Today’s must-reads: 1. Oakland’s unprecedented medical cannabis cultivation regulations go before the city council tomorrow. Some in the community like them; others, not so much. …
2. Can weed be a wedge issue driving Democratic voters to ballot? The Atlantic analyzes. “Political scientists disagree about whether gay-marriage bans helped Republicans, though a growing body of scholarship suggests that they probably did. So far, nobody has measured marijuana’s effect at the polls. But Stephen Nicholson, a leading expert on ballot initiatives at the University of California at Merced, told me that he plans to. What’s more, he sees an intriguing precedent in the nuclear freeze initiatives of 28 years ago, which he has studied. ‘In the 1982 midterms, 10 states had ballot initiatives on the nuclear freeze,’ Nicholson told me. ‘This had a significant positive effect on Democratic candidates.’ In states without them, candidates saw little to no effect.'”
