Get with the times, Holder!
Marijuana Prohibition's Legal Insanity Continues
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/obama-marijuana-policy_b_1004227.html
Two choice segments from the article:
As Tom Angell, media spokesman for
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition put it:
The administration clearly understood the political value in being perceived as pro-medical marijuana when they put out the October 2009 memo on respecting states' rights to enact these laws. They even leaked it to the Associated Press on a Sunday night to ensure maximum exposure. I really don't know what is behind the reversal of late. Perhaps it's a case of career drug war zealots in the Department of Justice undermining a boss who is too busy to concern himself with medical marijuana issues. In any case, this isn't going to play well politically for the administration in a contentious re-election fight at a time when 80 percent of Americans support medical marijuana. If the president knows what's good for him, he'll put a stop to the federal interference in states with medical marijuana laws.
And from the author Chris Weigant:
This Drug War insanity occasionally crosses over into laughable irony. Also in the marijuana news from the past few weeks was
the story of a 72-year-old woman in a car (as a passenger) who was pulled over by the cops in Oregon. The police found marijuana on the woman, but they had to let her go. The reason? She could prove she is one of the remaining four people who get their marijuana
directly from the federal government -- as medicine. She has glaucoma, and she qualified under an extremely narrow loophole (only a dozen or so people ever qualified for this program) in federal drug law which reaches back to the 1970s. She receives federal marijuana to treat her illness, and she brags about how well it works: "They won't acknowledge the fact that I do not have even one aspirin in this house." So the federal government legally provides medical marijuana to her and three others (100 pounds of it, since 2005), while at the same time
insisting that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use," and while threatening to treat state and local governmental officials as the worst criminals possible for trying to unravel this massive federal legal doublethink. If the Department of Justice's legal reasoning is correct -- anyone facilitating such activities as distributing marijuana should be federally prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law -- then
the entire federal government is a drug trafficker, too.
Edit:
And how could I forget the powerful closing statement by the author?
The ultimate irony is that Barack Obama has admitted he used marijuana himself, back in the day. The question I keep hoping some intrepid reporter will ask him is: "Mister President, if you had been caught for your illegal drug use and prosecuted the same way your own Justice Department is now trying to prosecute medical marijuana providers, how would your life have turned out differently? If you had been forced to 'pay for your crime' back then, do you think it would have improved your life, or changed it radically for the worse?" And a followup question, as well: "Then how can you justify what Eric Holder is currently doing?"