Here in the Air Capital of the World, the Wichita City Council, in response to the second attempt by dozens of local volunteers to gather thousands of signatures in less than a year, has forwarded to the ballot for our elections in April a proposal to significantly reduce the criminal penalities for first-time possession of a small amount of maijuana. The proposal is, rest assured, in violation of state law (drug laws are rather draconian here in Kansas). The prospect of taking some action which actually challenges rules laid down by folks higher up the self-government food chain in our federal system resulted in a fair amount of fretting on the City Council over “citizenship” and not being in opposition to the state legislature. But that’s a strange thing to fret about in our democracy, as I explain here.
