This week's news that support for the legalization of marijuana has reached a record high of 50% ought to bother Obama's re-election team a little bit. No, not because pot's more popular than the president, although that really says a lot. The problem, rather, is that Obama's heavily publicized and widely praised promise to respect state medical marijuana laws has recently been shattered into more pieces than the campaign can count.
In only a few short months, the Obama administration has presided over a vicious series of political assaults on medical marijuana patients and providers across the nation, carried out by numerous federal agencies. The situation just continues to get more ugly and insane from one week to the next:
As the American people appear all but prepared to end our war on marijuana once and for all, the federal government is busy doubling down on the even-more-mindless battle against people who use the drug medicinally. The disconnect is staggering and continues to expand as support for full legalization surges into the majority, while medical marijuana maintains the massive 80% national support it's had for some time now.
Today, at this very moment, support for the cause of marijuana reform has never been greater, and tomorrow it will be greater still. The surging momentum of the issue is generating discussion all around us, even by the media that once ignored it, which now misses no opportunity to cover the controversy over cannabis.
Alas, it seems the only person not talking about it is our president, who campaigned as an agent of change, who once spoke with seeming sincerity of the need to "rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws," who was elected after promising to reform federal enforcement priorities in medical marijuana states, and who earned universal praise from the press and the public when his administration announced its intention to do just that.
Whether deliberately or through a willful failure to follow the issue at all, Obama has thrown all of it away amidst an extraordinary stampede of over-the-top anti-pot posturing that makes Bush's drug war leadership look lazy by comparison. The situation is spiraling as we speak into new depths of absurdity, and many of the people who've made things this bad are busy brainstorming ways to make it worse.
Still, if there is one lesson to be learned from the recent history of marijuana policy in America, it is that support for reform is galvanized when the law is enforced in a manner that shocks the public conscience. The Obama Administration's past attempts at pandering to demands for a more measured criminal justice philosophy prove that he was once paying attention. Now, as the tension escalates with each new federal threat, Obama's silence on the matter is becoming conspicuous and embarrassing.
The time has come for the president, and no one else, to come forward and explain to the American people why war is still being waged against patients and providers in states that permit the medical use of marijuana. What the people want has been perfectly clear for a long time, and if we can't have it, we deserve an honest answer as to why.
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The US Governement has been doing business with the Mexican drug carterls for a while now, and they are realizing that legalizing marijuanna (even for medical purposes) decreases profits greatly. This is all business and little politics. However the Government itself isn't the one reaping all the rewards, it's the corporations (mostly the alcohol and pharmaceutical corporations in this case) that pull the Governments strings behind the scenes that are keeping it the way it is.
Until they can find a way to make as much or more off leagalization compared to the way it is now, the policy will remain the same, possibly even cracked down upon further. The morality of using "drugs" has absolutely nothing to do with this
But first...sign this http://t.co/9HRxPEsx petition!
Just who the hell works for whom here?
If we're asking our government for permission to do as we please with our own bodies and minds we are no longer free, and live under tyranny.
The founding fathers had clear guidelines for what our duty as Americans is should we find ourselves so situated.
If you don't know what that is, please look it up!
It's way past time this BS stop! It is Americans being mean to American over nothing. The violence won't stop and the bucks won't roll to the government until these insane and mean spirited drug laws are reconciled.
Legalize today!!!
Great book on medical marijuana: MARIJUANA - Guide to Buying, Growing, Harvesting, and Making Medical Marijuana Oil and Delicious Chocolates to Treat Pain and Ailments by Mary Bendis. This book has great recipe for marijuana oil and tasty, yummy chocolates!
Focusing on Obama is pointless if the DEA has become so powerful, so intertwined with international webs of corporate and political deceit, that it can go rogue without so much as suffering a wrist slap from the White House. If that’s the case, then we have retrogressed to the rogue-agency crisis the country suffered under J. Edgar Hoover’s administration and multiple foul-ups at the FBI.
A major DEA and ONDCP shake-up might be just the thing if the respective agencies cannot properly redefine their priorities. Reorganizations of drug enforcement agencies were a regular occurrence under Richard Nixon. Obama could decide to become the new Nixon and stir the agency pot once again.
Paraphrasing Carlos Fuentes, a prominent Mexican writer, the only way the US can sustain its democratic façade internally is by behaving undemocratically externally.The policy of the US, the largest drug consumer in the world and the most belligerent war on drugs warrior, has always been to force others to deal with the mess it has created in the first place.
The fact is that the US likes "exporting" its internal conflicts and “demanding” other countries to fight its fights. It is also the logic of its foreign policy: wage war on foreign lands — be it in the form of low intensity wars like the War on Drugs, or high intensity ones, like the War on Terror (see the pattern?) — in order to isolate the US from the fallout from pursing its economic, political and strategic interests whatever the cost…for others.
That explains why a country that swaggers about lecturing everybody about the rule of law, democracy and human rights, ignores international law, practices extraordinary rendition, tortures, wages illegal wars, finances mercenaries, uses unmanned drones to carry out extra-judicial killings, and is the largest beneficiary of the war on drugs proceeds.
from smoking that dope!
WE MUST!!!
or the next thing you know they'll be laughing and wheeling..
and going the wrong way on those handicap ramps..
I will actively campaign for the former governor of New Mexico, as Quixotic as I recognize that effort to be, based solely on his promise to grant presidential pardons to anyone convicted of a marijuana offense, and to actively pursue its legalization.
I do not care if he has a chance in H&LL to win the election... I will send the clear message to the political process that this is as desperate an issue in America as the under-reported 23% national unemployment.
He wants to get reelected. Thinks pot will hurt his chances.
He's afraid. When the subject comes up, he can't distance himself from it fast enough.
He'd better hope his supporters don't start to distance themselves from him.
Give us legal weed and the bankers can have everything else, they've got it anyway. We'll build a new world quickly once it becomes legal!
Awesome.
Fanned and Faved