SO IS IT LEGAL OR NOT?

Adding more confusion to an already confusing issue, Attorney General Holder issued a memo to his local AGs on recreational and medical marijuana use. Basically, it gives local AGs the option of prosecuting if they feel that local pot laws are not being enforced. There's also some curious wording about what will NOT trigger a Federal prosecution. The two items are the amount of money changing hands and the volume of marijuana trafficked.

This sort of goes against the DOJ's prior ruling that armored car operators are forbidden to transport money from Med Pot stores to banks.

So you can make as much money as you want and sell as much pot as you want but you can't deliver the proceeds of the sales in an armored car to a bank. Is that clear to anyone?

It seems to be a set of laws tailor made for hijackers.

Also curious is leaving prosecutions to local AGs but providing them with a very thin set of hard and fast rules. This once again throws confusion on top of confusion and opens more questions than it answers.

Why is this issue important to this blog which is supposed to be about gangs and organized crime?

It doesn't take much analysis to realize that the beneficiaries of relaxed sales and cultivation will be the people who have always been in the business of sales and cultivation. Say what you will about ultra high quality cross bred Cannabis, nutrient-rich hydroponics or what have you in the world of gourmet Cannabis, the fact still remains that tons and tons of street dope comes from south of the border and from illegal growers inside the border. This memo does nothing to address that issue.

There's nothing in this memo about permissible quantities in possession, under cultivation or hauled during transport.

Also, there's no Federal mechanism to tax sales or cultivation and the States are doing a lousy job of monitoring sales. This leaves the door wide open for an untaxed, cash only underground economy. Basically, there's reason to wonder if this latest memo was designed to make the issue better or way worse.