Like a lot of people, my morning routine involves clicking around a few major news sites to see what people are talking about that day. Disgusting cruise ships and exploding Russian meteorites aside, one of the stories that caught my eye today was a CNN.com story about Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the head of the notorious Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Yesterday, the Chicago Crime Commission named Guzman “Public Enemy Number One,” a title CNN notes was created for bootlegger and gangster Al Capone.

Not since Capone “has any criminal deserved this title more than Joaquin Guzman,” commission President J.R. Davis said in a news release. “Guzman is the major supplier of narcotics to Chicago. His agents are working in the Chicago area importing vast quantities of drugs for sale throughout the Chicago region and collecting and sending to Mexico tens of millions of dollars in drug money.”

The distinction isn’t surprising. Guzman’s syndicate is the single largest supplier of marijuana and other drugs that come into the U.S. It’s a lucrative gig — according to Forbes, Guzman’s net worth exceeds $1 billion — which explains why Guzman so ruthlessly protects his turf. Estimates of the death toll in Mexico’s drug war are now over 60,000.

What is surprising is that neither CNN’s story nor most of America’s elected officials have connected the dots between Capone and Guzman and how prohibition was the source of their power and wealth. Whether it’s the 1920′s or 2013, ceding control of a lucrative market to criminals enriches thugs like Capone and Guzman. Conversely, just as ending alcohol prohibition put bootleggers out of business, ending marijuana prohibition would deal a significant blow to drug trafficking cartels like Guzman’s.

When the San Francisco Giants and Detroit Tigers face off in game one of the World Series tonight, it will be the first time two teams from different medical marijuana states meet in the Fall Classic (The Giants and Angels played an intrastate series in ’02). There may be a smattering of Tigers fans in attendance, but unless they’re transplants living in California, they probably won’t be medical marijuana patients. When the series shifts to Detroit for game three, however, patients in California will be able to follow their team to Detroit with their medicine. Why the difference? Reciprocity.

Reciprocity is what allows patients to travel from one medical marijuana state to another. States that have it recognize the legitimacy of those out-of-state patients’ ID cards, at least for a short period of time and under some limited exceptions. For example, some states only provide protections for visiting patients who would qualify under their own laws, so a patient from California who uses marijuana to treat insomnia would not be able to use marijuana in Arizona, where insomnia is not a qualifying condition.

Here’s what Michigan’s law says:

“Visiting qualifying patient” means a patient who is not a resident of this state or who has been a resident of this state for less than 30 days.

…

A registry identification card, or its equivalent, that is issued under the laws of another state … that allows the medical use of marijuana by a visiting qualifying patient … shall have the same force and effect as a registry identification card issued by the department.

There are 17 states that allow patients with doctors’ recommendations to use medical marijuana, but only five—Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Montana, and Rhode Island—include reciprocity. All of those states’ laws were drafted by MPP.

So how does a medical marijuana patient travel, you might ask? It would be very risky to drive from, say, California to Michigan, since that would involve passing through plenty of states that don’t recognize any form of medical marijuana. And while you might think the T.S.A. won’t take too kindly to flying with medical marijuana, they do have an unofficial policy of deferring to state and local authorities, and there are a few examples of patients boarding planes after their medication turned up at the security checkpoint. Obviously we don’t recommend Giants fans doing so without checking with the T.S.A. in Detroit first.

So there you have it. No word on whether two-time Cy Young winner, World Series champion, and noted marijuana user Tim Lincecum is aware of the policy.

When a dedicated group of activists hoping to reform Springfield, Missouri’s punitive marijuana laws turned in thousands of signatures they had collected fair and square, they thought the next step would be for voters in Springfield to decide whether or not to support their proposal. In other words, they thought the initiative process works like common sense says it should. They were wrong. What happened next is an example of disenfranchisement so egregious it belongs in a work of fiction.

The Springfield City Council, as is their legal right, went ahead and passed the ordinance, meaning it would not be placed on the November ballot. Their stated reason for this was that they didn’t want the city to have to front the cost of printing the issue on general election ballots. In other words, they were just trying to save the city some money, they said. Normally, at this point, the story would be over. But this is Springfield.

Immediately after the council passed the ordinance, they voted to “table” it, so they could amend the law to their liking. Some wanted to raise the $150 fine, which they thought was too low. Others wanted to remove a provision establishing a “citizen oversight commission.” It gets worse. After 150 people showed up to offer their testimony—the overwhelming majority in support of the original ordinance—four of the nine councilmembers moved forward with a plan to repeal the entire ordinance, stripping citizens of their fundamental right to vote on the proposal. Here’s a quote from one of those councilmembers, and I promise I’m not making this up: “I’m going to support passing, and then gutting, the entire ordinance,” said Councilman Jeff Seifried. “This is the fiscally responsible way to do business.”

Last night those oligarchs councilmembers followed through on their intentions and repealed the ordinance. The petitioners from Show Me Cannabis Regulation who gathered the signatures are assessing their options now. They have 30 days to gather more signatures to repeal the council’s vote (which, of course, could then be overturned by the council). More likely, they’ll sue to challenge the council’s action as violating the city charter’s initiative language. Either way, one thing is clear: the Springfield, Missouri City Council does not care about your voting rights.

Marijuana reform is a hot topic of conversation in state legislatures around the country and not just in traditionally liberal states like California and Rhode Island. In fact, bills to make marijuana possession punishable by a fine only, rather than jail time, were introduced this year in conservative bastions like Arizona and Tennessee, and it’s a too-well-kept secret that such laws have been on the books since the ’70s in Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, and several other less-than-liberal states.

You can now add Indiana to the list of states where the conversation has gone mainstream. Last week, influential Republican state Senator Brent Steele (R-Bedford) announced he’d be introducing legislation to make possession of up to 10 grams of marijuana an “infraction,” punishable by fine, rather than a criminal misdemeanor.

“We have to ask ourselves as a society, do we really want to be locking people up for having a couple of joints in their pocket,” Steele told local media. “Is that how we want to be spending our criminal justice resources?” Steele also pointed out that several other states have already embraced similar policies, noting that “society didn’t melt down, and we didn’t turn into a drug-crazed culture as a result of it.”

Similar legislation has been introduced before by state Senator Karen Tallian (D-Portage), but without the support of Republicans, who hold a majority in both chambers, it never got off the ground. Speculation is that Steele’s support could change that. Steele, who is closely allied with Indiana prosecutors and is described by Indiana political veterans as a “rock-ribbed law-and-order guy,” chairs the powerful Senate Committee on Corrections, Criminal and Civil Matters where the bill would likely be assigned.

Between selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, killing innocent civilians in Honduras, and having to suspend agents for cavorting with prostitutes, it’s been a rough year so far for the DEA. You can understand then why the House Judiciary Committee wanted to call in Michele Leonhart, head of the DEA, for an oversight hearing yesterday.

After a blistering round of questions (starting at 1:02:07) from Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) on the agency’s bloated budget and the relative harms of marijuana, it was Congressman Jared Polis’ (D-CO) turn to try to get some sort of answers from Leonhart. Again, Leonhart dodged, ducked, and weaved, refusing to answer question after question from the Congressman. Watch for yourself. It really was a virtuoso performance in evasion techniques, particularly considering she works for an administration who recently claimed its drug policy is committed to “science over dogma, evidence over ideology.”

What I find interesting about all this is on the same day that Ms. Leonhart steadfastly refused to answer the questions of Congressmen Cohen and Polis, the House Oversight and Government Reform committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with its own investigation into the “Fast and Furious” scandal. My question is this: if it’s contempt for Holder to stonewall a congressional committee, shouldn’t Michele Leonhart be held in contempt for her performance yesterday?

Here is the most ridiculous part of Leonhart’s testimony:

It’s unfortunate that chronic pain isn’t a qualifying condition under D.C.’s medical marijuana law because prohibitionists in Congress have been getting beaten up pretty badly lately (metaphorically, of course). Late yesterday afternoon, the District of Columbia Department of Health announced the prospective operators eligible to register as medical marijuana dispensaries and begin distributing medical marijuana to patients in the fall. The announcement comes on the heels of Rhode Island’s legislature passing a decriminalization bill, and both Connecticut and New Hampshire’s legislatures passing medical marijuana legislation.

Ironically, that means medical marijuana will soon be available just blocks from Congress, which is responsible for prohibition and for holding up D.C.’s program for more than a decade. Despite nearly 70% of D.C. voters approving a medical marijuana initiative in 1998, Congress put a hold on D.C.’s appropriations bill that prevented the District from implementing the law. That hold was finally lifted in late 2009, and the District has been slowly but surely putting regulations in place and licensing cultivators and distributors since.

In the end, four dispensary applicants made the cut, one of which will be owned and operated by a rabbi. The next steps are for cultivation centers to begin producing marijuana and for the District to begin accepting applications from patients with HIV/AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, and multiple sclerosis whose doctors have certified them for participation in the program. The latest estimates are for the program to be up and running later this year.

Don’t worry all you ailing members of Congress; we’ll be working to expand the list of qualifying conditions soon enough.

There’s been a great deal of chatter recently about what the federal government can or will do if Californians wisely pass Proposition 19 in a few weeks (read up here and here for example). President Obama has several choices, but the one I want address here is the one recently urged by nine former DEA heads (pdf): for the feds to sue California in an attempt to declare the law null and void under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution because it violates the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). I have yet to see a more than perfunctory analysis of such a scenario, so I thought I’d post a little introductory Constitutional Law lesson for our curious readers.

Article VI, Section 1, clause 2 of the Constitution says “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof … shall be the supreme Law of the Land; … Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” In short, if state law conflicts with a constitutionally valid federal law, the state law is void. Now for starters, not even Supreme Court justices will agree on what the CSA can constitutionally prohibit. At least one justice will tell you a law prohibiting the intrastate cultivation and consumption of marijuana (at least for medical use) isn’t constitutional in the first place. But since a majority on the Court has already said Congress has authority to regulate even intrastate marijuana cultivation, does that mean Prop 19 would be void? Hardly.

The legal term for this analysis is “preemption” – does federal law preempt state law? There are two ways this can happen, express or implied. Express preemption is when federal law expressly says that it preempts state law (example) – the CSA does not. The second is implied preemption, and there are multiple versions of implied preemption. First is when federal laws and regulations are so comprehensive that they intend to “occupy the field” and leave no room for the states to regulate. The second is when there is a direct conflict between state and federal law, so that one law forbids something the other requires, or visa versa. Fortunately, section 903 of the CSA speaks directly to this question:

No provision of this subchapter shall be construed as indicating an intent on the part of the Congress to occupy the field in which that provision operates, including criminal penalties, to the exclusion of any State law on the same subject matter which would otherwise be within the authority of the State, unless there is a positive conflict between that provision of this subchapter and that State law so that the two cannot consistently stand together.

As you can see, the CSA itself says explicitly that it doesn’t “occupy the field.” That’s why in addition to federal laws on marijuana possession, every state in the country has its own laws, most of which differ from one another and federal law. So the question is whether there’s a “positive conflict” between federal law and Prop 19 — does the proposition require something that the CSA forbids? Late night punchlines notwithstanding, smoking marijuana will not be mandatory in California if Prop 19 passes. And Prop 19 doesn’t forbid anything the CSA requires.

There’s one final wrinkle though. A state law can conflict with federal law if it creates an obstacle to accomplishing the goals behind federal law. There’s some question as to whether this form of preemption even applies since one could argue the language of section 903 limits the analysis to direct, positive conflicts (and at least one court agrees with this interpretation). But let’s assume for argument’s sake that it does apply. Some will argue that a state making marijuana legal under its own laws frustrates Congress’ intent to control (by prohibiting) marijuana possession and use. Does that mean California has to keep marijuana illegal? No. A separate line of cases says the feds cannot “commandeer” state governments by telling them what they can and cannot do. In other words, the federal government cannot force California to keep marijuana illegal under state law or enforce federal law.

So what does all this mean? Without question, California can simply remove its criminal laws concerning the possession, cultivation, and use of marijuana, which Prop 19 would do. Then, cities and the state would be free to decide whether to tax and regulate marijuana distribution. Whether and how states or municipalities can enact regulations concerning sales and use of marijuana is another question, but the court decisions on similar issues are encouraging. Decisions in two California cases have found that federal law doesn’t prevent cities and counties from licensing medical marijuana dispensaries and that federal law doesn’t preempt the issuance of patients’ and caregivers’ ID cards. But suffice it to say, anyone claiming Prop 19 will just be void anyway because it conflicts with federal law is, at best, grossly oversimplifying matters. More likely, they’re just flat out wrong, and running scared now that it’s becoming clear what a failure marijuana prohibition has been.

The bottom line is this: California voters have a very real opportunity on November 2 to finally start unwinding marijuana prohibition, and nothing in the Constitution says otherwise.

(Thanks to Karen O’Keefe, MPP’s director of state policies, for her assistance.)