Is Pot Legalization Push in California a Trend That Will Spread?
San Francisco – It’s almost a cliché these days that this city and its sister to the east, Oakland, stand as the primary incubators of some of California’s infamously wacky but later transformational social and political ideas. From the Silicon Valley to Oakland and Berkeley to the Napa Valley – if it was at first weird, untested, illegal and/or controversial, it probably got its start right here. Now a small but determined coalition of Bay Area activists and politicos are on a mission to have California be the first state in the union to fully legalize, regulate and tax the use of marijuana – and they’re approaching that goal from several different angles. The groups began their quest by building on the foundation that the 1996 approval of Proposition 215 provided. The statewide initiative, which made California the first state in the nation to legalize medicinal marijuana, broke down many long-held views on the drug – especially in its compassionate use for cancer patients and other
