The United States Conference of Mayors asked President Barack Obama to lay off local marijuana policies on Monday.
Since cities in Colorado and Washington voted to legalize recreational marijuana fall 2012, local government officials have been working to parse out ways to successfully put the new legislation to work. According to The Atlantic, Aurora, Colorado even considered implementing its own marijuana growing operations and dispensaries.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has evaded giving definitive regulations to state-level governments, making them unsure as to how far they can surpass federal law.
During the U.S. COM's annual meeting in Las Vegas, Republican and Democrat mayors unanimously voted for a legislative document that argues, "states and localities should be able to set whatever marijuana policies work best to improve the public safety and health of their communities."
Mayors of the respective cities demanded an amendment to an existing federal law-they wanted to adjust the amount of freedom states have to come up with their own marijuana legislation. They also asked President Obama not to waste money on marijuana-related police crackdowns, The Atlantic reported.
For a few years now, the COM has been working toward this end-to increase power on the local level and leave the federal government out of state-by-state decisions on the pot topic. The coalition supported a resolution two years ago that denounced the war on drugs as a complete failure.
COM supporters argue that too much capital has been wasted on policing weed-that money would be better spent on problems cities actually experience.
The resolution they supported on Monday claimed that marijuana sales and use are, for the most part, similarly executed across ethnic and socioeconomic groups, but minorities in particular are "arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated at higher rates and for longer periods of time." They deem this just one more reason to tell the government to back off legislation that should be up to states to decide.
The mayors resolved to put pressure on the White House-right as United States Attorney General Eric Holder has been alluding to the fact that he's working toward coming out with a police "relatively soon."
