http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html

(I don't agree with its advocacy of a “sliding scale” or “range of values” for votes, though it is intriguing.)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_5ieXw28ZUpg/SfFUijhyl…

Front for legalization (hemp, medical marijuana): Self-explanatory.

Appeasement on medical marijuana, and by extension, to legalization or decriminalization:

http://pubrecord.org/law/5807/holder-unveils-fo…

Related (examples):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/us/19holder.html

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/19/local/m…

I actually have wanted marijuana legalized for ages because to me it's less harmful than alcohol or than tobacco (standard question: Would either of these two drugs be more likely than marijuana to receive FDA approval?), and we'd solve more problems that we'd create by legalizing it. (Taxing it should be viewed simply as a possible bonus, in part counteracted by regulation or other controls that would have to be set up and enforced.) Plus, I would love to put my gardening skills to productive(!) use.

Actually, in more ways than one, if you really want to know. Not to educate readers merely about California and the various (especially the best) suggestions for partitioning it. But also for the “greater” good insofar as the equity-of-financial-consequences-or-results rational approach used by California's own government, in its 1992 report, also applies to ideas of partitioning or consolidating, i.e., to ideas of rationalizing and re-designing, the collection of states we have elsewhere, throughout the USA (not, that is, limited to separating peninsular from mainland Florida or eastern from western Texas, or the heart of the state from the Panhandle, but to reconstituting states and boundaries everywhere, east and west USA).

It was meant for those who could use it (open replies to you, on an open forum).

I grew up there, and also spent a year in San Diego and “did seven years” in LA (lived in Orange County, worked in LA County). I'm actually familiar, in my post-1992 travels outside California, with other places, more so than natives, at times, but the case of California is one of extra familiarity.

The following is an example of partition advocacy that is in need of some geography (and other study).

http://www.frankjgruber.net/doc/BreakingUpCalif…

(Not Statham's ideas, which merely are debatable, but the actual author's.)

Side note: the California State Legislature Assembly Office of Research, in that 1992 report, partitioning the state to equalize the financial effects on the two new states, noted also that “a new state encompassing the 27 northernmost counties (mostly north of Sacramento) would be financially viable.” This includes the area of the state primarily in most people's minds when growing dope is considered. This is a claim of viability without consideration of marijuana legalization and taxation, so this is a case where the role of tax revenues but also the concentration of the industry and the interference with transit is paramount.

From the March 13, 2009 Time Magazine article: Can Marijuana Help Rescue California's Economy?

Pot is, after all, California's biggest cash crop, responsible for $14 billion a year in sales, dwarfing the state's second largest agricultural commodity — milk and cream — which brings in $7.3 billion a year, according to the most recent USDA statistics. The state's tax collectors estimate the bill would bring in about $1.3 billion a year in much needed revenue, offsetting some of the billions of dollars in service cuts and spending reductions outlined in the recently approved state budget.

From a Wikipedia article on marijuana:

In the United States, cannabis is overall the #4 value crop, and is #1 or #2 in many states including California, New York and Florida, averaging $3,000/lb. It is believed to generate an estimated $36 billion market.Most of the money is spent not on growing and producing but on smuggling the supply to buyers. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime claims in its 2008 World Drug Report that typical U.S. retail prices are 10-15 dollars per gram (approximately $290 to $430 per ounce). Street prices in North America are known to range at about $150 to $250 per ounce.

If only unemployed homeless weirdos smoked marijuana it wouldn't be a $35 BILLION a year industry. What's weird IMO is the government NOT taxing the money generated by it.

caveat:
I do not smoke marijuana. Forty years ago I did (quite a lot actually) but that was then… Since then I've raised a family, had a productive career and now I play a lot of golf. I'm not opposed to marijuana or those who use it, I've simply other priorities… other things that keep me occupied. When my body forces me to slow down I'll probably try it again.

If readers go to page 9 of the following PDF, a serious and still-contemporary analysis, you'll see a proposal for a north-south partition of California (which is almost always considered; occasionally you'll see an east-west, urban-rural partition, instead) that makes both north and south about equally rich or poor. (It's also the easiest to implement as it involves a single straight line as the new state boundary.)

http://www.csupomona.edu/~jskoga/splittingcalif…

* * *

“First, Santa Cruz is most certainly considered northern California — I didn't mean north of me, I just meant 'northern'. “

I understand. I said that the redwood country “includes the Santa Cruz Mountains and sites south, not only north, of San Francisco” and didn't only refer to the redwood country (which means “northernmost” California, though redwoods are as far south as Lucia!) but also to the National Forests.

Northern California ranges from the Oregon border (the northernmost parts, beyond Cape Mendocino, which actually are part of the Pacific Northwest and should be part of Oregon) all the way to the Transverse Ranges. (I draw the “border” at the best place, along a central river in the Transverse Ranges with inverted vegetation, chaparral on the northern bank and oak-grassland on the southern, the Santa Maria-Cuyama River, then extending eastward toward the division between the southernmost Sierra Nevada and the Tehachapis.)

California, in fact, could easily be partitioned into three or four states, or involve even more partition (land cessions to Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon).

http://www.csupomona.edu/~jskoga/splittingcalif…

http://books.google.com/books?id=OEqiYRm-ohMC&p…

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/14visalia….

http://www.csupomona.edu/~jskoga/splittingcalif…

http://www.phrelin.com/3Cals/Rationale.htm

http://www.jeffersonstate.com/

* * *

“People could just buy a plot of land and grow some plants. I think it would also be much easier to disseminate information on safe indoor grows if it were legal. You wouldn't need to illegally tap into the power grid (which is one source of grow fires) because you wouldn't need to hide it. In addition: hemp!”

Hemp, first and foremost — image Hemp for Victory, waves of it, in the Central Valley. Hemp has befallen to “medical marijuana” as the front for legalization and recreational use of marijuana lately.

The activists should be as honest as you are about it. Just legalize it or decriminalize it.

The fires in places like Vancouver (house fires) raise other concerns, too, from hazard and carelessness involving electrical overloading and lamp-related heat. (Growers there began working with water-jacketed lamps 15+ years ago — there were multiple homes burning down each month during the worse earlier times.)

California is a mammoth agricultural producer (leader in many categories) already, and is an ideal place for marijuana growing. (That fantastic star outdoors outdoes any lamp we can construct and operate here on earth.) I'd love to return there and put my gardening skills to work once again. (I grew plants at home while growing up there, and the only other gardening I did was to work with a couple of guys on an indoor project once in the Seattle metro area.)

Not the kind of problems with house fires as in Vancouver (BC), but a much-longer history of outdoor dangers, including guns, booby traps, and non-peaceful people guarding their acreage in the redwood country (which includes the Santa Cruz Mountains and sites south, not only north, of San Francisco).

The immigrant labor force and using the National Forest lands for additional growing sites is more recent.

Anyone in the Bay Area (or from it) will be happy to remind people of that, as well as about “Tinseltown.”

However, be aware that just as in the rest of the world outside the USA (“Hollywood! Beach babes! Oranges!”), much of the rest of the USA outside California also thinks of Southern California when “California” (or the silly “Cali,” which is the name of a city in Colombia, not a state in the USA) is on their minds and in their words.

Hey Sil — I'm not sure what part of the country you live in, but I live in the Bay Area, and let me assure you, it most certainly is already like this, it's just not taxed. Go up to the backwood hills in many of the northern counties and there is just about as much pot as can be imagined. Acres and acres of meticulously manicured plants. Huge mansion-size grow rooms. It's fairly clear that the whole situation would be safer for everyone if this particular drug were legalized — legalization takes out all the danger, all the need for guns and gangs, etc, all the need for sleezy drug lords or covert grow houses. As long as you have laws stipulating that you can't drive, operate heavy machinery, etc, while stoned, there really is no more danger than smoking cigarettes — some would argue less danger, since it's very rare to find a pot smoker that smokes as often or as much as even light cig smokers. Give the old hippies and cancer patients their weed.

In other words: it may sound crazy on the surface, and who knows if the proposal would have worked, but it certainly didn't come from a place of “yay prostitution!”, it came from a place of compassion for those who are at risk.

“California will be like the tobacco states I guess..selling something they shouldn't and making a killing, literally. Considering how the Fed feels about pot,”

Sil, ObamaCo has deliberately, explicitly made a gesture of appeasement in cases similar to this (with medical marijuana, itself a front for legalization — I wish proponents would simply be up-front and honest).

Each drug must be viewed separately and individually, because each drug is different — the blanket-total-legalizers are out of touch with reality. Marijuana is at the forefront (and probably the only drug, really) as a candidate for legalization, or at least decriminalization. There's plenty of weight to the “should” just as there still is a “shouldn't” in the case of legalizing, selling, and (typically) taxing the stuff. Where myth supplants reality is in people's expectations that a) legalization would eliminate existing problems and create no new ones; b) that this would be an instant, permanent fiscal salvation of mismanaged state finances.

What's funny are two things: a) the naivete' of so many (which would be dispelled in many subsequent cases by drug tourism and related criminal activity involving outsiders); b) the dependence and expectation of revenues, ridiculous behavior, similar to what already has often happened with things like lottery and casino revenue (“for education”) in a number of states. In other words, additional mismanagement problems ensue, rather than some instant, magic cure for systemic failure.