The enforcement part is what I was getting at. It's all well and good for the federal government to make a law that says that marijuana is illegal, or that whit

The enforcement part is what I was getting at. It's all well and good for the federal government to make a law that says that marijuana is illegal, or that whites and African Americans must go to the same schools. But nothing about those laws alters facts on the ground without resources and manpower devoted to enforcement. The allocation of those resources and manpower requires political will, and when that political will is lacking, laws can be passed, court decisions can be made, and no facts on the ground will change. Like you pointed out, what enables the "defiance" of state governments in the face of the federal government is the fact that, in some cases, the federal government has decided that it's not worth causing further political unrest to quash this defiance. This is why we don't see raids on marijuana retailers in Washington and Colorado. In other cases, that political will does exist, as we saw when Lyndon Johnson called out the National Guard to force the integration of schools in the Jim Crow South.