Thinking Clearly

From the Choom Gang to Drug Warrior, Barack Obama Keeps Bogarting Joints

by Nick Gillespie at The Daily Beast 

 

 When running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama said, “We need to rethink how we are operating in the drug wars and I think currently we are not doing a good job.” In 2006, while on a book tour for The Audacity of Hope and testing the waters of a presidential run, he was comfortable enough discussing his personal experiences to joke, “I inhaled frequently...that was the whole point.” In 2008, he said that he wouldn’t use federal resources to target medical marijuana providers and users in states that had made the stuff legal—a promise reiterated by Attorney General Eric Holder shortly after taking office in 2009.

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Yet for all that, Obama has governed not merely as a standard-issue White House drug warrior but as a particularly hard-headed and hard-hearted one. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana and polls routinely show 70 percent to 80 percent of Americans support the stuff, but the Obama administration has actually outpaced the Bush administration when it comes to dispensary raids. As my Reason colleague Mike Riggs has reported, the Obama administration has also continued or expanded programs that funnel billions of dollars to oppressive drug-war operations in Asia and Mexico (where the results have included “multiple reports of forced disappearances by the army, navy, and police.”)

 

 ...   where a kid who was once into “total absorption” and “roof hits” has done nothing serious to end what’s rightly called “America’s Longest War.” Sadly, there’s no reason to think that Obama will return from surveying the carnage black markets in drugs have caused in Mexico with any new ideas.