With recreational marijuana legal in Alaska and Washington, D.C., this week—and Oregon soon to follow—here's everything you need to know about current laws across the country.
Alaska joined the ranks of Colorado and Washington on Tuesday to become the third U.S. state to legalize recreational marijuana. Thanks to a voter-approved referendum last November, residents and visitors to the Last Frontier who are at least 21 can now smoke, grow and possess cannabis.
But retail shops selling pot products won’t open until the end of this year, creating a dicey landscape for law-abiding bud connoisseurs, as well as what you might call a toker’s paradox: Right now you can have an ounce of weed on you in public and up to six plants growing in your home, but you still can’t legally buy either anywhere. As far as the current law is concerned, the pot just appears in a poof like a genie.
At times, the intricate rules that govern recreational marijuana elsewhere can be similarly confounding. Like in Alaska, an adult in Colorado can grow up to six cannabis plants at home. But you can’t grow any in Washington state. And while the penalty for publicly consuming pot in Seattle is $27, it can reach $999 in Denver.Image may be NSFW.
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Such quirks and variations in the law will likely increase as other places prepare to decriminalize pot. The measure to legalize marijuana in Washington, D.C., will take effect on Thursday, despite a brazen move by Congress to block the effort, which culminated in a stupefying procedural debate over the definition of the word “enact.” No retail marijuana shops will be allowed to open, but the District will permit people to possess, consume and grow marijuana (which they must illegally acquire).
And when Oregon embarks in July on its own recreational weed adventure, users will have its specific set of rules and limits to follow. All of the early experimentation will be closely followed by California, Massachusetts, Arizona, Vermont, Maine, and Missouri, all of which areexpected to follow suit on legalized pot by 2016.
SEE ALSO: Marijuana's surprising effects on athletic performance
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