The people who live in Washington only decide a subset of the laws for the state. It is still illegal to possess or consume weed in Washington because WA is a part of the United States of America, where weed is illegal nationwide.
The "United States of America" as a political body is defined by the borders of the United States of America (within which WA is completely contained), it is not located in Washington DC.
Are you the Cory Klein in Minnesota (with whom I went to college)?
Nope, although there are less than 50 Cory Kleins in the United States, so hooray for unlikely probabilities!
That was already the (insane) case. Consider people who live in the Netherlands, or Czechia, or Portugal.
I think it's quite a misconception about Czechia being super weed friendly. As a tourist you are most probably going to get scammed on streets of Prague. If you want to feel more free about weed consumption Netherlands is the place to go to.
Further tangent: at least part of it has been "die Tschechei" in German since 1918 per the Wiktionary[0] and that's certainly the word people used in West Germany in the 80's, and I believe it's used widely today despite "Tschechien" being official[1].
The Wikipedia article (in German) suggests Tschechei is from Čechy which seems to be Czech for Bohemia. But I am not Czech nor Cseh nor tschechisch nor Čech so I may soon stand corrected. :-)
[0]: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Tschechei [1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tschechien
So if you hear someone using a country name you've never heard before, I can understand being cautious about adopting it :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_names_for_Northern...
And if you obviously have no clue what you're doing and don't even try to buy a drink, they'll definitely know you aren't a cop and offer you the weed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands
It's not technically legal in any of those countries.
What? How? Why? That makes no sense.
You are correct that the US border policy with Canada doesn't make any sense.
Canadians are being denied entry into the US simply for what the US deems to be "immoral behavior".
That is a very slippery subjective slope to be on.
Even having investments in Cannabis stocks can get you barred for life.
Do you know where your mutual funds go at night...
You can have a criminal conviction and still vote, for example.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...
The second time I got detained was only for 5 hours though. The second time I went in mid to late 20s by myself. After searching my car for 3 hours, they didn't find anything and I was let go.
I hate it.
We had to sit for about an hour and she had to go through a bunch of questioning but eventually they let us all through.
Every time tho I've had my car searched, it's too much of a hassle really to bother with going up there anymore for me personally.
If you're coming from Australia, the official immigration docs ask do you have a DUI? If yes, was it below .07 Blood Alcohol Content?
(In Australia the crime is .05 or above, but in Canada the crime is only > .07)
So even if you broke the law in Australia and got a DUI at .06, Canada will ignore it, because technically driving at .06 in Canada is not a crime, so they don't deem you to have committed a crime at all!
They can deny for any arbitrary reason, or no reason at all!
I would happily say "no" and smile if I was you when asked about what you did in a different country that they have no business knowing.
While thread didn't really get into citizenship, if you're aren't a citizen of the state in question you have no right of entry. The state has the right to ask for any information they wish and set criteria for entry as they wish. It's not a matter of "incrimination" as in you go to jail, it's a matter of obtaining permission for entry, you have no "right to remain silent". And in a democratic state I don't think that's immoral either. Knowing is in fact their business, and if it shouldn't be then the government should tell its border controls to not inquire at all.
>I would happily say "no" and smile if I was you when asked about what you did in a different country that they have no business knowing.
Obviously as a practical matter there are many situations where the odds of getting caught are minimal to non-existent, but I would be very cautious about casually committing perjury. Particularly in this worrying day and age of photos everywhere and ever increasing ML that can actually make sense of it and centralized datasets that governments may be able to gain access to. For example, particularly when the behavior is made legal I'd expect there to be a lot more people who post pictures of themselves using cannabis or not being concerned if someone else in the picture is because of course it's legal. Combine with spreading facial recognition and person tagging on places like Facebook and advertising (since it's legalized) that will be actively and legally interested in "is so-and-so a user so we can sell them related products" and someone could quite easily end up in a database saying "confirmed to use cannabis" without ever knowing. There are many times where "the coverup is worse then the crime" is quite true, and something that would merely get you politely or not so politely turned away would turn into a serious crime by lying about it. You can't know when an authority is asking you something out of actual interest vs a question they know the answer to already just to test you.
Honesty and political pressure seems better in this specific case given that it's not like there isn't already a major legalization movement in the US too. Canada is an extremely important business partner and source of tourism and ally. If enough Canadians were denied entry over this then even under this administration pressure to simply change the rules to ignore it would be very high. If not under this one then when the Democrats retake control.
There's a huge racial component. Essentially all of this "you're not allowed to" talk is strictly for white people only.
1) It is racist to deny a non-citizen entry
2) Fuzzy rules for entry allow room for racial bias
3) Something else?
And of course the policy also says that if they think you lied, they might use that as a reason to deny entry in the future.
They are free to not let you in, but you are free to ignore any irrelevant or intimate questions.
> You: "No"
If you have consumed in the last 30 days, then your "No" response is definitely not correct.
Lying is only giving wrong answers on correct questions. If a person sticks their nose where it does not belong, too bad.
I have rights to do any kinds of thingd to my body, and I have exactly zero obligation to disclose it, unless in strict contexts of medical help or driving.
https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
- I'm just kidding..
For some time you might act that way, but you are trespassing.
There is no right to cross the border, but there's loads of other rights, human and otherwise, that you still undeniably have while being at the border.
There is no international body regulating any other kind of right, despite the well-meaning intention of a number of organizations.
This may end up ugly for the USA if they try to abuse that decision. Not every country in this world is Mexico.
So you want the country the person is traveling from to impose their Will on the country they are traveling to?
Happens all the time.
Although I think weed should be legal, in the mean time I am not interested in my taxes paying for the confinement or deportation of Canadians. Ergo, one can support weed legalization and also believe that weed consumption can be used from a practical perspective to deny entrance to foreigners.
This makes no sense. How does having consumed weed in the past entail that one will consume weed in the United States? This is like saying that a person who has driven on the left in the past will drive on the left in the United States, and should therefore be denied entry. It's ridiculous.
If you and I had a betting market that allowed us to bet on an individual's likelihood of consuming weed while in the United States, knowledge of that person's past behavior in consuming weed would be a strong piece of evidence that you could use when making a bet.
Anybody consuming weed today is more likely to have consumed it in the last 30 days than somebody that is not consuming weed today.
Of course making actual behavior consequential rather than potential behavior doesn't have those delicious authoritarian overtones.
Why? Is it not just selling and possession but also the very act of smoking illegal in the USA? Are the USA citizens forced to follow the homeland laws wherever they travel even if the laws at where they are are different? It sounds like if they had to still drive the right sides of the roads when in UK/Japan.
Obviously perfectly legal in Germany, but seriously illegal in the USA, so the border guards will deny you entry for breaking a US law while you where in a country where it's not illegal! insanity!
Once on a connecting flight so I wasn't even wanting to leave the airport. At the time I was working for a highly regarded company and going on to do some work for CBC in Toronto. I had flown in on business class and my smile, polite British English, white skin, smart clothes, clean passport and squeaky clean criminal record should have given me a free pass. I wasn't even carrying any highly unusual electronic hardware. And no I had not been a member of the 'communist party'.
As I saw it there was just a problem of 'customer service'. The mentality of border guards should be to welcome guests to the country and not treat everyone as a criminal.
As a non-U.S. person I am like a lot of people that just see the U.S. as not the place to want to go to. I know that most Americans lay on fantastic hospitality for visitors, welcoming you into their homes and looking out for you. But the hostile border guards obfuscate that.
Canada is the far more preferable destination, whether you want to be stoned all day or not matters little really, the legalisation of weed sends a signal that Canada is the much more welcoming place to go.
Tourism matters, I do wonder how much tourist trade the U.S. misses out on due to the negative perception the world has of the place.
Everyone in the world says this about their own border agents! People always seem to be most critical of their own.
i hated coming in through detroit or atlanta (one atlanta officer even tried to find me on facebook -- wtf?). but only had good experiences with new york city and chicago.
Except those situations are very rare. CBP's own website lists a total of 40 deaths over the past 15 years. I looked at over half of them, and very few were actually a "deadly confronatation"
Some of the deaths: * One intern died after collapsing during a 1.5 mile run that was part of his final exam. * At least two died following from heart attacks * Another two are listed as having collapsed and died with no further cause. * Another was listed as heat related. * At least two people died in separate incidents when their vehicles hit large animals. * At least four people have died due to accidental drowning. * At least three died when their aircraft crashed. * At least one was hit by a drunk driver. * At least two killed when their vehicle was hit by a freight train. * At least two were killed during altercations while off duty.
Most of the rest appear to be single vehicle crashes. It appears that less than 10 were actually shot, stabbed, or otherwise killed by people, and I didn't see a single listing of one happening at a border control station.
These people want you to believe they have an incredibly dangerous job. While it's certainly more dangerous than working in IT, the truth is that law enforcement isn't even in the top 10 of dangerous jobs!
The police unions would have you believe that it was. Regarding people killed on the job, law enforcement is right there with construction work, but most deaths on the job are traffic deaths. Actual genuine targeted murders of police officers are rare, it's about 40/year. The number of civilians killed in police-involved shootings is a different magnitude altogether, over 1000/year.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I've come to believe tech is a very dangerous career. Years ago I recall looking out my office window and realizing that everyone I could see in front of me had a (free!) soda on their desk and most of them had diabetes. Heart disease, diabetes, back problems, carpal tunnel, eye strain, obesity - tech is a silent killer. Sitting at a desk for 8+ hours a day will do that.
Perhaps they assume that if border guards establish a friendly relationship like that, it will only help bad actors distract the border guard from strictly enforcing the rules through jokes, small talk, etc.
Still, if the USA wants that approach, it could still learn a lot from Israeli passport control. Whenever I have entered Israel I have been asked a lot of questions and the official had some reasonable suspicion about my plans and travel history, but this questioning was still done in a fairly respectful and professional way. The guard wasn’t glum and surly like American border agents.
We watch cheap flight deals pretty regularly and have noticed we are seeing a lot more cheap flights to the US than normal, so it makes us think that perhaps the US is starting to suffer on tourism, but it could just be our biases.
As more people get fed up like us, tourism will wane, but I doubt it'll make a big enough dent anytime soon for any action to be taken, especially when it's spread across the entire US, so harder to see at once.
It's intended to be stressful because that gets people to crack. My advice is to not take it personally unless they really push the line. The stress is part of their procedure to make sure you are not lying.
However, for someone with a gun on their belt, having got their education from Hollywood films and with a government that snitches on the world to lock up dark skinned people in Guantanamo I guess this jobsworth mentality makes sense to them.
Upsetting people who have good money to spend means they don't come back. You don't want to be treated like garbage by imbeciles that insult your intelligence. It is taken personally. The U.S.A. is not that special, it is just full of entitled people that think they are special.
There is no reason they cant do the same job while treating everyone with respect. When you work with a group of people that see themselves as hammers, everyone else is a nail.
Because that's one way that police forces make it clear to you who is in charge.
Also, because you have no recourse against people wielding absolute power over you.
US border guards might deny you entry if you admit to previous cannabis use - for them "A confession is as good as a conviction". So you can do something that is perfectly legal in Canada, then a month later be denied entry to the US for doing it.
If you work at a 100% legal Government-run Cannabis store and want to go to the US for a holiday, you "Could be found admissible". could!
When arriving by air into Canada you will be asked about previous Cannabis use. What? They don't ask about previous alcohol use, why do they for what is now perfectly legal Cannabis?