#so unless a given community makes a concerted effort to move together people will just be scattered to the winds

[memorys-skyscraper]

honestly big shoutouts to el*n m*sk for fucking up twitter so bad

the fact that i literally can't use the site at all now without running the risk of my "impressions" resulting in alt-right chuds getting paid, even just an extra cent, has finally given me the motivation i needed to uninstall/block twitter on all my devices

and since im at it i've finally switched from chrome to firefox, added a bunch of ad blocking/privacy/QoL extensions, changed my default search engine to duckduckgo, the whole nine- all stuff i should've done ages ago but just never did

so, uh, hey! shoutouts to him for being a fucking idiot and driving me off the platform for good, thereby prompting me to change all this other stuff

[xtruss]

World Mental Health Day 2020

"We must act together, now, to make quality mental health care available for all who need it to allow us to recover faster from the #COVID19 crisis." — UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Saturday's World Mental Health Day.

This year’s World Mental Health Day, on 10 October, comes at a time when our daily lives have changed considerably as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The past months have brought many challenges: for health-care workers, providing care in difficult circumstances, going to work fearful of bringing COVID-19 home with them; for students, adapting to taking classes from home, with little contact with teachers and friends, and anxious about their futures; for workers whose livelihoods are threatened; for the vast number of people caught in poverty or in fragile humanitarian settings with extremely limited protection from COVID-19; and for people with mental health conditions, many experiencing even greater social isolation than before. And this is to say nothing of managing the grief of losing a loved one, sometimes without being able to say goodbye.

The economic consequences of the pandemic are already being felt, as companies let staff go in an effort to save their businesses, or indeed shut down completely.

Given past experience of emergencies, it is expected that the need for mental health and psychosocial support will substantially increase in the coming months and years. Investment in mental health programmes at the national and international levels, which have already suffered from years of chronic underfunding, is now more important than it has ever been.

This is why the goal of this year’s World Mental Health Day campaign is increased investment in mental health.

World Mental Health Day: an opportunity to kick-start a massive scale-up in investment in mental health

— 27 August 2020 News release Geneva

Joint release by the World Health Organization, United for Global Mental Health and the World Federation for Mental Health

Mental health is one of the most neglected areas of public health. Close to 1 billion people are living with a mental disorder, 3 million people die every year from the harmful use of alcohol and one person dies every 40 seconds by suicide. And now, billions of people around the world have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is having a further impact on people’s mental health.

Yet, relatively few people around the world have access to quality mental health services. In low- and middle-income countries, more than 75% of people with mental, neurological and substance use disorders receive no treatment for their condition at all. Furthermore, stigma, discrimination, punitive legislation and human rights abuses are still widespread.

The limited access to quality, affordable mental health care in the world before the pandemic, and particularly in humanitarian emergencies and conflict settings, has been further diminished due to COVID-19 as the pandemic has disrupted health services around the world. Primary causes have been infection and the risk of infection in long-stay facilities such as care homes and psychiatric institutions; barriers to meeting people face-to-face; mental health staff being infected with the virus; and the closing of mental health facilities to convert them into care facilities for people with COVID-19.

Move for mental health: let’s invest

That’s why, for this year’s World Mental Health Day, WHO, together with partner organizations, United for Global Mental Health and the World Federation for Mental Health, is calling for a massive scale-up in investment in mental health. To encourage public action around the world, a World Mental Health Day campaign, Move for mental health: let’s invest will kick off in September.

“World Mental Health Day is an opportunity for the world to come together and begin redressing the historic neglect of mental health,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization. “We are already seeing the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s mental well-being, and this is just the beginning. Unless we make serious commitments to scale up investment in mental health right now, the health, social and economic consequences will be far-reaching.”

During the past few months, the World Health Organization has issued, in collaboration with partners, guidance and advice on mental health for health workers and other frontline workers, managers of health facilities, and people of all ages whose lives have changed considerably as a result of the pandemic. With the disruption in health services, countries are finding innovative ways to provide mental health care, and initiatives to strengthen psychosocial support have sprung up. Yet, because of the scale of the problem, the vast majority of mental health needs remain unaddressed. The response is hampered by chronic under-investment in mental health promotion, prevention and care for many years before the pandemic.

Countries spend just 2% of their health budgets on mental health

Countries spend on average only 2% of their health budgets on mental health. Despite some increases in recent years, international development assistance for mental health has never exceeded 1% of all development assistance for health. This is despite the fact that for every US$ 1 invested in scaled-up treatment for common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, there is a return of US$ 5 in improved health and productivity.

World Mental Health Day: an opportunity to commit

The World Mental Health Day campaign will offer opportunities, primarily online given the continuing pandemic, for all of us to do something life-affirming: as individuals, to take concrete actions in support of our own mental health, and to support friends and family who are struggling; as employers, to take steps towards putting in place employee wellness programmes; as governments, to commit to establishing or scaling-up mental health services; and as journalists, to explain what more can and must be done to make mental health care a reality for everyone.

“It is nearly 30 years since the first World Mental Health Day was launched by the World Federation for Mental Health,” said Dr Ingrid Daniels, President of the World Federation for Mental Health. “During that time, we have seen an increasing openness to talk about mental health in many countries of the world. But now we must turn words into actions. We need to see concerted efforts being made to build mental health systems that are appropriate and relevant for today’s – and tomorrow’s - world.

“With so many people lacking access to good quality, appropriate mental health services, investment is needed now more than ever,” said Elisha London, Founder and CEO of United for Global Mental Health. “Everyone, everywhere can participate in this year’s campaign. Whether you have struggled with your own mental health, know someone who has been affected, are a mental health expert, or if you simply believe that investing in mental health is the right thing to do, move for mental health, and help make mental health care and support accessible for everyone.”

Key Events:

United for Global Mental Health: The 24-hour March for Mental Health

On 9 October, people from around the world will be encouraged to participate in a virtual march. A 24-hour livestream will feature people with lived experience, mental health leaders and influencers from the civil society groups already active in 19 countries through the Speak Your Mind campaign. In addition, global partner organizations that are leading and coordinating work on mental health are organizing hour-long sessions on specific themes, including mental health and young people, mental health and older people, and mental health and the LGBTQ+ community. Confirmed partners include Human Rights Watch and Alzheimer’s Disease International. The March will help increase awareness of mental health issues, break down stigma and bring about policy change. Members of the public will be urged to “add their voice” and join the March using online filters to be released in the lead-up to the event.

WHO: The Big Event for Mental Health

On World Mental Health Day, 10 October, the World Health Organization will, for the first time ever, host a global online advocacy Event on mental health. At this event - the Big Event for Mental Health - WHO will showcase the work that its staff are doing around the world to reduce mental illness and the harmful use of alcohol and drugs. World leaders and mental health experts will join the WHO Director-General to talk about their commitment to mental health and what more must be done. World-renowned musicians who have spoken out about the importance of mental health will talk about their motivation and perform. Sportsmen and women whose lives have been affected by mental ill health will share their experiences and how they have dealt with conditions such as depression and anxiety.

During the Event, a Special Prize for a mental health film, a newly-created category of WHO’s inaugural Health for All Film Festival, will be awarded.

World Federation for Mental Health: education and awareness raising

The Federation’s campaign kicks off on 1 September, with the Federation’s President launching the 2020 World Mental Health Day Campaign Educational Material “Mental Health for All: Greater Investment - Greater Access” under the Royal Patronage of HRH Princess Iman Afzan Al-Sultan Abdullah of Malaysia. This includes a Call to Action 2020 from Pamela Y. Collins and Deepa Rao, and will be followed by 45 days of awareness-raising activities led by the Federation’s youth section, including a global online discussion forum and art exhibition.

The World Health Organization

The World Health Organization provides global leadership in public health within the United Nations system. Founded in 1948, WHO works with 194 Member States, across six regions and from more than 150 offices, to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable. Our goals for 2019-2023 are to ensure that a billion more people have universal health coverage, to protect a billion more people from health emergencies, and to provide a further billion people with better health and well-being.

World Mental Health Day @WHO

United for Global Mental Health

United for Global Mental Health brings together the global mental health community with governments, funders and campaigners to help make sure everyone, everywhere has someone to turn to in support of their mental health. The not-for-profit organization was launched at the UN in September 2018.

www.unitedgmh.org @UnitedGMH

Speak your Mind is a nationally driven and globally united campaign powered by United for Global Mental Health. It works in support of mental health for all. It brings together people with first-hand experience of mental health conditions, experts and civil society organizations to call on leaders to end the neglect of mental health by increasing investment, empowerment and education. The campaign involves campaigners from 19 countries: Argentina, Australia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Liberia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tonga, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

www.gospeakyourmind.org @gospeakyourmind

The World Federation for Mental Health

The World Federation for Mental Health is an international membership organization founded in 1948 to advance, among all peoples and nations, the prevention of mental and emotional disorders, the proper treatment and care of those with such disorders, and the promotion of mental health. The Federation was the initiator of World Mental Health Day.

https://wfmh.global/ @WMHDay

[themostrandomfandom]

after reading that post on the NDs i was just wondering what some of your future!headcanons are, friendship wise? because in canon, brittana don't really have a consistent friend besides mercedes, right? like, quinn, rachel and kurt were all on an off with at least santana, if not both of them, and i guess artie and britt were kinda consistent post s2 but not really yknow? in season 6 tina seemed like she could be an option but as you mentioned in your post, they have kind of a weird history.

Hey, @deleteee​!

So here’s the thing: I don’t see Brittana having a lot of close contact with most members of the New Directions in the future.

It’s not that they purposefully cut them out of their lives or outright hate them or anything.

Well, okay, to be fair, Brittany does hate Rachel.

It’s just that they kind of naturally grow apart from them over time. 

While they will certainly attend what New Directions reunions they can and get together with the glee kids on occasion as logistics allow, things aren’t going to be the way they were during S4, S5, and S6 when they were jetting back and forth from NYC to Lima every other week and dropping in to stage musical interventions on various teammates whenever one of them had a personal crisis. 

There’s going to be some distance and some growing apart. The relationships they have that are already awkward will become more awkward still, and even their closer relationships will (by necessity) evolve and change shape.  

I have two main reasons why I headcanon things this way:

Because, as you mention, Brittana’s relationships with most of the members of the New Directions are already complicated at best, and I suspect that the status quo isn’t much likely to change given that the majority of the glee kids still after so many years fail to understand Brittana at even the most basic level.

Because, while of course experiences vary and I can’t speak for everyone who, like me, has passed the ten-year class reunion mark, I can say that I’ve personally found that adults who keep in close contact with any high school friends other than their bestest besties tend to be an exception rather than a rule.  

Particularly in small towns, as my hometown is and Glee’s Lima purports to be, there may be some groups who continue to socialize long after graduation, but more often than not such groups are comprised of the folks who never leave town, and they’re far and away a minority.

Much more common are the folks who eventually move away, maintaining sporadic contact with a few old friends but otherwise leaving high school in the past, forming new social circles as they attend school, travel, join the military, take work, start families, and/or gain more life experiences.

The closer the high school friendship was, the more likely it is to continue after graduation, while the more casual or complicated the high school friendship was, the more likely it is to peter out once the involved parties are no longer in daily contact and sharing regular mutual bonding experiences. The general rule is that the further out one gets from high school, the less one is willing and able to maintain old high school friendships.

So given that Brittana were never really all that close to the majority of the New Directions to begin with, I tend to think that as the years wear on, they’ll cease to have regular contact with most of them. High school is going to be in their rearview mirror, and while they’ll certainly have some fond memories of those days, they’re also going to be caught up in their new adult life together and glad to be continuing on to bigger and better things.

I kinda fic’d the idea here, if you’re interested.

As for individual headcanons, I put them after the cut.

__________

Tina Cohen-Chang, Artie Abrams, and Mike Chang

I list these three New Directions alums first because, frankly, I think Brittana will have the least contact with them out of anybody. 

Brittana are never especially close with Mike or Tina—and, in fact, Brittany even has beef with Tina in later seasons—and Santana is never close with Artie, even after she no longer has reason to view him as her rival for Brittany. Brittany and Artie are friendly with each other following their breakup, but they still aren’t especially close overall and they don’t tend to hang out one-on-one.

Those dynamics being what they are, I tend to believe that outside of glee reunions, there’s not going to be a lot of communication between Brittana and Tina, Artie, and Mike going into the future.

I’m sure that Brittana probably go to see Artina’s movies, and if Mike’s ballet troupe ever comes to town, they get tickets to see him perform. If they run into one another by chance, they stop to talk for a few minutes. If Brittana have kids, Tina will “like” every single baby photo that they post online and gush about how cute they are with multiple exclamation points.

But that’s probably about the extent of their interactions.

The farther out they get from their WMHS days, the less they’ll have to talk about.  

Hummelsonberry

Brittana’s relationship with this trio will depend a lot on proximity.

Following the events of S5 when Santana realizes that she doesn’t have to keep killing herself to win Hummelberry’s approval—and particularly as, no matter what she does, she is never going to get it—Brittana start to take a very casual approach to their interactions with Hummelberry (and by extension Blaine). 

Their basic m.o. seems to be to act cordial but not bend over backwards scrambling for affection. If they have the time and wherewithal, they’ll help Hummelsonberry out where they can, but they’re not going to upend their whole lives to deal with each and every new Hummelsonberry crisis like they (and particularly Santana) used to.

They’re okay with having a superficial friendship.

It’s this attitude and pattern for behavior that will shape all future Brittana + Hummelsonberry interactions.

The truth is that Hummelsonberry are fairly self-involved, so it is easier for them to maintain friendships with people whom they see on the regular and whose social orbits intersect with their own than it is for them to maintain friendships long distance or with people who move in circles outside theirs.

If they can run into Brittana on the subway or meet up with them at a mutually convenient bistro for a quick, twenty-minute lunch, then they’ll do so. But if keeping contact with Brittana requires real effort, then they’re not going to expend it. Friends have to come to them, not the other way around. If Brittana are willing and available to attend Rachel’s productions and Klaine’s charity galas, then they’ll be very welcome to do so. But there’s not going to be a lot of reciprocity there. 

—which is why I say that these relationships are only really going to be viable if Brittana remain in NYC.

Simply framed, on both sides, this is a friendship of convenience.

In the past, Santana used to go out of her way to maintain her bonds with Kurt and Rachel, and Brittany came into contact with Hummelberry through Santana’s efforts. But now that Santana’s not making such concerted efforts and no one else is picking up the slack, there will by necessity be a drop-off in interaction. If Santana doesn’t come running every time Hummelberry call, then in the long term, they’re all going to see one another less overall.   

Once Rachel’s Broadway career takes off and especially after she marries Jesse St. James and her social circle starts merging more and more with his, she’ll have less time for “the little people” that she used to know from Lima. She’ll make time for Klaine, of course, because Kurt’s her bestie and she carried their baby for them, but I doubt she’ll see as much of the other members of the New Directions as she once did, and particularly not outside of special, prearranged meetups and gatherings. 

Klaine will likewise be off doing their own thing. 

By 2020, they already have a kid, and as anyone in their twenties and thirties can tell you, friendships between people without kids and people with them take some serious work to maintain. Both parties have to be deeply invested in the endeavor in order to achieve success.

Since Brittana’s relationship with Klaine over the years has been tumultous at best, I somehow doubt that either party is going to log the effort to regularly socialize if Klaine have a kid and Brittana don’t. 

If Brittana do have children during their twenties, then maybe they’ll be able to arrange playdates between their kid and Klaine’s and bond with Klaine over their similar experiences in young parenthood.

But even if that scenario is the case, on a whole, I still don’t see Brittana and Klaine being particularly close.

Even beyond their responsibilities as new fathers, Klaine are also going to be busy with whatever careers they have. Like Rachel, their social circles will be based more in their current activities and work than in an old club from high school. Unless Brittana are in a similar line of work as they are, more relational slippage will occur. It will be easier for Klaine to socialize with others in their fields rather than with Brittana.

We know very little from canon about what Brittana will be up to in 2020, but I think it’s fairly telling that they’re not present for the NYC Tony Awards viewing party depicted in episode 6x13.

Either they’re in NYC but choose for whatever reason not to attend OR they’re not in NYC and so can’t attend. The dearth of canon information makes it difficult to know what exactly is going on.

Last we hear in episode 6x03, Brittana intend to live in NYC together and perhaps start attending school again. But we don’t really know where they go or what they do after their wedding—and especially not what becomes of them five years down the road.

If Brittana do remain in NYC in the long term, then they’ll probably see this Hummelsonberry a few times a year, usually in a group setting.

Still, despite having some interaction, the friendships here will never be intimate ones. Everything will be about shared activities and a common past, not emotional disclosure or deep personal trust. Just due to Hummelsonberry’s personalities, the focus of conversation and social energy will always be about seventy percent on them and their lives and only thirty percent on Brittana.

Of course, if Brittana move away from NYC—which eventually they may do, depending on where their career paths and family life takes them—then I think their level of interaction with Hummelsonberry will greatly decrease and will probably only take place at reunions, on special occasions, and through Facebook. 

They’ll exchange “likes” on good news posts and Christmas and Hanukkah cards each December, but they’re not going to be all up in one another’s business anymore, and there definitely won’t be any long, heartfelt phone calls or flights across the country for the sole purpose of seeing one another.

In any case, in the long run, I think Brittana will find that they like Hummelsonberry better from a distance and that having a catchup session once every year or two is preferable to being caught up in the vortex of their constant drama. Brittany will be able to handle Rachel better if she only has to interact with her on special occasions, and having some physical removal from Hummelberry will help Santana maintain perspective on them and preserve healthy social boundaries.

Quinn Fabray

I think that the future of the Unholy Trinity is pretty much up to Quinn.

Like I discuss in this post, Brittana have never really “needed” Quinn, per se. They’ve always been each other’s best friends, and she has been a third wheel. Over the years, there have been many times when Brittana have either purposefully separated themselves from Quinn or she from them, and whenever those instances of separation have occurred, Brittana have generally been fine, though Quinn has suffered for the isolation. 

Still, even though Brittana may not “need” Quinn, they do—despite their convoluted history with her—seem to want her, as we see when they seek her out throughout S2 and S3 especially.

Brittany’s S2 Heart Locker speech pretty much perfectly encapsulates how Brittana approach Quinn in the later seasons: they know that, in the past, they have fought with Quinn and stolen her boyfriends and threatened to quit their trio like every other week, and there’s been lots of weird stuff between them, but ultimately they realize that Quinn is their family, and they love and accept Quinn no matter what.

One of the main ways in which Brittana show their loving acceptance for Quinn is by allowing her to be the one to dictate the way the Unholy Trinity friendship functions. When Quinn isolates herself, they’ll seek her out and ask her nicely to return, but if she denies them, they’ll just let her be, trusting that eventually she’ll come back when she’s ready. They’re not going to push or get all up in her face. They know better than most people that everyone has to go at their own pace and that you shouldn’t force anyone to change their lives before they’re prepared to.

Honestly, I think Brittana’s “give her space” approach to Quinn explains why she doesn’t attend their wedding.

It’s not that Brittana don’t invite her.

I mean, they’re obviously fine with Quinn, even after the events of episode 4x14, given that they interact with her on friendly terms throughout S5 and early S6.  

It’s that she chooses not to come—and if I had to guess why, I’d say it’s probably because she feels awkward knowing that the last time she and Santana attended the same wedding, they ended up sleeping together. 

She knows she and Brittana are good under normal circumstances, but she can’t help but worry that it will be a little bit strange for her to be at their wedding, given that she and Santana have slept with each other. She feels uncomfortable, so she doesn’t show. She probably makes some excuse, saying she is busy with school or her job or traveling elsewhere.

—and headcanon says Brittana know that the excuse is bogus, but they don’t hold it against her.

For as much as they might like to have Quinn at the wedding, she clearly isn’t ready to be there, so they give her a pass. That’s just kind of their m.o. with Quinn. They’ll give her as much attention as she’ll allow but no more. 

That’s why I say that the future of the Unholy Trinity is ultimately on Quinn.

If she seeks Brittana out and shows that she is receptive to their overtures, then I can see them having a fairly warm relationship going forward. But if she continues to remain aloof, then Brittana will let her be.

Of course, I’d like to imagine that as Quinn matures and undergoes more treatment for her trauma and mental health issues, she becomes increasingly more comfortable with herself and is better equipped to maintain friendships. Though in her teens and twenties, she routinely ghosted whenever she couldn’t deal, now she actually reaches out to people—including Brittana.

Sure, their relationship is never exactly as close as they perhaps once wished it could be, but there’s still genuine affection there. 

So to the actual headcanons:

In their twenties, sometimes they’ll go months without any contact, but then out of the blue Brittana will get a postcard from Quinn who’s doing grad school work in Europe or attending some kind of nonprofit fundraiser on the West Coast. The postcard never says much, just, “Miss you girls. ❤ Q.” Just knowing that Quinn is out in the world and doing okay makes Brittana smile. The postcards go up on the refrigerator, stuck on with Brittany’s most colorful magnets. 

On the rare occasions when they’re in the same city, they go out for coffee and drinks. Brittana tease Quinn about her abysmal choices in men, and she tells them to fuck off because back when they were in high school and still dating boys, they didn’t fare much better. Later in the night, once they’re sufficiently drunk, they talk about how surreal it is that they’ve all slept with both Puck and Sam and that Brittany and Quinn have both slept with Santana, and Santana groans and says she needs another cosmo if they’re going to continue with this conversation. They all agree that they’re so glad things are different now. 

Occasionally, Quinntana fight on Twitter over political stuff. They’re mostly on the same side of the fence, but they do come from very different backgrounds, and there have been a few times when Santana has called Quinn out for spouting white feminist bullshit and Quinn has told Santana that she’s being unrealistic and needs to pull her head out of her ass. Brittany usually tries to make some joking comment to diffuse the situation, but in one instance things get so bad that Quinntana end up blocking each other and not talking—on Twitter or otherwise—for several months. The radio silence between them lasts a long time, but then one day something happens with Rachel, whom they both mutually follow, and they end up replying to the tweet almost simultaneously. A brief conversation ensues, and the next thing you know, they’re both following each other again. They eventually talk through their old issue and move on. Brittany posts a #tbt unholy trinity photo on Instagram to commemorate their make-up.

Over the holidays, when Brittana are in Lima visiting their folks and they run into Judy at the grocery store, they text Quinn “saw ur mom today xoxoxo.” Two seconds later, they send her a selfie they took with Judy by the freezer waffles. They’re all pulling duck faces. Quinn responds with an eye-roll emoji, but Brittana know she secretly loves it. 

Someday in the future, an obituary for one Sue Sylvester, Esq. starts circulating online. Brittana call Quinn and talk through the weird tangle of feelings that they know only she can really understand, stunned that the larger-than-life cheerleading coach who was in so many ways a monster to them is finally gone. 

If Quinn ever marries, you can bet that Brittana get her the most embarrassing sex toy ever for her bridal shower but the most thoughtful gift ever for the wedding—something not on the registery but that she ends up loving anyway.

Once they get into their thirties, they don’t see one another or talk very often, but when they do, it’s good. They’re living in different places, and their lives have taken very different turns, but they still enjoy one another’s company when they can have it. Quinn laughs more now than she ever did in high school, and she’s much more easygoing. There’s no slapping or one-upping. They all have this unspoken sense that they survived something together, and while it’s not the straightforward kind of friendship most people would recognize, for them it works. It’s what the Unholy Trinity is all about. 

Sam Evans and Noah Puckerman

When it comes to these boys, Brittana’s future relationships with them really depend on their future relationships with Brittana’s female friends.

Simply put: If in the long term Sam ends up with Mercedes and Puck ends up with Quinn, then Brittana are going to keep in contact with Sam and Puck by association. But if those romantic relationships don’t pan out, then I think Brittana will seldom if ever see or talk to Sam and Puck again except at glee reunions.

In real life, very few people actually marry their high school sweethearts, but in the Gleeverse, pretty much the exact opposite statistic holds true. 

That being the case, methinks that chances are Brittana will end up seeing their ex-boyfriends with some frequency over the years.

—and, frankly, while that’s probably not something they would have chosen to do if their friendships with their best girls didn’t necessitate it, I think that with things as they are, they probably actually take everything pretty in stride, and they’re able to foster a good group dynamic that works out well in the end.

Since they’re closer with Mercedes than they are with Quinn, they see Sam more often than they do Puck. 

Now that she is not in direct competition with him for Brittany, Santana reverts to her S3 dynamics with Sam, meaning that she treats him like a dorky younger brother, teasing him about his lips (and now probably also his relationship with Mercedes). He takes her snark in stride and they actually develop a fairly good rapport. It’s not like they disclose a lot to each other or they ever hang out together in the absence of Mercedes, but they can keep a friendly conversation going at family BBQs, and there’s a lot less tension between them nowadays than there was during S4, for sure.

Brittany goes back to mostly ignoring Sam, much as she did throughout S2, S5, and S6. It’s not that she’s cold to him, but they don’t really have a lot of one-on-one conversations with each other. They do fine in a group setting, and Sam’s impressions still make Brittany laugh pretty hard, but the personal bond they used to have has essentially dissolved. They dated, and thank god it didn’t work out, because now they’re both married to other people—the right people—and they wouldn’t have things any other way.

I tend to think that if Samcedes get married, they’ll almost certainly have kids someday, and if Brittana also have kids someday, then I can see playdates as a real bonding experience for Brittana and Sam. Sam is great with kids, and Brittana would be the kind of moms who would love anyone who loved their children, so watching Sam run around with Sugar their toddler on his shoulders at the same time that his and Mercedes’s baby sits cooing at them from a nearby bouncy swing would definitely be something that they would find endearing.

As for Puck, Brittana don’t have a ton to say to him, and, honestly, Quinn tends to for the most part leave him behind when she and Brittana have meetups (“He says we should have fun doing our ‘girlie stuff.’ He’s going out with some of his old squadron buddies. He’ll swing by around midnight to pick me up”).

Still, on the rare occasions when they are with him, they get along okay. Pretty early on, he figures out that Brittany is a wizard at calculating flight trajectories off the top of her head, so he quizzes her on the physics like it’s a party trick, and he and Santana mostly just talk shit to each other, not in a mean way like they used to but just because they’re both hotheads who like to run their mouths.

Of course, Puck is always a little bit weird about the fact that both he and Brittana are attracted to women, not in the sense that he says lewd things—he grew out of that after high school, thank god—but in the sense that he is clearly fascinated and keeps trying to figure out if Brittana have “types.” 

Brittana and Quick will be out having drinks, and Quinn will excuse herself to go use the restroom, and as soon as she’s out of earshot, Puck will point up at whatever actress or model is on the TV over the bar and make a comment like, “Hot blonde, right? Great legs,” trying to see if Santana and Brittany will agree with him.  

Hint: They mostly just roll their eyes.

All in all, Brittana are never very personally close with either Sam or Puck, but they learn to get along with them pretty well in the way one does with in-laws.

Mercedes Jones

Saved the happiest one for last.

Since Mercedes is the friend Brittana have the best relationship with to close out the show, I think she is the one they remain emotionally closest to as the years march on. When she took them on as her background dancers, that made her their family, and they’re always going to feel warmly towards her and want to spend time with her when they can. 

Of course, that said, Mercedes is a busy person with a recording career and active touring schedule, so maintaining a relationship with her requires some serious work on the parts of both parties. 

When Mercedes rolls into town, Brittana know that they are basically “on call” to meet up with her whenever she can spare a moment between her radio gigs and photo shoots and recording sessions and nightly concerts. 

Sometimes they’ve reunited with her in the strangest places and under the most hectic circumstances—for twenty minutes in the parking lot at the airport while she is on a layover coming back to the States from the UK, backstage at Studio 8-H while she’s filming promos for an SNL episode on which she’s the musical guest, and at three in the morning on a double-decker bus outside MSG after she rocks a sold-out show and takes three successive encores.

They don’t necessarily get to talk to her very often, but they do text with her every few weeks, and on the rare occasions when they can “steal her” for an hour or two, they make up for lost time laughing and singing and smiling their full heads off.

—and for as busy as Mercedes is, she does go the extra mile to make time for Brittana, too, flying them out to LA to lay down some background vocals on a charity track she’s doing for hurricane relief; throwing them a baby shower the same day she has a morning interview with Kelly Ripa; making sure that they know ten months in advance that they will be bridesmaids at her wedding so they had better clear their calendars (“Santana, you are allowed three mouth jokes about my groom during the reception, so you’d better use them wisely—and not during your toast”).

Once Mercedes and Sam start having kids of their own, Mercedes’s schedule clears out somewhat—not because her career is failing but because she makes a personal decision to spend as much time as she can with her family—and once it does, she and Brittana are able to socialize more regularly.

I headcanon Mercedes as Brittana’s child(ren)’s godmother, and I think that Brittana are probably godmothers to at least one of her kids, too.

Sometimes Mercedes still has no idea what Brittany’s talking about when she rambles, and Sancedes still rib each other on occasion, but at the end of the day, they’re three friends who support and love each other no matter what.

Because both sides continually put in the effort to keep the friendship alive and growing, Brittanacedes actually get closer as the years go on, developing a truly intimate friendship of the kind that earns Brittana mentions in Mercedes’s “Greatest Hits” album liner notes and which makes Brittana feel, perhaps for the first time outside of the relationship they have with each other, that they’ve got someone who really has their backs and will put in the work for them like a true friend should. 

Final Note

Though I believe that Brittana will grow apart from many members of the New Directions over time, that’s not to say that I think that they won’t have friends. 

Even as they grow apart from some members of their high school social circle, they’ll make new friends through their school, work, and other activities. There may be besties in their future that we never got to meet on the show—a neighbor who has kids the same age as theirs are, a hilarious coworker, a wlw couple they meet at Pride.

Honestly, I think that Brittana will increasingly come into their own as they get older. While they were “popular girls” in high school, the reality is that they both had a lot of hangups that made it difficult for them to make and keep friends and develop platonic intimacy even with the people they liked. As adults, they’re infinitely more comfortable with themselves and better equipped to let others in. They don’t hide. They show all of the awesomeness that they are.   

Like I talk about at the end of this post, Brittana have a lot to offer people who give them a fair shake and see them for who they are currently as opposed to who they may have been in the past. They’re hilarious, talented, generous women who have a great capacity for love. 

I’ve gotta believe that adulthood will be good to our girls. They’re gonna be surrounded by lots of people they love and who love them.

[nickgerlich]

What We Have Learned So Far

I remember back to the 1970s, when I was a mere teenager. My Dad the Accountant was also the purchasing agent for our family. It was a task in which he prided himself and his squeezing-blood-out-of-turnips ways. He shopped with ruthless cunning and laser precision. This explained why our basement had metal shelves lined with enough canned goods to get us through a nuclear fallout, because Dad was the kind of guy who would find corn on sale, and then buy the whole case.

My friends used to make fun of me. “Are you guys planning on World War III?” they would ask. Nope. Dad was just being a good shopper, so we shut up and ate corn.

But suddenly I realize that Dad was ahead of his time, while at the same time, a product of his times. He grew up during the Great Depression, so he knew the value of a nickel saved, a paper clip, piece of string, even an empty beer can with its top removed to use as a pencil holder. This is not just quaint nostalgic yearnings, it’s the new survival strategy. I suspect if you went into many American pantries these days, you would think my Dad had paid them a visit.

While the first documented US case of coronavirus happened on 20 January 2020, it wasn’t until the last two weeks that we really stood up and paid much attention here. In that short time, we have learned many things, about ourselves, about our society. Here are a few:

No one is happy right now. We are filled with anxiety. We’re stress-filled, and easily provoked by the littlest thing someone might do to us in public. I get it. When your world is turned upside down, it’s easy to take it out on others. Even though only a tiny tiny fraction of our 330 million people will contract COVID-19, there is still the chance it could happen. Given the fact that we are all told to stay home, one has to wonder what the social outcomes will be down the road. Will there be a baby boom next winter, as some chirpy people suggest? Or will the added stress lead to divorces? Worse yet, not if, but when, will there be shopping cart rage and shootings in shops as people fight over scarce commodities?

What we once took for granted, we may never do so again. Remember when we could go to a supermarket and they would have everything we needed? Yeah, me too…about two weeks ago. I remember my first semester at WT, when I had a young Polish emigre in my Principles of Marketing class. She told of life in the mother country, still reeling under years of an oppressive regime. She spoke of being overwhelmed by all the choices we had in America, because in Poland, it wasn’t about which bread, it was about whether there was any bread at all. If you saw a queue forming outside a store, you got in line without even knowing why you were there, under the assumption that someone knew something you did not, and you better not miss whatever was available.

How sad that we now think the same thing. We blindly get in line before opening hours in hopes that shelves have been restocked during the night.  And for that matter, every other aspect of our lives, from dining out to movie theatres, concerts, sporting events, and more, are all out the window right now. We have our Netflix, as long as they don’t cut the bandwidth to save the internet for everyone now engaged in online learning.


Cheap gas is nice, but if you can’t go anywhere, it is worthless. With a barrel of oil around $24, dealers are practically giving gas away. Today, you can get gas for $1.69 a gallon in Amarillo. The only problem is that, with so many people sent home to work, shops closed, and everyone hunkering down, there’s really nowhere to go other than the grocery. Oh, for fuel this cheap when we are able to take road trips. This is nothing but a false positive externality of the coronavirus crisis.

Agile companies and organizations will survive, while the others will be weeded out quickly. We will definitely lose a lot of businesses during this pandemic, especially mom-and-pop businesses. There are more businesses than we realize that are only one or two months away from bankruptcy, mirroring the condition of many citizens who are similarly skating by, month-to-month. Are you in the restaurant business? Why haven’t you considered takeaway before? Have a retail shop? Why haven’t you gone online yet with a commerce-driven website and/or mobile app? Teach at a university? Why haven’t you pushed yourself a little the last two decades by developing at least one online course?

Furthermore, this will cause many businesses, organizations, and even governments to reconsider how business is done, but only among those that survive. Does it necessarily have to be face-to-face? Why can’t it be done electronically? Does it have to be done the old way forever?

I do not need to eat out anywhere near as much as I once did. I have been moving in this direction for the last few months anyway in an effort to eat more healthily, as well as because I am enjoying teaching myself to cook. But with restaurants off-limits in most areas, and everyone my age being urged to have a month’s worth of provisions on hand, my pantry runneth over. And you know what? I am enjoying it. Even with my beginner’s skills and tools, I can put together a mighty tasty dinner. My oldest daughter often joins me in this endeavor, and she, better than I, produce some amazing meals. Guess what? We are saving money. We are eating very healthily. And I am losing weight. Lots of it. Yay, us! Of course, that’s bad news for the restaurants if they are able to survive this tragedy, because I may not return there as frequently as I once did.

Many more people are now getting exposure to e-commerce, curbside pick-up, and home delivery. This could forever change the way we buy things, making it difficult for those unable or unwilling to evolve. This goes far beyond the native convenience of it all, and even the social distancing aspect. I, for one, do not want to purchase items that have been handled, tried on, manipulated, etc., by others.

What people purchase during times of panic reflects their worst fears. Panic is irrationality at its worst. It causes us to do things completely out of character, and when it comes to purchasing, it causes us to buy things that make no sense whatsoever. The elephant in the living room right now is toilet paper. The coronavirus does not even cause diarrhea, so there’s no worry in that department, yet Americans and others worldwide have gobbled up virtually every available roll. One report I read said that we bought 60 days’ worth of toilet paper in three days. A standard 18-roll pack should last a minimum of one month, and quite possibly two months, in a two-person household.

So why did everyone hoard this most basic commodity? Simple. Because everyone fears having to take a dump and not having paper with which to wipe. Never mind starvation or more important matters; we just want to be clean down there. I want to be clean, too, but I’m not going to go crazy on inventorying it. A second fear is bottled water. Really? Unless our public utilities also break down, we’re going to have tap water. So picture this: We are a bunch of defecation dehydrophobes. I don’t like that mental picture.

The food people are buying reflects our rather pedestrian American cuisine, which also turns out to be our comfort foods. The American diet is a mash-up of various international influences and regionalized adaptations, along with some items of our own making. To be honest, I don’t think it is all that good. It is rather bland, favors sauces that happens to red, and probably puts more emphasis on the centerpiece—meat—than is healthy. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Folks are buying the things they know how to prepare, because going out to eat is out of the question unless you can live with takeaway, and people are buying the things that will provide comfort and hope during a time of discomfort and seeming hopelessness. If pounded steak and potatoes make you feel good, then by all means, eat it. It also means that my rather esoteric tastes and dietary preferences are pretty safe. This is one time that being in the minority has its benefits. All of my stuff is still abundant.

People will rearrange their schedules to go shopping if there is hope that a scarce item has been replenished overnight. When was the last time you went grocery shopping at 7:00am? I did it this week, and was not the least bit surprised to see about two dozen others out there, milling about in the pre-dawn moonlight. Many stores have now trimmed their operating hours to allow more time for thorough overnight cleanings and restocking, as well as to accommodate seniors-only shopping hours, but the long and the short of it is simple: We’ll do whatever it takes if we think we might find a roll of toilet paper or canister of Lysol. Think about this. Aside from Black Friday, when was the last time you engaged in cart-to-cart contact for a limited supply of products?

We are social animals, and we are already starting to miss each other. I can see it on social media already. We want…no, we need…human interactions, whether it is at church, the pub, the workplace, the classroom. All of those have been taken from us in short order, and it did not take long for us to feel that immense loss. Thankfully, we have social media to stay in touch, and inexpensive calling plans to just say hello. Reach out and touch your loved ones, maybe not physically, but at least electronically. It may be a while before we can hug, kiss, even shake hands. But we can still communicate.

There will always be defiant, belligerent people among us. This is the scariest part. There are many folks taking to social media trying to downplay the importance of this matter, dissing the statistics that shows this to be a highly communicable disease with a much higher mortality rate than the common flu. Worst yet, I have seen some of my former students echoing these refrains online. Now more than ever we must use reasoning and logic to filter through the news, all of it, from real to fake. This is a very real contagion that can grow exponentially if left unabated. Interventions of the highest order are necessary to throw speed bumps in its growth. This is not a conspiracy from any political party; it is a global pandemic that knows no borders nor ideologies. Don’t blow off the truth; don’t dig your heels in the dirt and embrace nonsense claptrap that ignores the magnitude of this situation.

We use social media to vent our frustrations and anxieties. And argue. It is sadly ironic that the very tool intended to bring people together has also made it possible for oceans of discontent to rage between us. Give someone a microphone, and suddenly they feel like they are back in high school debate. But more than that, I see raw emotions in people’s posts…the empty shelves, the shuttered stores, the empty parking lots. The mere act of photographing, composing a caption, and posting them is cathartic in that it lets us release those pent up emotions. My advice going forward: skip the arguing, but keep posting your photos and words. If anything, we are all now citizen journalists documenting history in the making. Can you imagine nearly everyone in 1918 had a decent camera in their pocket or purse, and snapped hundreds of photos of the pandemic that year? We would have a much better record had this all been available. We do, so keep shooting and posting.

Finally, we need to love our educators. They have all been forced to do things they may or may not know anything about as they transition to online. For some, it has been easy. For others, it is like being thrust from knowing miles, pounds, and quarts, and suddenly having to use kilometers, kilograms, and liters. We are doing our best to make sure the learning continues, with or without the comforts of the classroom. We all have to make the best of the situation. And I offer encouragement to students for whom online learning is unfamiliar. It’s not perfect, but neither is the classroom. Keep an open mind, and trust your educator. We’re not doing this for ourselves.

I know that I could go on, and there is certainly much more we will learn in the days and weeks ahead. And that’s right—weeks. I am not hopeful that we will return to what we consider to be normal for quite some time. This is the new normal. All I know is that my dad was right. Life could get tough again, maybe not quite like it was in the 1930s, but certainly a far cry from what we all know as the American way. In the end, though, it will make us tougher. Our steely resolve will help us get through this, and prepare us for whatever the future may hold. 



Now who wants some corn?

Dr “Going The Distance“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

[behindthebeautylens]

The Other Side: Learning to Assist in order to Learn

How many of you have attended a workshop and were seriously impressed from the moment you stepped in the studio or room? I know I have been impressed a few times and I've been relatively unimpressed at least 2x. To be honest, it's been a 50-50% crap shoot.

In June 2017, I had the opportunity to work as a workshop assistant in New York City. There was no budget for the assistants but the trade off is that I would get to see production from the opposite side of the students, direct access to the photographer hosting the workshop, a portfolio review and get to shoot at least one day for some portfolio images. Now, I don't always advocate working for free because it sets a precedence that's generally undesirable but you have to know what you're getting in exchange for your hard work and efforts. I thought the trade off was fair and I liked the photographer.

Being on the other side of a workshop has really enlightened me. It's different when everything is set up for you and you walk in as a student and you're wide eyed in wonder. I think there's a ton of value in offering to work as an assistant for a photographer you admire even if you're not getting paid for it. I knew that I would be spending money to attend this workshop and work as an assistant. The budget wasn't there to pay for the entire cost of going to this workshop but I did reap the benefit of seeing the preparation and planning that goes into a workshop, meeting her stylists, working directly for a well established German photographer/student as a lighting assistant, and seeing how it comes together.

The other benefit of being on the other side of a workshop is you get to see how much effort goes into running a workshop. Everyone thinks they can run a workshop (myself included) and that people will be falling over themselves to learn from another. The reality is - it's a lot of hard work and sticking to your guns (beliefs and standards). It's also knowing what makes a great workshop and that is "production.”

The production side of a workshop makes or breaks a workshop. The level of detail, contingency planning, details, contributors all have a stake in making a workshop memorable or a waste of time. It's hard work and it should be hard work. It means you covered every detail possible for the workshop - the minutiae right down to the type of food you're offering because someone might have an allergy or making special accommodations for students. It's a lot of communication of intent and desires so that there is no mis-fires on what the expectations are and what the outcomes should be. There's a lot of time location scouting and finding the right place that will accommodate the size of your group, the stylists, the models, etc.

Working as a lighting assistant was really interesting. I worked for a German photographer who was well established as a production and creative director. He's worked on Audi commercials and produced large scale concert video projects. He really didn't need to do this workshop but he wanted to because it pushed him to create in a different environment, something he couldn't get in Munich. While walking with him while scouting the backstreets of Noho and Soho, I asked why he chose to come to this workshop. He said in Munich the city is much different; you couldn't get that gritty feel of NYC. He said everything in Munich was beautiful and just too "pretty."

As we walked along these back streets I would point out city back grounds and spaces that we could visualize our model in. He would take out his phone and use an app called Artemeis and snap a few images to see what each look would look like using a 50mm or 85mm. He would actually collaborate with me and we would stop and Brainstorm each location - how to light it and what we would want the model to do. In the end, we decided that natural light with a white reflector would be the way to go. It would be too difficult and risky to haul out the Profoto equipment onto the street, especially moving 3-5 times for different background scenes. I learned from him that shooting fashion didn't need to be complicated. Sometimes we over complicate photo shoots and think more is better. It's not. We, as junior photographers, can do fashion with the right vision and foresight; by being selective in styling choices and model choices and with the right conveyed intent - we can create fashion without all the hoopla that we "think" is happening on these sets. So I thank this photographer for simplifying it for me and showing me that it's ok to use natural light and basic tools to get an image.

When we went inside the NEO studios, he outlined to me what he would like for lighting and it was my task to go into the lighting room and pull the required equipment. I pulled all the lights, stands, and equipment to set up his lighting equipment while he took a break. Yeah, I wanted a break too, but I liked the challenge of having his "set" set up and ready to go. I was totally happy knowing "my" photographer walking on set and ready to go. Minor adjustments to the model's clothing and we were off shooting. The nice part was that the photographer I worked with was very low key, confident in his abilities, and was willing to share his knowledge. I learned a lot about helping the photographer achieve his lighting and also dialing in his lighting to achieve his vision.

The interesting part is that you'll find out that even the biggest photographers who are creating these amazing images are sometimes doing the same thing you're doing - working in a crammed location with stylist working off of kitchen tables and kitchen counters and the photographer crammed into small nooks trying to get the shot. These photographers and teams are doing the same thing you're doing already. They're getting up early, hiking/traveling to locations, grabbing their favorite teams and lighting assistants and a model and making images happen. They are you with more drive and tenacity. They. Are. You.

So, being an assistant is not really a bad thing. It's work, for sure. However, I think I came away with more knowledge about production and how to "work for someone else." I think a lot of photographers miss out on that aspect of the creative team. We are usually in charge of the process but we forget that in order to learn and lead, we must also follow others. If you're given the opportunity to assist, I highly recommend you grab the chance. You will learn much more than spending $1,500 to "ooh and aww" another photographer's achievements.

Here's what I learned from this assistant job:

1. High end production is expensive. It's not cheap. The cheaper you go, the cheaper the experience is for photographers or your client.

2. Location matters. Not just the city you're doing the workshop in, but the space that you're working in. The environment - what it offers and the capabilities to transform your environment into a photo set. You can't just pick a corner of a street and hope that you can make it this amazing photo shoot set. The photographer I assisted scouted the back of the Neo Studio building in Noho, NYC and we walked the entire back street. I suggested locations, we did some light testing, we crafted an imaginary picture of what our model would look like in that particular spot (i.e. Against a black door, in an alley way, where the light would hit at x-time). Location is important because it sets the scene and it inspires the photographer and model to bring forth their best.

3. Marketing is important. While I am privy to some stuff, I will just say that marketing is a 24/7 job. It's tiring and it's a necessary evil. Unless you're going to hire your own marketing guru and can afford it, it's on you to market your workshop and translate value to a potential client. How you do that - I couldn't tell you. I'm still learning how to do it myself.

Hope that gives you a little insight on what it's like to be an assistant and what to look for when you're working for "free." Not all free work is beneficial but if you can walk away with a wealth of knowledge, then you made the right decision.

[theconservativebrief]

The week’s news has been dominated by two stories: Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, and the New York Times’s anonymous op-ed from a Trump senior official blasting the president. These two things may seem unrelated, but they are not. Put together, they constitute a damning indictment of the way so-called “Never Trump” Republicans and their fellow travelers in Congress have reacted to a president who they know is unfit for office.

To see why, look at the way three Trump-skeptical Republicans in the Senate — Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, and Bob Corker — have reacted to the Times op-ed, which argued that Trump has dangerous policy instincts and an erratic, moody personality (the same picture that emerges from Bob Woodward’s book and the past two years or so of inside-the-White House reporting). Sasse said the piece’s argument is “similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week.” Flake said he was glad that members of Trump’s top staff, like the op-ed writer, are working to frustrate the president. Corker claimed that “this is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one.”

But the question the Kavanaugh hearing prompted is this: What are they willing to do, as US senators, knowing that the president is unfit for office? The answer, it seems, is pretty much nothing.

Given that Republicans have only a 51-49 majority in the Senate, a mere two Republican defections could put Kavanaugh’s nomination in serious jeopardy (to a greater or lesser degree depending on where red-state Democrats, like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, come down). Trump really wants Kavanaugh on the Court, and so does the rest of the party. This gives the three Trump-skeptical Republicans cited above a good deal of leverage over the president: the power to withhold their vote on a top Trump and GOP priority unless something is done to reel him in.

They could hold up the nomination until Trump agrees to sign a bill that would prevent him from firing special counsel Robert Mueller (such a bill has already passed the Senate Judiciary Committee). They could demand a passage of a bill restraining Trump’s ability to cavalierly launch a war (Senate Democrats have written such a bill). They could pass legislation preventing the president from unilaterally withdrawing from trade deals and international organizations like NATO (there is, you guessed it, a Senate bill for that).

They could demand real Senate investigations into Trump’s conflict of interests, or force him to release his tax returns — the list goes on and on and on.

But the Sasse-Corker-Flake triumvirate hasn’t done any of that. They haven’t even hinted at doing anything like that, despite the obviousness of such a move given that the op-ed prompted focus on Trump’s fitness for office. According to the Vox Senate confirmation tracker, both Sasse and Corker have already voiced support for Kavanaugh’s nomination; Flake is still formally undecided but widely expected to vote yes.

By prioritizing their party’s interests over their duty to act in a crisis that they have acknowledged we’re confronting, the Trump skeptics in the GOP expose their own rhetoric as profoundly hollow.

There is something so fittingly obscene about the wheels coming off the administration right before our eyes just as the GOP cements its deal with the devil. What could possibly make this worth it to them? Justice Kavanaugh, that’s what.

— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) September 6, 2018

This isn’t the first time these Republicans have acted like this. Time after time, on issue after issue, Sasse, Corker, and Flake have all voiced criticisms of Trump and then voted for his legislation when the time comes. There has never been any concerted effort to use their leverage to hold Trump accountable, or try to mitigate the consequences of a venal and mercurial man holding the most powerful position in the world.

But there has never been a clearer contrast between what these Republicans say and what they do than there is at this particular moment in time. The two main topics in American public life at the moment are the Supreme Court and the basic unfitness of the president for office. Yet in the name of the former, Republican legislators aren’t acting to do anything about the latter.

If the crisis is as bad as the anonymous Times op-ed writer and these senators say it is, then this isn’t a time for the normal politics of judicial confirmation. It’s a time to subordinate everything to the health and survival of the country: protecting American democracy, and blocking Trump from using his policy powers to endanger national security and the health of the US economy.

And yet confirming Kavanaugh comes first. Tax cuts came first. The Obamacare repeal effort, which all of these men supported, came first. There never seems to be a time when the actual power these men have — the power to block Trump’s legislative priorities — is being used.

Some anti-Trump conservatives think this is the principled thing to do. Commentary’s Noah Rothman, for example, argues that it would be inconsistent or unprincipled for Republicans to put Kavanaugh below combating Trump:

If conservatives were to oppose this nominee not on his merits but to communicate some ancillary message to the White House, they would be guilty of betraying principle and shunning their constitutional prerogatives. In the process, they would sacrifice their scant influence within the Republican Party.

This gets to a pervasive misapprehension about what Trump-skeptical Republicans see as their role at this moment in history. Their conduct suggests that they value consistency over raw power, and that consistency is what irritates those whose politics is entirely situational.

But this has it precisely backward. Voting for Kavanaugh unconditionally is valuing power, GOP control on the Supreme Court, over consistency — consistency with their own stated view of the gravity of the crisis facing the country.

These three senators, if you ask them, would claim to put country over party. But when they warn that the basic health of the country is at stake, and have an opportunity to do something about it, Republican political and policy interests come first.

This is the core of the problem. Republicans, even the ones who are willing to open their eyes to the danger of Trump, think that tax cuts and judges are more important than reining in a president who they fully admit could do serious damage to the country. If even the most Trump-skeptical Republicans are unwilling to entertain the idea of temporarily frustrating the Republican agenda in order to rein in Trump, what hope is there for the rest of the party?

Original Source -> Kavanaugh, the NYT op-ed, and the failure of Trump-skeptical Republicans

via The Conservative Brief

[ulyssessklein]

How being in a band changes your life

The weird and wonderful realities of a life in music.

This article is not about how being a member of a band somehow elevates you to a god-like status, nor is it about how you’ll never have to work a normal 9-5 job again, or the copious amounts of sex and drugs you expect you’ll be served up every night of the week.

Instead, we’re going to look at the far less glamorous yet infinitely more realistic aspects of life in an aspiring band. It might not sound very rock ‘n’ roll, but it is precisely that – much less throwing TVs out of hotel windows than it is riding around in a beat-up van feeling hungry and tired.

Please note: we’re not trying to put you off. Live music is the gift that keeps on giving, and the highs of being in a band frequently outshine the lows. We just don’t want you to embark on your musical journey without knowing the facts – so here are the most important ones for you and your bandmates to bear in mind.

Evenings (say goodbye to leisure time)

A band needs to practice, according to Kurt Cobain, at least five times a week if the band ever expects to accomplish anything. Then again, he also said “practice makes perfect, but nobody’s perfect, so why practice?”

Somewhere between these two extremes lies the balance you and your bandmates will need to find – and it’s not going to be easy. Just as you treat studying for a master’s degree in your spare time or dedicating yourself to playing for your local hockey team as an unshakable regular commitment, so should you treat practicing for your band as something you just have to make time for. To put it another way, blowing off practice will make your education, team or band suffer.

This of course means that some sacrifices must be made. Enjoy going to the movies on a Friday night? Now it’s band practice. Meet up with your book club on a Wednesday evening? Band practice. Avid gamer? Not any more – unless it’s Guitar Hero or something. Now any spare time you have is going to be consumed by your band duties – most of which will consist of practicing and traveling.

To integrate yourself into your local music scene, you’re also going to have to dedicate time to going to other local bands’ shows, as well as planning your own. Not only is this common courtesy (it may prove difficult to persuade another local band to attend your show if you’re a no-show at theirs), but also a good way of getting recognized as a ‘regular.’

To put it plainly, bands who are seen to be making an effort to support their local scene are generally considered more deserving of support themselves – and if your face is known to the venue owners and promoters, you’re far more likely to come up in conversation when they’re looking for opening acts.

Social Media (get used to it, everywhere, all the time)

Have you ever been chastised for being on your phone too often? Well, whoever said that is going to realize they spoke too soon – now you’ll be glued to that tiny touchscreen 24/7.

Most bands these days use Facebook, as well as social media platforms designed to promote music on sites like Bandcamp, to attract attention for their project – so you’ll be receiving notifications from at least two sources now, and your phone may never be silent again. Unless you put it on silent mode, which we would strongly recommend doing sometimes.

To share the workload, you’re all going to need to up your social media game. If there are any technophobes in your band, or indeed any members who look down scornfully on the food-selfie-posting public, tell them to get a grip. Facebook may be a towering, omniscient, data collecting, freedom-sapping corporation akin to Sauron’s all-seeing Eye atop Barad-dûr, but, for the time being at least, it’s also one of the most effective advertising tools that your band can use to spread your message and get gigs.

Also consider setting up a band email account — and make sure you all check it regularly — to separate gig inquiries from your personal messages.

Exercise (or get injured)

You may not be the world’s most physical guy or girl, but until you’re rich and famous enough to have your own team of roadies to haul your gear around for you, it’s time to crack open the elbow grease – let’s just hope you’ve got the strength to open the jar. For those of you who don’t drive, this may be a good incentive to learn – you can just about carry around a guitar case and a practice amp, but once you start getting serious, you’ll appreciate some vehicular assistance. A helping hand doesn’t go amiss either – think of the poor drummer lugging around their cymbal stands and whatnot. When all hands are on deck, powerful bonds are forged.

You’ll also need to keep yourself relatively physically fit if you want to remain an active, engaging performer. You don’t want to be four dates into your tour and collapse into a sweaty heap onstage – or, worse still, risk a neck or wrist injury from enjoying the guitar too much. Again, spare a thought for your drummer, who’ll have their work cut out in ways non-drummers cannot comprehend. It’s like a 10k run in a 25ºC room.

New Community (and losing friends)

The live music game comes with a ready-made community of musicians, music lovers, gig promoters, venue owners, bar staff, roadies and other colorful characters – all of whom you’re going to be dealing with as part of a band.

If you’re a muso from a small town without much of a music scene, you may have been craving the day when you could strike up an interesting musical conversation with literally anyone in your immediate social circle. Well, as lovely as it may be to have that dream finally realized, you may also find yourself so inundated with music talk that you end up craving the simpler days of TV, video games or just nothing at all.

You’re going to need to find the middle ground between remaining focused on your musical ambitions and maintaining the relationships surrounding it, and taking a step back to regain a sense of yourself and protect your sanity.

This, of course, also means some of your pre-band relationships may start to get neglected, especially if you’re cutting down on non-musical activities. Unfortunately, this is pretty much par for the course – sad, but true. Just trust the fact that those of your friends and family who truly care about you and your ambitions will understand how important this is to you, and trust yourself to catch up with them when you can.

The truest friendships can be picked up where they were left off, even years down the line (though hopefully it won’t be quite that long).

Head Music (a blessing and a curse)

This doesn’t happen to everyone, but if you’re concentrating on perfecting the same set of 10-20 songs week in, week out, chances are you’re going to be bringing your work home with you. Particularly if it’s a newly written song that’s not quite there yet – don’t be surprised if, when you’re tucked up in bed at night, you hear that same verse fading in, begging you to show it how to bridge the gap between it and the chorus.

There are two ways of dealing with this: get up and try to do something about – not necessarily finish the whole song, just enough to feel like you’ve made progress; or train yourself to shut it out, and trust you’ll do something about it once you’ve had a well-earned rest.

There’s something to be said for either approach:

Leap out of bed every time you have the slightest inkling, and you’ll become a slave to it, unable to prioritize your own well-being over your obsession.

Ignore every little ear worm that tries to burrow its way in, and you’ll be left wondering if you let your best ideas escape you.

Allow yourself the odd 2am burst of inspiration, and your health shouldn’t be too affected. Side effect may also include: air guitar-ing, air drumming, and random outbursts of song.

The Public Eye (is judging your every move)

Sooner or later, being in a band means putting yourself out there for others to judge, whether it’s by playing onstage, appearing in videos or having a song played on the radio. Now, unless you ran for class president, or was a prominent figure in the drama society, you may not be used to public scrutiny, and may not know what to expect of it.

In a nutshell, people easily get jealous of the success of others, and this can manifest itself as negative, often unfounded, comments. These are not to be confused with constructive criticism, which is more likely to be given by fellow musicians, venue owners and veteran concert-goers who want you to do well.

Exposing yourself can be scary (what if you make a mistake? What if you get stage fright? What if nobody likes your song?) but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Even if you get a negative reaction after a gig, or get negative comments on a song you post online, all that means is that you’ve not reached your target audience yet. Be true to yourself, and be mindful of your own actions and comments and the implications they may have, and your confidence will start to grow – as will the public’s respect for you.

Sales and Marketing (are not the enemies of creativity)

You may think artistry and commerce have no business existing in the same lifestyle, and while the values are often at odds, they achieve their optimum levels of success when working together. Honest art validates hollow advertising, and smart business acumen helps channel creativity and is necessary to get your work out there.

You’ll be dealing with this on a much smaller scale to begin with, most likely by selling your own merchandise. It’ll be down to you to keep track of your stock, how to reproduce it in as cost-effective a manner as possible, and how to let your budding fanbase know of new stock as well as upcoming gigs, single releases, etc.

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, and you won’t need an economics degree – in fact, you can find out all you need to know by reading music blogs and chatting to other local bands until you’ve put together a business model that suits you.

Money (What’s money?)

Once you’ve been bitten by the band bug, you can wave goodbye to most of your expendable income. Read any tour diary of an up-and-coming act and you’ll come across tales of eating nothing but beans and sleeping rough in the van just to keep fuel in the tank and strings on the guitars.

Any paycheck you receive from here on in will be divided between buying new equipment, maintaining your old equipment, the rehearsing and recording of your material, advertising your band (which includes the production of merch) and getting yourselves to gigs. There’s always going to be a new effects pedal, microphone or cymbal that you won’t be able to live without from the moment it catches your eye, and there’s always going to be a lead, a stand or a drum stick that gets damaged or breaks.

And, if you’re lucky, you might have enough left at the end to replace your holey trainers and beer-soaked t-shirt. But every last one of these responsibilities and sacrifices will be testament to your dedication, and serve as a reminder to you that you’re doing something that feels far greater than your own personal comfort.

This article was written by our friend Joe from Bands for Hire.

The post How being in a band changes your life appeared first on DIY Musician Blog.

[cvasps]

Transitioning To Fewer Resources-Sean Brown

This is my first contribution to CVASP. Relatively new to the profession, I’ve wrestled with what I could possibly contribute of any substance. Many things have run through my mind, and constantly ringing in my ears is a statement often echoed by veteran performance coaches everywhere I’ve been thus far. It goes something along the lines of “early in my career, I thought I knew everything”. This is not a problem for me - and I don’t mean in a good way. On the contrary, I am acutely aware of how little I know. Perhaps I just haven’t been at this long enough, but right now I just don’t feel like many coaches want to hear what I have to say 9 months through my first year running my own program(s).

It occurs to me that the best thing I can contribute is a recount and maybe even a little advice regarding moving from a high major program with abundant resources to a program that does not compete at the same level in terms of funding and resources.

I am sure that some will chuckle at the notion. Certainly, many have worked years to achieve a position at a major institution, and some are still on the way, having worked their way up the proverbial ladder. I will be the first to explain to you how lucky I have been in my career thus far, but that is a conversation for another day. So, I am under no illusion that everyone will relate to this situation. However, given this profession’s turnover rate and the rising number of internship and GA positions all over the country, particularly at the larger programs, my hope is that somewhere there is a coach who will find themselves in a similar situation that can get something out of this.

With that said, here is what it has been like to move from a high powered athletic program to one fighting with less in their pockets:

Facilities

All things considered I am doing pretty well in the facilities department. Sure, it’s not the same now as it was at a place like Texas, but so what? I have everything I need in our facility. The only major difference is that we share ours with Olympic Sports. Now, for many coaches this has been all they’ve ever known. Beginning my career at the DIII level I understand what it is like to be limited in time and space. However, it is different as an intern, volunteer or assistant than it is when actually running one of the programs that shares the weight room.

The most important thing I’ve learned regarding the shared space – and I will reference this several more times – invest in people (Full Disclosure – This, like many of my ideas, is stolen shamelessly from my former employer, friend and mentor, Daniel Roose).

Everyone is in the same boat, especially the strength coaches, attempting to get their sport coach to nail down a schedule so that they can understand their own training schedule and how it fits into the full weight room schedule. The ATCs also need to know and account for the training schedules of their respective sports. Facilities operations is at the behest of each head coach who views their program as the most important in the building. So, when change inevitably occurs just about every day, each one of these puzzle pieces has to move and adjust to make things work.

Quite simply, it is far easier and more pleasant to move this process along if you have spent the time to develop a relationship with those in the building. Admittedly I need to do a better job of this as well, but I have found that the more time I spend with others in the building, the easier it is to get what I need, especially when a curveball is thrown.

  Equipment & Purchasing

This one doesn’t take a lot of explanation. Clearly the budget, especially for strength & conditioning, or in my case Men’s Basketball Strength & Conditioning, is going to be different depending on where you are. Moving from a high-major to anywhere other than that is going to put you in a different purchasing situation. However, my head coach doesn’t want to hear that he can’t have what I tell him we need. So, how to determine what is really needed?

For me, a bare-bones look at our facilities, personnel and desired training methodology helped to reveal need vs want. Are there things that I would enjoy having and could employ frequently to help our players? Sure. Do I absolutely need them to do my job? No. But what can we get?

Again, we come back to investing in people. The more time I have spent with our Director of Operations, Associate AD, ATC, and finance department, the clearer the picture has become of when and where I have some space and leverage to purchase. Early on this was difficult because we just hadn’t spent enough time together. As trust is built, so is an understanding between myself and others involved regarding what I need to do my job and how we can help each other to make it work.

ATC

Surely each coaching staff is different, but the biggest change for me is how the rest of the pieces of a staff fill out at a smaller institution.

For instance, our ATC is one of the longest tenured members of the department. He is an Associate AD and is the Head ATC, overseeing every other sport and their respective ATC, as well as administrative level operations. He remains as the Men’s Basketball trainer in addition to his other responsibilities. Like everybody else in the building, he is spread pretty thin. I’m not the only one who needs to be able to talk to him during the day.

The more time I spend with him, the better things go. The more we have gotten to know each other, the better we have gotten at communicating effectively and accomplishing our common goals. Some of this occurs naturally over time, but much of it is a concerted effort to get to him when he is available and discuss things, even if it’s a quick meeting. In our case, we are located in different parts of the building (because my desk is in the basketball office and not the weight room), so it is vital that at some point we take the time to find the other and talk. Sometimes there is much to discuss, sometimes not. Either way, the ATC relationship is critical and requires effort, which may have to be more regimented at a smaller institution due to the increased time demands of both parties.

Administration

When I was at Texas we prepared our weight room (and our interns) every day and night with the understanding that “you never know who will walk through the door”. It could be a high-profile recruit, a player’s parent, or the Athletic Director that randomly walks in. At all times we prepared such that we were represented well in our appearance and behavior, and at various times this situation arose and everything was okay because we had prepared. But, it was a rare occurrence.

However, it was our facility. We shared the weight room with the women’s basketball team and that was it. Because of our scheduling, just about all of the time we were not even in the building at the same time as the women. So, while we prepared for anybody to come through at any moment, it was largely our world. Our facility was across a highway from the rest of campus. Nobody came there unless they meant to, and in that event we likely knew about it.

At Rice, our Athletic Director runs on the treadmill in our weight room just about every day. I’m serious. Just think – are you prepared (and have you prepared) to do your job with the Athletic Director literally in the room with you?

This is my reality. Our administration is smaller. Fewer people cover all the normal responsibilities of any other athletic department. Their offices are just down the hall from mine. If we play the music loudly in the weight room, they can hear it. They know my name and my responsibilities. There is no hiding, and I think this is a positive. It has forced me to evaluate every word I say and every move I make. Because our weight room is shared, I am frequently not the only team lifting. Sometimes there are a few other athletes, sometimes there’s an entire team. Sometimes another team may bring a recruit through. Such is life for the majority of coaches across the country, but depending on your school, you may have varying levels of transparency.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t ever get upset with my athletes. Sometimes I raise my voice to get a point across or when I feel like one of my guys could use some extra fire. But things change when so many members of the administration can actually hear what you are saying. It has helped me to assess the manner in which I address my athletes at all times. One thing I learned is that I’m more likely to be offensive when we are having a great day, not the other way around. What can I say? I get excited. Where I am now though it is imperative that I be mindful of who is in the room and who might be listening – and that’s a good thing.

  Job Responsibilities

I used to be one member of a large team. From the nutrition staff to sport scientists, basketball team managers and graduate assistants, there were hands everywhere to get the job done. Moreover, on the strength and conditioning side alone, I was an assistant under someone’s direction, and we also had two interns. All in all, plenty of people around to get things done.

Things are a little different now. First and foremost the important concept is that even though we are smaller, the expectations for a college basketball program remain the same, or at least they do where I am. I played and have worked at the high school and DIII level where resources are limited, but clearly the expectation is different, alleviating some of the challenge. *Please do not take this to mean that at the high school or DIII level coaches do not expect quality work and winning effort. That is not my intention. I’m simply speaking of the expectations of time and energy allocation of the strength & conditioning coach, which is more thinly spread at the high school and DIII levels. So, while we don’t have the same number of people, the same level of quality is expected. Great, I love attacking challenges. Here’s the difference:

I assist in all operations of the program. In many ways I feel like an assistant to our Director of Operations. He is the hardest working person in our program and most of the time we are helping each other to get something done. This also includes our video coordinator. We simply don’t have the number of GAs, managers and interns around to accomplish everything that you do at a major program. Don’t get me wrong, we have a few that are able to pitch in when they can, but it’s simply different. Most importantly, it’s a two way street. Because I don’t have any direct assistance, I need help… a lot. By investing my time and energy in helping our operations staff, I get the same thing in return when I need help.

Here’s the other major difference: We just began conference play. I am micro-dosing our athletes in season which is fantastic (and a different article altogether). Even with a lift every day I would still estimate that about 80-90% of my time is currently occupied by nutrition.

We don’t have a training table (strictly speaking), so I am responsible for as much of our nutrition as our budget allows, which in my case is a fair amount. I actually love this. I get to be as hands on as possible with what my players are eating (or at least what I can reasonably control within the rules). I also have the benefit of working with some very intelligent and driven athletes who have been very receptive to basic nutrition education and continue to expand their knowledge of how to properly care for their body. However, I was completely unaware that it would take over my life the way it has.

Our snacks, meals, recovery shakes, etc. all obviously get stepped up a notch when travel comes into play, and our conference schedule has us traveling on Wednesdays to play on Thursdays, and then directly to our next site for a Saturday game and a return flight on Sunday. That’s a lot of travel meals and snacks to consider.

Compounding the challenge is the fact that we fly commercial. At a Power 5 or some of the larger mid-major programs, charter flights are a game changer (as anyone who has experienced it can attest). No longer do I have the ability to simply pack up whatever I need and throw it under a plane. I need to get creative and figure out how to find water and proper nutrition on the road, not just for one night, but for multiple days at a time. I have found that, as obvious as it sounds, the more planning I do ahead of time, the better. Also (say it with me), invest in people. The developed relationships with the rest of my staff go a long way in acquiring whatever I need whether we are at home or on the road.

Athletes

Hopefully this is obvious, but your athletes are going to be different. Don’t walk in with any assumptions. I made more mistakes than I can count based on assumptions about what my athletes could do or couldn’t do, as well as my understanding of their daily life. Each school is different, each program is different. This is simple. Spend as much time as you possibly can with your players before you lay out your plans. Ask them questions. Learn about them. Their training history, injury history, personal lives, etc.

For instance, the finals week on the academic calendar may not be when the players actually take finals. No way to learn that without talking to them.

I don’t know much, but I do know that ultimately there are challenges no matter where you go. I have been incredibly lucky to land in some great spots with fantastic people around me to help address any and everything to help the program. For me, that’s what this comes down to, no matter where you are - invest in the people. The most important time I have spent since arriving at Rice is not the time programming, booking catering or stocking water. It’s the time spent with people, and not just because they can help me when I need it, but more importantly because if you ask me, that’s why we do this - for the relationships we build with players, coaches, administrators, ATCs, etc. that last a lifetime.

This is where I am as I come close to finishing my first year at Rice. If this helps just one coach out there then I’ll take it as a win. As a closing, there is a lot of talk in Strength & Conditioning about helping one another, and I did just write an entire article based around the idea of investing in people. As such, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. I’m making it my mission to be one of the guys that actually answers the call/email.

sean.brown@rice.edu

@brownstrength87

Who is Sean Brown?

Sean Brown is in his first year as Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Rice Men’s Basketball team. He comes to Rice from The University of Texas at Austin, where he spent the last two years working directly with Men’s Basketball.

In his current role, Brown is responsible for all year-round strength & conditioning aspects of the Men’s Basketball and Men’s Golf programs at Rice.

Prior to Rice, in 2016-17 he served as an Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach at The University of Texas at Austin, working directly with Men’s Basketball under the guidance of Director of Basketball Performance, Daniel Roose. Brown was hired into that role after serving as a Men’s Basketball Strength & Conditioning Intern during the 2015-16 season.

He also has held volunteer/internship positions with Southwestern University where he worked with football, volleyball, basketball, swim & dive and soccer, as well as University of Texas Athletic Performance.

Brown is a Strength & Conditioning Coach Certified through the Collegiate Strength & Conditioning Coaches Association, as well as a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist through the National Strength & Conditioning Association. He earned his B.A. in English from The University of Mary Washington in 2009, and an M.Ed. in Kinesiology – Sport Sciences & Nutrition from The University of Texas at Austin in 2016.

A native of Fairfax, VA, Brown lives in Houston with his wife, Kate.

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  See Full Article Here: Transitioning To Fewer Resources-Sean Brown

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp

[centuryassociates]

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much

Just about whenever Attorney General speaks, the cannabis industry panics. Stop it people.

This week Jeff Sessions gave an interview where he was asked about possibly using the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to tackle legal marijuana. The media (the cannabis media in particular) have covered that interview as though it sets forth a roadmap for federal cannabis policy. And since that interview, probably every single cannabis lawyer at my law firm (in California, Washington and Oregon) has received at least one client call seeking an opinion on it.

Stop it everyone. Just stop it. Really. Sessions didn’t do anything in this interview but muse about a seldom used federal statute.

In this interview, Sessions hinted that he might be open to using RICO to pursue cannabis businesses in cannabis legal states:

INTERVIEWER: One RICO prosecution against one marijuana retailer in one state that has so-called legalization ends this façade and this flaunting of the Supremacy Clause. Will you be bringing such a case?

SESSIONS: We will, marijuana is against federal law, and that applies in states where they may have repealed their own anti-marijuana laws. So yes, we will enforce law in an appropriate way nationwide. It’s not possible for the federal government, of course, to take over everything the local police used to do in a state that’s legalized it. And I’m not in favor of legalization of marijuana. I think it’s a more dangerous drug than a lot of people realize. I don’t think we’re going to be a better community if marijuana is sold in every corner grocery store.

Of course he might be open to using RICO to pursue federal criminal law violations by cannabis businesses. I actually do not believe Attorney Generals Holder and Lynch, who were the Attorney Generals during the Obama Administration) would have answered this question substantively much differently. You are not going to get an Attorney General to say, “yes, we have this really important law on the books, but nobody worry because we will never enforce it. Just go ahead and violate it.” Really?

And if you listen to the entire interview here, you will hear Sessions poo-poo the benefits of bringing a RICO action against state-legal cannabis businesses:

INTERVIEWER: [I]t would literally take one racketeering influence corrupt organization prosecution to take all the money from one retailer, and the message would be sent. I mean, if you want to send that message, you can send it. Do you think you’re going to send it?

SESSIONS: Well, we’ll be evaluating how we want to handle that. I think it’s a little more complicated than one RICO case, I’ve got to tell you. This — places like Colorado — it’s just sprung up a lot of different independent entities that are moving marijuana. And it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.

RICO was designed to pursue the mafia and other organized crime groups. RICO provides powerful criminal and civil penalties against people who engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” and have a relationship to an “enterprise.” “Racketeering activity” includes roughly a hundred different offenses, including violations of the Controlled Substances Act. A “pattern” is established when an offense occurs more than one time in a given statutorily defined time period. An “enterprise” includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any group of individuals associated together even if they are not in a formal business relationship.

The broad interpretation of “enterprise” means that on a technical legal basis, RICO could pose a significant risk to cannabis businesses. The production and sale of cannabis is prohibited by the CSA and, therefore, regular sales of cannabis could serve as the predicate offense for a RICO charge and all those involved with legal cannabis sales, including vendors, contractors, landlords, lawyers, accountants, and even state officials could arguably be in an enterprise engaging in illegal activity.

But nobody should panic about this, not even close. RICO is a powerful but seldom used tool and that is because both prosecutors and judges view it as a very powerful weapon that should only be used in limited circumstances. The RICO statute has been around since 1970 and I cannot recall a single cannabis case having been brought under it. I am not saying there has never been such a case, but I am saying that it has been used sparingly in dealing with cannabis, if at all, including during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s “Just Say No” administrations. In this same interview Sessions noted that the federal government has limited resources and it cannot simply commandeer local police forces to pursue RICO charges against cannabis users. RICO cases take a massive amount of effort to prosecute criminally and apparently not even Jeff (“good people don’t smoke cannabis“) Sessions deems this would be money and time well spent.

It also bears mentioning that a few years ago, some private citizens brought RICO claims against marijuana businesses and non-cannabis businesses alleged to have been operating in concert to sell cannabis. As we wrote here, the federal court dismissed those claims.

There is though one important thing cannabis businesses should take from this interview. Sessions is concerned about cannabis businesses that move marijuana from state to state. Note how he brings this up when he says: “it’s also being moved interstate, not just in the home state.” This IS important. The states are mostly in charge of prosecuting criminal activities that happen entirely within their own state borders. A robber in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco will almost certainly be prosecuted by state-city prosecutors; but a robber who brings stolen goods from Seattle to San Francisco could very well be prosecuted federally. The same has always been true of illegal drugs, including cannabis. If you are caught with weed in Newton, Iowa, you risk city or state prosecution. But if you are caught transporting cannabis from Iowa to Illinois, you risk federal prosecution.

So if you want to panic based on this Jeff Sessions interview, you should if you are planning to transport cannabis across state lines. The federal government has never liked interstate cannabis transport and it has always made this clear, as have we, in the following posts:

7 Things To Know Before Your Cannabis Business Crosses State Lines

Containing Cannabis Within State Lines: Who’s Responsible?

Moving Marijuana Across State Lines: Still A Felony

In Marijuana Law Myths. Not Everything Changes With Legalization, in Myth #2, we explain why it is so dangerous to fall for the myth that you can legally transport cannabis from one legal state to another and why this myth is so dangerous:

2. Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, it is legal to sell Washington-grown marijuana in all three states. We hear this one ALL the time, mostly from marijuana businesses that intend to do this, believing it to be legal. It isn’t and please, please do not do this, unless you want to go to federal prison. The same holds true for Washington D.C., where marijuana was just legalized. You cannot just take your “legal” marijuana there and start selling it.

Taking legal pot across ANY state borders by boat or by car or by air is a big deal as it amounts to unlawful interstate drug trafficking.

More importantly, taking marijuana from one marijuana legal state to another is a federal crime. Marijuana is still a Schedule I Controlled Substance. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This means that it can (and does) prosecute people for transporting marijuana across state lines, even if the transport is from one marijuana legal state jurisdiction to another.

We are not saying that you should expect FBI agents to be sitting at the borders waiting to arrest people for going from one state to another with marijuana, but this is to say that traveling from state to state with marijuana is not advised, particularly by boat or by airplane. More importantly, a business plan that assumes this is legal is a business plan that will set you up to fail, especially if you publicly reveal that your business does this.

This is also a good time to remind you that if you are going to drive from state to state, clear out your cars, your boats, your airplanes, your clothes and your luggage before going from a cannabis legal state to one that is not. State troopers in states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Idaho (and even Nevada where cannabis is legal for medical us but not recreational) love making easy money by arresting and fining people entering with marijuana from Colorado and Washington.

Transporting a Schedule I Controlled Substance, including marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony. This is the case even if your medical marijuana patient card is honored in the next state over, and even if you are moving between jurisdictions that have legalized recreational marijuana. Keep and consume your cannabis in the state where you purchased it, or you run the risk of federal criminal charges for transporting a controlled substance.

So yeah, moving cannabis across state lines (yes, even from one cannabis legal state to another) is a really bad idea.

Oh, and one more thing, many (even some in the cannabis industry) are acting as though one RICO case would do what this interviewer says and “send the message” to all those in the cannabis industry to terminate all their employees and shut down their state-legal cannabis businesses. In other words, many are acting as though one RICO claim would be “lights out” for legalized cannabis all across the country.

This is absurd. The federal government has been trying to shut down cannabis for more than one hundred years, and for much of that time, it had overwhelming popular support for doing so. Today though, the majority of Americans favor legalization and those numbers keep getting better. Were the federal government to pursue “just one” RICO claim, it would likely be against a really large cannabis business that transported cannabis across state lines and I do not believe such a lawsuit would lead to a single state-legal cannabis business shutting down. If anything, it would be more likely to galvanize our country to legalize cannabis once and for all.

So please, nobody panic.

Jeff Sessions Talks and the Cannabis Industry Listens … Too Much posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnEzMp