Will Obama bring audacity to US dope law reform?

President Obama could make himself very popular by abandoning the unpopular and unwinnable war on drugs

FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Obama was sworn in as president on January 20 and two days later the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) celebrated the new era by raiding a medical marijuana dispensary in South Lake Tahoe, up in the California Sierra. The feds carried off about 5lb of cannabis and a few thousand dollars in cash. They didn't arrest the dispenser, a wheelchair-bound fellow called Ken Estes who'd had similar brushes with the DEA before.

In the early days of a new administration, every lobby in the country fixes its eyes on the White House to see which way the wind is likely to blow. Straight off the bat, the left got curtailment of official torture by the CIA, as well as refreshing edicts on ethical guidelines and on equal pay. The women's groups got renewed government financing of abortion counseling overseas. Human rights groups got a pledge to close Guantanamo.

The lobby to legalise medical marijuana got the feds busting Ken Estes, in a state whose own statute book explicitly legalises medical marijuana.

If the DEA respects state drug laws, the balance sheets of Big Pharm will suffer It's not a small lobby. Polls regularly show that 70-80 per cent of Americans favour legalisation of marijuana used for medical purposes. People like substances that beat back pain and banish care, especially when painkillers dispensed by the pharmaceutical industry can wipe them out financially and have terrible side-effects.

Obama was the candidate who said last year that sure, as a young man he had inhaled marijuana, since that was the whole point. On the campaign trail he was very specific about the relative weight of federal law (which the DEA brandishes) as against state laws decriminalising or legalising medical marijuana sale and use in ten states.

"What I'm not going to be doing," he told Gary Nelson of the Medford Mail Tribune, an Oregon paper, "is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue simply because I want folks to be investigating violent crimes and potential terrorism."

The DEA busted Ken Estes (right) for growing medical marijuana in a state were such activity is explicitly legal

Ken Estes, busted for medical-marijuana production

Oregon has on its books a state law legalising medical marijuana. Obama was in what was thought might be a tight race with Hillary Clinton. Every vote among liberal, dope-smoking Democrats might count. But this went beyond the usual candidate waffle about 'commissions of enquiry', 'panels of experts' and the like.

So, to the hopeful medical marijuana lobby, the federal DEA raid on Estes came like a punch on the nose. Fred Gardner, who edits O'Shaughnessy's, a pro-cannabis doctors' journal, reported the raid on the CounterPunch website on February 4. One day later the White House announced that President Obama's commitment to honouring state medical-marijuana law would be implemented by his yet-to-be-named DEA Administrator.

The Washington Times reported on February 5: "The White House said it expects those kinds of raids to end once Mr Obama nominates someone to take charge of DEA, which is still run by Bush administration holdovers. 'The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of

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I see the main problem for any politician addressing the insane drug laws to be the weight of moral panic that has been stimulated over the decades, so that many people think drugs are 'evil' despite the fact that alcohol is a drug, and a pretty dangerous one too. American started it all off by making cannabis an illegal drug on behalf of the chemical companies because it provided not only a sustainable alternative to plastics [hemp has been around a long time and provided the sails and rigging for the Elizabethan navy] for cloth, but also a safe alternative to chemical painkillers, as doctors have increasingly been finding out. But the lobby is very powerful, and Obama will have to be pretty strong to stand up against it. The American people may well want it legalised as do the majority of Brits and most other countries, but it's a brave politician who goes against big money. It could be a golden opportunity to look again at the ludicrous war on drugs, make some sane changes and start to address the problems we have, mostly caused by the legislation the whole world has been forced into adopting by the US, and UN drug treaties. It's a simple lesson, if you want to make something popular and readily accessible, make it illegal and hand distribution [and profits] over to organised crime. If you want to minimise any harm which might be caused, you legalise and regulate, ignoring all the emotional claptrap and disinformation that like a sea of garbage constantly washes over the whole question of marijuana.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 10:37am on February 24, 2009

Of course he would make himself wildly popular by the drug abusing classes of society. The so-called ludicrous war on drugs has impacted the very people it was intended to help, the drug abusers. They would be shorn of unprincipled pushers, school aged punks who have only this as a method of self-esteem. Just oimagine, they could suffer and go to hell as they want. I would also abandon the war on alchohol and tobacco - let these abusers also go to hell as they want. Government money could go to the things that really count in today's society - reality TV, beauty pangeants and eating white bread.

Posted by John Valentine at 5:36pm on February 25, 2009