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Monday, March 21, 2022

[UPDATED] Cannabis legislation: At the federal level the majority will is to let states decide legalization. However, there is need for authorization at the federal level to make bank accounts and credit card purchase legal in states that leagalize. It is a matter of SAFETY. The step should be unopposed.

Events in Washington State, the greater Seattle metro area, have in past days given compelling evidence:

 Seattle Times:

Tacoma pot shop worker killed in Saturday night robbery

Updated March 20, 2022

An armed robbery of a Tacoma cannabis retailer left a man dead Saturday, police said.

According to the Tacoma Police Department, a man working at World of Weed, in the 3200 block of Portland Avenue East, was found with a life-threatening gunshot wound when officers arrived shortly after 10 p.m.

They attempted lifesaving measures. Firefighters also responded. The man was pronounced dead at the scene.

Detectives and crime scene technicians were investigating the shooting as a homicide.

Saturday night’s shooting was the third fatality related to a cannabis shop robbery over the past four days.

On Thursday night, an armed employee of a cannabis dispensary in Covington fatally shot a man who was attempting to rob the store, according to the store’s director of operations.

A suspect in a Wednesday pot shop robbery in Bellevue was killed in a shootout with police after fleeing to the Hillman City neighborhood of Seattle.

That is the entire report. Short and three dead. SWAT team needed. Danger of high speed police chase. 

Yes small shops, mom-and-pop neighborhood convenience stores, have a robbery history. However, mom and pop can accept credit cards, thus holding less cash - with low per-item merchandise valuations. Leaving with a small bag full of pot shop merchandise is a different scale of things than cereal boxes, eggs, and toilet paper as needed sometimes from a quik-shop.

Pot shops are invitations to troublemakers who probably look for ones having less of a security presence than others. (If it is a young lady instead of a large gentleman checking IDs, there is a feeling of secure commerce with the big guy.) 

Under current conditions, pot shops have to deal as a strictly  cash and carry business because federally, they are still criminalized on the books; and banking shies away.

However, while we are talking DC and that presents a complication, only a total moron would fail to see that public safety with less shooting and dying, would be a complete and sensible cause to enact quick specific federal law putting banking regularity into the pot shops - where locally legalized. 

And - only a total morals-lacking jackass would not want to boost public safety at no cost to beliefs about the quality or evil of marijuana commerce (and its tax revenues). Where it is legal there is no cause for it to carry a greater danger to customers and staff.

____________UPDATE__________

Follow-up Seattle Times item, here. Related, this.

__________FURTHER__________

Same source, this time a March 22, 2022, op-ed

Deadly pot-shop robberies are a byproduct of federal inaction

It is written well, so read it there. No excerpt. But more opinion - Crabgrass belief being it is dreadfully negligent for DC players to not do something easy for public safety, whatever they think of pot. They can hang around their favorite DC bar and piss and moan over pot popularity, but the job remains - protect people from other desperate and/or meaner people. Whether they like the growing commerce or not.

It's their job. Do the job. The pay, prestige and benefits are exceptional. So do the fucking job already. Nothing could be simpler, (except going the wrong way on daylight savings time, climate science, medicare for all, handgun profusion, population explosion, etc.).

As to climate science, while there may be incrementalism, Biden charging stations and such, get moving. Time is wasting. 

There likely are tipping points in major climactic conditions we poorly understand but which are immediate threats; see, e.g., here and here

Fracking more money out of North Dakota oil is less important to all of us, while being cashflow to a greedy handful. To the extent fossil fuel will be used, go with methane - less carbon dioxide per BTU, and fight pipeline leakage even if that means short term replacement pipelines (go with efficient non-leakers) since methane is a greenhouse gas. The military will have its way, so oil extraction will not fully cease, (gotta fuel those airplanes and pack those munitions); AND carbon fibre and petrochem resins are needed for wind turbine deployment. But conserve.

Be smart and curb naked environmentally unfriendly greed.