Richard,
I agree, this is an excellent development! Kudos to ASA, and I sure hope they prevail in this legal fight.
Things are moving ahead on the initiative front as well. The Regulate Marijuana Like Wine initiative put together by Steve Kubby and Judge Jim Gray just got title and summary from the state Attorney General's office, and signature-gathering efforts will begin very soon.
Although I would naturally prefer to see more libertarian legislation become law, I think that simply repealing marijuana prohibition and disallowing regulation and taxation (sadly) has little chance of being approved by voters at present. And after the defeat of Prop. 19 last year, another loss at the ballot box could be very harmful to the cannabis freedom movement.
I also agree that if we were to simply repeal prohibition without specifying any particular approach to taxation and regulation, as another initiative in the works apparently would do, we could soon see more burdensome laws and more confiscatory taxation imposed than what Regulate Marijuana Like Wine mandates, both at the state and the local levels.
That is the crux of why I think this initiative strikes the right balance between those better but less politically viable solutions, and the approach taken by Prop. 19, which I believe lost because it was *excessively* statist and might have even made cannabis law in California *worse* from a legal standpoint (I voted for it very reluctantly in order to send a pro-legalization message, due to the fact that flawed media coverage had the vast majority of the public viewing it simply as a test of whether people wanted to legalize marijuana or not).
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))