With its power of the purse, Congress passed a vote today, 219-189, to cease funding the Justice Department, and the DEA within it, for enforcement efforts to shutter legal medical marijuana dispensaries, caregivers, and other types of legal marijuana growers.  This vote is consistent with Attorney General Eric Holder's pronouncements, issued earlier this year via a series of inter-office memos, that the DOJ was no longer prosecuting medical marijuana producers.

As we here at the Law Blogger announce this arguably historic vote from a few hours ago, it is important to keep in mind that marijuana continues to be listed on Schedule 1 of the federal Controlled Substance Act.  As we have opined in various posts to this blog, until it is truly legalized and removed from Schedule 1, pot will continue to be a grow-your-own fringe industry serving a largely homeopathic self-medicating population.

In other words, it may not live up to its true corporate potential.  Billions of dollars of inexhaustible demand await, that's for sure.  Taxes, regulation, banking with it's compliance laws, insurance with its compliance laws; everybody's happy in the professional world.

But the hippy farmers and the Latin American drug cartels would be out if marijuana were struck from Schedule 1.  Nevertheless, this vote could be the next step in what some see as the inevitable political process of decriminalizing and, eventually, legalizing marijuana.

Well, we shall see what happens next.  But this vote sure makes former DEA agent Patrick Moen, whom we blogged about last week, look like a genius.

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