, damn the elected officials, the police chief said. Cannabis, Manley said, \u201cis still illegal, and we will still enforce marijuana law if we come across people smoking in the community,\u201d\u00a0as the Texas Tribune reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After all, said the chief, \u201ca city council does not have the authority to tell a police department not to enforce a state law.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result, as both\u00a0Reason<\/a>\u00a0and the Tribune reported, is an old-fashioned standoff, but one in which the lawman lacks both the firepower and the public support to enforce his will.<\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, what\u2019s happening in Texas is happening elsewhere in the United States, as law-enforcement agencies spoiled by years of cannabis prohibition are finding their lives and work hopelessly complicated by hemp.<\/p>\n

The 2018 Farm Bill, signed into law by President Donald Trump,\u00a0legalized hemp production<\/a>, defining \u201chemp\u201d as the cannabis sativa<\/em> plant with 0.3% or less of THC. (Pedants will argue that it always was, but pedants will also be forced to admit that the shift in policy injected heretofore unseen clarity.)<\/p>\n

Hemp legalization helped supercharge the already fast-moving CBD boom, but it also meant that in order to continue arrests for low-level marijuana possession, police needed to do more work than declaring a green leafy substance to be marijuana based solely on smell and look. Specifically, cops needed to submit whatever cannabis sativa they encountered for costly and time-consuming lab tests to determine how much THC the joint in question contained and whether it was cannabis, or hemp \u2014 a process that was such a pain that, many police complained, the hemp law basically amounted to de-facto decriminalization of weed.<\/p>\n

According to Margaret Moore, the local prosecutor, submitting samples of seized weed to the state testing lab involved a turnaround time of up to a year, more time than anyone seemed willing to commit to low-level possession busts. With state drug laws unchanged, prosecutors asked for more cash. In the meantime, prosecutors also dropped 32 possession cases after defense attorneys pointed out that the weed involved wasn\u2019t tested.<\/p>\n

Rather than pay for costly new lab equipment or for weed to be tested in private labs, the Austin City Council voted unanimously that no city money could be spent on testing cannabis in misdemeanor-level cases \u2014 meaning that though state drug laws were unchanged, anyone busted with 4 ounces or less couldn\u2019t be prosecuted because Austin cops wouldn\u2019t be able to prove they had weed. Hundreds more pending cases will be dropped as a result, Councilmember Gregorio Casar, sponsor of the vote, told Reason.<\/p>\n

But even if they won\u2019t appear in court, anyone in Austin caught with pot can be ticketed and inconvenienced \u2014 and have their weed taken away \u2014 and filing pointless paperwork appears to be what police intend to do. As per the Tribune, Chief Manley has instructed police to continue issuing tickets and\/or making arrests.<\/p>\n

The disagreement here might sound like some kind of \u201cTexas standoff,\u201d but in this instance, the lawmakers hold the purse strings and thus the upper hand. Casar told the paper that, even if Manley\u2019s officers do continue making busts, any tickets issued will be \u201cmeaningless pieces of paper,\u201d and any arrests, while time-consuming and certainly not fun, will end with a \u201cquick release with no charges.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under the resolution, Austin\u2019s city manager must present a progress report to lawmakers by May 1. If Manley is serious, his officers may be spending a lot of time on fruitless weed searches. If he\u2019s not, cannabis is indeed effectively decriminalized. Either way, it seems like Austin is on its way to becoming the weed-friendliest locale in Texas. Which isn\u2019t saying much, but it\u2019s all thanks to the hemp bill.<\/p>\n

TELL US,\u00a0<\/strong>is your city weed-friendly?<\/p>\n

The post Austin Votes to Decriminalize Cannabis<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\nRead More: Austin Votes to Decriminalize Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, the city council in Austin, Texas \u2014 almost certainly the most progressive city in a slowly changing, but still undeniably conservative state \u2014\u00a0voted unanimously in favor of hardcore conservative values: no more would the city pay for lab tests necessary to differentiate illegal cannabis from state-legal hemp. SmallContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8070,50,94,1593,81,726],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40978"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40979,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40978\/revisions\/40979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}