The big news here in Illinois, of course, is that Illinois’s “legalization” of recreational marijuana took effect yesterday. Here in Chicago there were people standing in lines at dispensaries to be among the first to purchase marijuana “legally” for as much as six hours.
I put those words in quotation marks because, as long as cannabis is still defined by the federal government as a Schedule I drug, they haven’t actually legalized anything. That makes me queasy as do all state nullifications of federal law.
Although police departments in Illinois have been preparing for the new law to take effect for some time, I doubt they are actually ready for it. How many police departments are actually equipped with enough saliva tests for THC? Also I would expect a rash of law suits challenging those tests’ validity.
This isn’t just a problem for Illinois. One of Illinois’s peculiarities is that nearly every one of the state’s major population centers is on or near the border with another state. That means that Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Kentucky need to be prepared as well.
Seems like payback time for Wisconsin, which was open and ready to sell beer to our Illinois 18-year-olds in the 60s–70s.