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OPINION 6A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2016 Britain’s Brexit leap in the dark Founded in 1873 STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager Time to allow pot to join real world Federal regulations are less and less tenable By ROGER COHEN New York Times News Service ONDON — The British have given the world’s political, inancial and business establishment a massive kick in the teeth by voting to leave the European Union, a historic deci- sion that will plunge Britain into uncertainty for years to come and reverses the integration on which the continent’s stability has been based. L Warnings by President Barack Obama, Britain’s political leaders and the International Monetary Fund about the dire consequences of a British exit proved useless. If anything, they goaded a mood of deiant anger against these very elites. This resentment has its roots in many things but may be summed up as a revolt against global capitalism. To heck with the experts and politi- cal correctness was the predominant mood in the end. A majority of Brit- ons had no time for the politicians that brought the world a disastrous war in Iraq, the 2008 inancial melt- down, European austerity, stagnant working-class wages, high immigra- tion and tax havens for the super-rich. That some of these issues have no direct link to the European Union or its much-maligned Brussels bureau- crats did not matter. It was a conve- nient target in this restive moment that has also made Donald Trump the presumptive Republican nomi- nee — and may now take him further still on a similar wave of nativism and anti-establishment rage. David Cameron, the British prime minister prodded into holding the ref- erendum by the right of his Conserva- tive Party, said he would resign, stay- ing on in a caretaker capacity for a few months. This was the right call, and an inevitable one. He has led the country into a debacle. The pound duly plunged some 10 percent to its lowest level since 1985. Global markets were rattled. Main- stream European politicians lamented a sad day for Europe and Britain; rightists like Marine Le Pen in France exulted. The world has entered a period of grave volatility. Ever-greater unity was a founda- tion stone since the 1950s not only of peace in Europe, putting an end to the repetitive wars that had ravaged gen- erations of Europeans, but also of the global political order. Now all bets are off. A process of European unraveling may have begun. A core assumption of American foreign policy — that a united Europe had overcomes its divi- sions — has been undermined. Geert Wilders, the right-wing anti-immigrant Dutch politician, promptly tweeted: “Hurrah for the British! Now it is our turn. Time for egal marijuana is big business in the Paciic Northwest, quickly achieving a scale that belies its continuing image as a commodity coaxed into life by aging hippies and Millennial stoners. In fact, 21st century marijuana has about as much in common with its cottage-industry antecedents as Napa Valley vineyards have with French villagers stomping grapes. The realities of rapid indus- all this money locking to the trialization of marijuana are product might seem to invite constantly being driven home the possibility of a continu- by news reports. ing regulatory struggle with As EO Media Group’s pot produced off the legal grid. Capital Bureau reported last However, legal marijuana’s week, newly available state ability to avoid tangling with data based on tax receipts soon cops, its production economies may prove the old contention of scale and other factors have that marijuana is Oregon’s been driving retail prices down. most valuable crop. With a Particularly in Oregon where value approaching $1 billion it now is legal for grownups last year, legal pot will surpass to grow their own, the days cattle and calves ($922 million of black market dealers are in 2014) as Oregon’s top agri- rapidly winding down. This cultural product. assumes, however, that a new And this strength in the pot president continues the current business is before the Oregon administration’s lack of inter- Liquor Control Commission est in rehashing this lost ight. implements new recreational At the same time marijuana production and retail licens- increasingly becomes a major ing, which will spur creation of cash crop for legitimate busi- even more pot stores and sales. ness, continuing inconsisten- In Washington state, law cies with federal regulations enforcement this week will become less and less tena- cease turning a blind eye to ble. This results in silly and a system of growers and dis- ineficient results, such as the pensaries that developed state being unable to list mar- when medical marijuana was ijuana in its annual crop statis- legal but recreation marijuana tics due to federal policy. Water wasn’t. As of July 1, the state from federal projects can’t is folding the medical and rec- be used to irrigate marijuana, reational markets into one nor are Natural Resources regulatory system, but there Conservation Service pro- By GAIL COLLINS were 10 times more license grams available for pot crops. New York Times News Service applicants than there were Looking all this, it should et’s criticize cruise ships. licenses. Beginning Friday, be obvious even to Congress I know, I know. Things are bad the Washington State Liquor that this isn’t Old McDonald’s enough without going negative about and Cannabis Board will begin Marijuana Farm anymore. It your summer vacation. seizing marijuana from unli- is time to normalize marijua- But we’ve got some problems here. censed businesses, with own- na’s connection with bank- Plus, I promise there will be a penguin. The cruise industry seems to be ers facing civil penalties and ing, environmental, labor and exploding — the newest generation of additional actions from local other laws. At the same time, it ships can carry more than 5,000 passen- law enforcement. becomes increasingly import- gers. They make a great deal of proit from the sale of alcohol, so imagine the In December 2015, a report ant to monitor the pot industry’s equivalent of a small city whose inhabi- put the size of Washington’s efforts to inluence elections tants are perpetually drunk. Really, these things are so huge, it’s marijuana market at $1.3 bil- and government decisions. amazing they can stay aloat without lion a year, with medical dis- This is a big industry with toppling over. And when one is parked pensaries providing 37 percent plentiful money; it must be outside, say, Venice, the effect is like one of those alien-invasion movies, when of the total. held to at least the same legal people wake up and ind that a space- With both states imposing standards as the rest of corpo- ship the size of Toledo has landed down- town. (Venetians also claim the ships are hefty tax rates on marijuana, rate America. causing waves in their canals.) Environ- L Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA via AP A woman on a bicycle leaves a polling station near to the Royal Chel- sea Hospital, London Thursday. Voters in Britain decide Thursday the country should leave the European Union. a Dutch referendum!” The The English were also European Union is more prepared to risk some- vulnerable than at any point thing else: the breakup since its inception. The of the United Kingdom. sacred images of old — like Scotland voted to remain French President François in the European Union by Mitterrand and German a margin of 62 percent to Chancellor Helmut Kohl 38 percent. Northern Ire- hand-in-hand at Verdun — land voted to remain by 56 have lost their resonance. percent to 44 percent. The The travails of the euro, the Scots will now likely seek Roger tide of immigration (both a second referendum on Cohen within the European independence. Union from poorer to Divisions were not The richer members and only national. Lon- from outside), and high voted overwhelm- European don unemployment have ingly to remain. But led to an eerie collec- the countryside, small Union tive loss of patience, towns and hard-hit prudence and memory. industrial provincial is more Anything but this has industrial centers voted vulnerable overwhelmingly to become a widespread sentiment; irrationality leave and carried the than at is in the air. day. A Britain issured The colossal leap a liberal, met- any point between in the dark that a tradi- ropolitan class cen- tionally cautious peo- tered in London and since its ple — the British — the rest was revealed. inception. were prepared to take Europe’s failings has to be taken seri- — and they have been ously. It suggests that other such leaps conspicuous over the past decade — could occur elsewhere, perhaps in are simply not suficient to explain Trump’s America. A Trump victory what Britain has done to itself. This in November is more plausible now was a vote against the global eco- because it has an immediate prece- nomic and social order that the irst dent in a developed democracy ready 16 years of the 21st century have pro- to trash the status quo for the high- duced. Where it leads is unclear. The risk unknown. worst is not inevitable but it is plau- Fifty-two percent of the British sible. Britain will remain an import- population was ready to face higher ant power. But it will punch beneath unemployment, a weaker currency, its weight. It faces serious, long-term possible recession, political turbu- political and economic risk. lence, the loss of access to a market of Anger was most focused on the a half-billion people, a messy divorce hundreds of thousands of immigrants that may take as long as two years coming into Britain each year, most to complete, a very long subsequent from other European Union nations negotiation of Britain’s relation- like Poland. Farage’s U.K. Indepen- ship with Europe, and the tortuous dence Party, abetted by much of the redrafting of laws and trade treaties press, was able to whip up a storm and environmental regulations — all that conlated EU immigration with for what the right-wing leader Nigel the trickle from the Middle East. Wild Farage daftly called “Independence myths, like imminent Turkish mem- Day.” Britain was a sovereign nation bership of the European Union, were before this vote in every signiicant cultivated. Violence entered the cam- sense. It remains so. Estrangement paign on a wave of xenophobia and Day would be more apt. take-our-country back rhetoric. A look at tax dodging on the high seas L FYI: Clippings from the press of the Paciic Northwest and the nation NATO is the antidote to Brexit he United States can best sup- port Britain, and Europe, by becoming a more active and vocal leader of the NATO alliance, which will retain Britain as a member. If the European Union is weakening or even in danger of crumbling, to the T delight of Vladi mir Putin, Mr. Xi and other adversaries, then one antidote is a reinforced transatlantic military partnership that bridges the incip- ient gap between London and the continent. — The Washington Post Facts win out on abortion lthough nearly one-third of American women will have an abortion in their lifetime, a goal of abortion opponents has been to carve out abortion practice from ordinary health care, to ghettoize and delegit- imize it. Those days are now over, A too. Singling out abortion for regula- tion that can’t be justiied on medical grounds is unacceptable, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized in a concurring opinion. — Linda Greenhouse in The New York Times mentalists wring their hands over the air pollution and sewage — a 3,000-pas- senger ship, which today would rank as medium-size, produces 21,000 gal- lons of sewage a day, sometimes treated and sometimes not so much. But always pumped into the sea. And, as long as we’re complaining, let’s point out that noise from the ships is messing with the whales. Michael Jasny of the Natural Resources Defense Council says cruises en route to Alaska “routinely drown out the calls of the endangered orcas” trying to communi- cate. The NRDC has a new ilm, “Sonic Sea,” that features audio of a whale conversation being obliterated by an approaching cruise ship. The effect is sort of like what you’d experience if you were having a meaningful chat with friends on the patio and a trailer-trac- tor full of disco dancers suddenly drove into the backyard. Thanks to global warming, cruise lines will soon be able to sail the North- west Passage, so the Arctic He’s the sponsor of a bill will have both more melting that would increase con- ice and more 13-deck ships. sumer protection for cruise Antarctica hosted 30,000 passengers. The bill, which visitors last year. Doesn’t can’t even get a committee that seem like a lot for such hearing, would also require a fragile place? Also, an the ships to have up-to- opera singer who was enter- date technology that detects taining passengers on one when passengers fall over- cruise went ashore to sing board. Now this would seem “O Sole Mio” and caused a like something you’d expect Gail penguin stampede. This is them to have around. Collins not really a problem you An average of about need to worry about, but 20 people fall off cruise Stop it was a pretty interesting ships every year, which moment. scaring the industry points out is While many of the only about one in a million the biggest cruise lines appear travelers. But still, I sus- to be headquartered in pect that passengers work Florida, they are, for tax penguins. under the assumption that purposes, actually proud if they do somehow wind residents of … elsewhere. up in the water, some- “Carnival is a Panamanian corporation; one will notice. This spring, a 33-year- Royal Caribbean is Liberian,” said Ross old U.S. woman disappeared during a Klein, who tracks the industry through cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. No one his Cruise Junkie website. realized she was gone for 10 hours, and Although, of course, if one of the by the time searchers could start look- ships needs help, it will often be the U.S. ing for her, the area they needed to cover taxpayer-funded Coast Guard that comes was more than 4,000 square miles. to the rescue. The Coast Guard doesn’t While it’s the least thing anyone worries charge for its services, a spokesman said, about when a person is missing at sea, because “we don’t want people to hesi- let us point out once again that it was the tate” to summon help when passengers taxpayer-funded Coast Guard doing the are in danger. This attitude is commend- searching. able. But the no-taxes part is not. The cruise industry says the over- “Cruise lines do pay taxes,” pro- board technology hasn’t been perfected. tested a spokesman for the industry, Blumenthal says it’s been well tested. counting off a number of levies for Seems like the sort of disagreement that things like customs and examination of would be easy to resolve with … a com- animals and plants being brought into mittee hearing. the country. Not the same thing. Most cruise vacationers seem to We’re constantly hearing complaints enjoy their experience — the industry in Congress about U.S. companies that says nearly 90 percent declare them- relocate their headquarters overseas for selves satisied. It’s not our business to tax avoidance. But when do you hear get in between anybody and an ocean anybody mentioning the cruise indus- breeze. Our requests are modest, really: try’s Panamanian connection? The Make the cruise ship companies that cruise companies may not really live are, for all practical purposes, American pay American taxes. Leave the whales here, but they certainly can lobby here. “Powerful is an understatement,” alone. Give that bill a committee hear- said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. ing. And stop scaring the penguins.