Two themes emerge in response to my 3/28/09 post. Below, a shot at summarizing. Let's call the competing views Camp Yes, as in President Obama should have tackled the marijuana issue during his recent online town hall meeting, and Camp No representing those who believe he was wise to shrug it off.
Camp Yes
Barack Obama, along with at least two of his Oval Office predecessors, was a pot smoker (and cocaine snorter) in his younger days. "Youthful mistakes," declaim all three. (Why don't they, and multitudes of other public figures, just say they did it, they enjoyed it, they outgrew it. Or they calculated the risks of continued use vis-à-vis their upward mobility, and switched back to booze?) This president's drug use did not slow his march toward global eminence (any more than Michael Phelps's kept him from the gold). But if young Barry had been busted? For starters, you wouldn't know the man's name today. Camp Yes asks the president: Why not use your understanding of what a drug bust would have done to your own future to do right by tens of millions of unlucky others?
Countless Americans suffering from terminal illness and/or excruciating pain find relief not from commercial pharmaceuticals, and their sometimes ghastly side effects, but from cannabis. Patients risk arrest for purchasing, growing, or possessing this analgesic, naturally occurring medicine. The president's compassion for the sick and dying surely dictates action. Real change, Mr. President. Now, not later. Justice delayed is in fact justice denied.
Hemp is a self-renewing, eco-friendly product with virtually endless industrial and commercial applications. The manufacturing of hemp products should be legalized posthaste, its growth encouraged.
A casualty of the drug war has been our civil liberties, along with our faith in a system of governing that guarantees one's right to the pursuit of happiness--as defined not by the government but by the individual. As adult Americans, we enjoy sovereignty over our own bodies, and that includes what we choose to put into them.
It is the economy, stupid. Marijuana is the largest (untaxed) cash crop in 12 states, among the top three in 30 states, and far and away the country's most valuable crop. At an annual value of over $35 billion, marijuana outstrips the combined value of corn and wheat. Its legalization, taxation, and regulation would provide many jobs and help grow the economy, not insignificantly.
Legalization would deliver a devastating blow to Mexican drug cartels, and to street traffickers who sell to kids.
Presumed opposition to marijuana reform is speculative, grossly overstated, and "overfeared." The president was therefore shortsighted, politically, in dismissing the question of legalization. Further, his disregard of the vast online community that helped put him in the White House merely salted the wound.
Camp No
The president's refusal to consider the marijuana issue was smart politics, the only thing he could have done in that situation. Obama is simply too new to the job, too busy with the economic crisis, too exposed politically. Pot legalization is a third-rail: Put a finger to it and Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin winds up in the White House in 2012.
The subject of the Town Hall was the economy, stupid. If the president and his team are able to turn the economy around, and to win credit for it both here and abroad, he will have ample political capital to tackle controversial subjects like major drug policy reform. In his second term.
It's not his job. Congress makes law, the president executes it. Congress must muster the wisdom and courage to craft a bill, pass it, and put it on the president's desk. Consensus? He'd sign it.
The president did not diss his online supporters. He was simply having a little harmless fun with the question, actually helping to neutralize the exaggerated political baggage associated with pot.
Many in Camp No thought I should (a) cut the president some slack, (b) develop a sense of humor, and (c) recognize the limits of what a new president, even one as gifted as Barack Obama, could possibly accomplish in less than a hundred days (assuming he had opted to embrace marijuana reform in the first place).
For the record, I'm an Obama partisan. Like many others I was transfixed by his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Who is this guy? Is he for real? His March '08 speech on race (reacting to the Jeremiah Wright controversy) was, for me, the definitive political statement on the subject, honest, eloquent, inspiring. Many of his other speeches--and, yes, the sheer size of the crowds he drew--in Germany, in Portland, on election night in Chicago, at the inauguration filled me with awe and pride. I watched the returns on election night with dear friends, champagne mixing with tears and goosebumps (even as we understood our collusion with one another in setting unrealistically high expectations of the man).
I've borne witness to 13 presidents (12 within memory), from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Barack Hussein Obama. I believe we've just said goodbye to the worst in U.S. history, and hello to one who could turn out to be among the best. No other president in my lifetime has offered greater hope across a wide range of social and economic issues--including meaningful and comprehensive drug policy reform--than this man. His earlier statements on marijuana decriminalization and the "utter failure" of the drug war combined with his decision to put a halt to DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries bode well for reform.
The drug war rests on a constellation of harebrained laws, most of them enacted by earlier generations of frightened, ignorant, often racist lawmakers. It has been fueled by nonstop lies and propaganda, and kept alive over the years by a succession of eight U.S. presidents in concert with one generation after another of federal, state, and local law enforcers.
Dismantling the decades-old, massively bureaucratized and financed drug war machine is a daunting task. Knowing this, given all he's currently facing, shouldn't we cut Obama some slack?
On reflection, yes.
I believe if we do our part, continuing aggressively to advance the populist cause of drug law reform--calling, writing, phoning, visiting our lawmakers at the state and national level--the president will do his part.
But cutting him some slack does not mean letting Obama off the hook by indulging his tendency toward "extreme moderation." He is our chief executive. He has authority. He has a bully pulpit. He has the constitutional power of Executive Order. And he has a duty to take seriously issues important to his constituents, and vital to the health and safety of his country.
http://eclecticradical.blogspot.com/2009/04/crime-corruption-and-fascism-war-on.html
It's just that I was busted 43 years ago and I thought it would be legal by 1970. I even voted for McGovern as I knew tricky Dick was afraid of hippies, gays, and non whites. Turns out Nixon has a lot of blood on his hands for ignorring the Schaffer report. He knew what he was doing and it worked. I just wish he was still alive to see Obama in the white house.
The first came from a pharmacologist at Temple University who claimed that he had injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 dogs, and two of those dogs had died. When asked by the Congressmen, and I quote, "Doctor, did you choose dogs for the similarity of their reactions to that of humans?" The answer of the pharmacologist was, "I wouldn't know, I am not a dog psychologist."
Well, the active ingredient in marijuana was first synthesized in a laboratory in Holland after World War II. So what it was this pharmacologist injected into these dogs we will never know, but it almost certainly was not the active ingredient in marijuana.
The other piece of medical testimony came from a man named Dr. William C. Woodward. Dr. Woodward was both a lawyer and a doctor and he was Chief Counsel to the American Medical Association. Dr. Woodward came to testify at the behest of the American Medical Association saying, and I quote, "The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug."
That's an exact quote. The next Congressman said, "Doctor, if you haven't got something better to say than that, we are sick of hearing you."
Quoted from:
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/whiteb1.htm
http://www.cripsandbloodsmovie.com/
If Woody Harrelson is the biggest public face of pot/hemp legalization (Bill Maher's pro-marijuana stance withstanding) then they need anew spokesperson.
Someone mature, solid, well respected, above reproach and not connected with comedy would help, as they tend to be easily dismissed.
"Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." - Abraham Lincoln (from a letter written by Lincoln during his presidency to the head of the Hohner Harmonica Company in Germany)
"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country."
- Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President
"Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere."
- George Washington, U.S. President
"We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption."
- John Adams, U.S. President
"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marihuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marihuana." - Jimmy Carter, U.S. President
"Prohibition... goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded" -Abraham Lincoln
lol
You want to LOSE it.
Gimme that old timey spelling, gimme that old timey spelling ....
If bodily harm is the issue, then we need to immediately criminalize alcohol and tobacco (and probably fast food and guns while we're at it). Fair is fair - you can't have it both ways. Prohibition does not work. It never has. All Prohibition gave us was Al Capone and an enormous criminal sub-culture - much as it is doing now. Legalize it and in one fell swoop you do away with all of the Mexian drug war violence, purge thousands of people from prison who should never have been there in the first place, add billions to the economy and let seriously ill people take whatever they want to feel better. An added benefit is that we stop spending billions of dollars and untold hours of police work on a completely un-winnable war. Adults are competent to make their own decisions. Common sense is LONG overdue.
The Alcohol Industry Lobby is formidable what do you suppose the Marijuana Lobby would look like in 20 years?
Not only is it not harmful, but the science is showing that it cancer. There are many studies with extremely compelling evidence. The latest came out April from Spain showing marijuana shrinks brain cancer tumors, kills cancer cells.
Studies have even shown that heavy pot smoking over the course of a life does not have a correlation with lung cancer. They deduced that although bad things were going into the lungs when pot was smoked, it must be that cancer-curing effect that was to blame for the lack of harm to the lungs, throat or mouth as they had expected to find.
Wikipedia is a battleground for different camps, but if recent edits are still there, I encourage you to go to the "Medical Cannabis" page ~ the very second section has oodles and oodles of science. It could get erased at any moment, as in the US, there are powerful forces which seek to keep anything positive regarding marijuana underground.
Why? People will loose money. To keep selling us their pharmaceudicals, cannabis needs to be kept on par with heroin in terms of being downright evil. And they have been doing a great job. But it's only a matter of time before an argument that holds no water must loose to rationality and science.
Legalizing cannabis would hurt the cartels, but it wouldn't finish them off. They'd still have the huge profits from cocaine, which I think we can all agree is emphatically not "almost harmless" as is cannabis.