We have received the review of PAMDA from Idaho’s Attorney General. We are reviewing the suggestions and have found some of them to be very helpful in preventing PAMDA from facing constitutional challenges. We will incorporate some of these changes in our latest revisions.
However, some of the Attorney General’s opinions seem to be based on the idea that passing PAMDA will make the jobs of police more difficult. In the sense that we no longer wish to empower police to interfere with the personal private use of marijuana by adults, this is true.
One of the compelling points of PAMDA is to free police from the futile mission of pulling over adults on the freeway and ransacking their vehicles for small personal marijuana purchases they made legally across the border.
These encounters are terrifying for the Idahoans who are pulled over. Discovery of marijuana means arrest and jail, loss of job or scholarship, and a future as a “convicted drug criminal” that needlessly restricts opportunity.
Most of these Idahoans shopping over the border do so precisely because they do not want to deal with the criminal element—it’s not as if there are no weed dealers in Idaho willing to sell them marijuana.
Under PAMDA, we discourage the purchase of in-state black market marijuana and establish clear guidance as to what is considered a “personal amount” of marijuana and the acceptable parameters of “personal use” of marijuana—on private property only with permission of the owner.
PAMDA does not encourage the use of marijuana, it merely accepts that some Idaho adults do use marijuana despite the threat of criminal prosecution, that Idaho is surrounded by legal marijuana that will only increase its importation into Idaho, and that Idaho needn’t expend its finite law enforcement resources on those Idahoans who responsibly use marijuana in private.
PAMDA recognizes that marijuana legalization has come to the United States and that Idaho is uniquely positioned to stop criminalizing personal private marijuana use without succumbing to the corrupting influences of commercialized legal marijuana.
We can legalize marijuana the Idaho Way.
