Dhillon on Berkeley Cannabis Sanctuary

Harmeet Dhillon FOX Interview about Sanctuary Law - Dhillon Law Group

Harmeet Dhillon

Harmeet Dhillon Appears on ‘FOX and Friends First’ To Discuss Berkley’s Cannabis Industry

According to Harmeet:
What is happening is the members of the assembly introduced a bill to prevent California law enforcement and officials from cooperating with the federal government in terms of marijuana enforcement. This comes up because we have a state law that legalized not just medical marijuana but recreational marijuana as of January 1st and just today the city of Berkeley has legalized, has issued a law that says the city of Berkeley is a sanctuary city creating chaos between the federal and state government.

It is important to know this is posturing along the lines of what the Attorney General in California is doing, 24 resistance lawsuits against the federal government but in reality what happened is the federal government is going to come in and make arrests in front of state law enforcement whether they like it or not, we have a supremacy clause that says the federal law is supreme over state law but what is awkward here is here putting law enforcement officers who want to enforce the law because they have an obligation, they took an oath under the Constitution to support federal law and now they are told not to do that. It is chaos, it doesn’t really protect them, it is verges signaling by the attorney general.

Typically drug interdiction efforts have been done in a state task force situation so normally they are used to cooperating with each other in this particular law concerning marijuana but they are supposed to be cooperating with cocaine and other drugs. It doesn’t operate in a vacuum so it won’t be the case that marijuana is in one place and all the other drugs are separate. It will cause confusion and law enforcement officers will run and put themselves in violation of California state law if they honor their obligations under federal law.

The Attorney General and Governor and most democratic legislature has been opposed to the president. Even though the election took place in 2016 they are still campaigning against the president using this as a prop for getting votes from our electorate. They may be pushing a too far because even a lot of democratic voters are not nuts about drug chaos in the streets. We had a lot of problems in the street so this idea that you can just pick and choose which federal laws you want to follow and which you don’t is going to lead to real chaos in the state. We have a situation with serious crime increasing in the state. Interesting to see when voters pull the plug on this trend of ignoring laws they don’t like in Washington.

Harmeet Dhillon is a nationally recognized lawyer, trusted boardroom advisor, and passionate advocate for individual, corporate and institutional clients across numerous industries and walks of life. Her focus is in commercial litigation, employment law, First Amendment rights, and election law matters.
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