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Marijuana and Self-Government, Large and Small

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…
Russell Arben Fox
January 30, 2015

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.

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A stack of three Local Culture journals and the book 'Localism in the Mass Age'

Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox is a Front Porch Republic Contributing Editor. He grew up milking cows and baling hay in Spokane Valley, WA, but now lives in Wichita, KS, where he runs the History & Politics and the Honors programs at Friends University, a small Christian liberal arts college. He aspires to write a book about the theory and practice of democracy, community, and environmental sustainability in small to mid-sized cities, like the one he has made his and his family’s home; his scribblings pertaining to that and related subjects are collected at the Substack “Wichita and the Mittelpolitan.” He also blogs–irregularly and usually at too-great a length–more broadly about politics, philosophy, religion, socialism, bicycling, books, farming, pop music, and whatever else strikes his fancy, at “In Medias Res.”

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