Pubdate: Tue, 09 Dec 2008
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2008 The Sacramento Bee
Contact:  http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
Page: 19A
Author: Peter Schrag
Note: Letters from newspaper's circulation area receive publishing priority
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/barack+obama

OBAMA SENDS MIXED MESSAGES ON MARIJUANA

There were moments not so long ago when Barack Obama was signaling
that he was ready to end the costly and pointless federal raids on
medical marijuana users and their caretakers. In the past few years,
those raids have hit Californians particularly hard.

"The Justice Department going after sick individuals using this as a
palliative instead of going after serious criminals makes no sense,"
he said in New Hampshire last year. In 2004, he seemed to favor the
decriminalization of pot altogether.

On the day Obama was elected, voters in Michigan, by a 63-37 margin,
put their state in the ranks of the 12 others that have passed medical
marijuana laws since California broke the ice in 1996. On the same
day, Massachusetts voters approved a measure that decriminalized
possession of small amounts of pot altogether. Both votes should have
helped Obama to get off the fence. But recent reports that Obama was
considering Rep. Jim Ramstad, a moderate Minnesota Republican who's
retiring from Congress, for the post of White House drug czar, send a
very different message.

Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic, has been cheered as the sponsor of
laws requiring insurers to cover drug treatment and mental health
services. But he also voted for federal funding bans on needle
exchanges and strongly opposed measures to stop federal arrests of
medical marijuana patients in states like California where its use is
legal.

There are reasons for Obama, like many other politicians, to be
skittish about the issue. He's acknowledged drug use in his past. He
doesn't want to trip on the matter when he has countless tougher
things to deal with in his first years in office.

But since millions of Americans are beginning to understand that the
pursuit of medical marijuana patients, and maybe much of the rest of
the drug war, is and has long been a self-defeating exercise, maybe
it's time for a little hard rethinking.

The biggest beneficiaries of the drug war are the criminal cartels
that process, import and market the stuff, the terrorists who tax it,
and the multibillion-dollar narcotics repression machinery that for 70
years has always been its biggest advocate.

Last week the nation marked the 75th anniversary of the repeal of
Prohibition, another misbegotten experiment in social sanitation whose
greatest legatees were the organized crime syndicates that began
operations as bootleggers in the 1920s.

What became the federal law that effectively outlawed marijuana was
enacted in 1937, four years after Prohibition ended. Credit that to
two men. One was Harry Anslinger, who, as head of the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics, was building his empire. The other was newspaper tycoon
William Randolph Hearst, whose paper mills were competing for pulp
sales with hemp growers in Mexico.

The message was the threat of "reefer madness," a fabricated myth
echoed by Hollywood and other papers that pot drove users to rape,
murder and mayhem. Worse, it was a Mexican drug (also used by blacks,
jazz musicians and other disreputable people). It became an additional
weapon in the 1930s campaign to deport and exclude Mexicans.

Congress acted on marijuana a generation after the first state
outlawed the drug. That state was Utah, from which some Mormons had
moved to northwest Mexico after their church banned polygamy. When
their hopes for their Mexican settlements didn't pan out, many
returned in 1914-15, bringing cannabis back with them. The church
quickly banned it as against the Mormon religion, and the Utah
Legislature quickly followed.

According to the FBI's latest crime report, among the nation's 1.8
million drug busts in 2007 were 775,000 for simple possession of
marijuana for personal use. That 1.8 million is roughly triple the
number of arrests for violent crime. Fewer than 20 percent of the
arrests were for sales or production.

Drug control isn't a simple issue: Drug policies in Europe vary all
over the lot, although none is as punitive as ours. Last week, the
Swiss approved the indefinite extension of that nation's medically
supervised heroin administration program, created to get addicts off
the streets, while at the same time rejecting a proposal to
decriminalize marijuana. The Swiss like neat streets.

But what reformers call "harm reduction" - meaning reducing all harm -
is assuredly a better course than criminalizing everything.

Where does a good society draw the lines between personal
responsibility, treatment of addicts, and rigid criminal sanctions?
How willing are we to disrupt productive lives and families, how much
are we willing to pay for what benefit? How much could drug-related
crime be reduced with smarter policies? With the exception of the drug
control establishment, how many of us believe that we have a
successful cost-efficient system that should be left as it is?
Californians, along with the other medical marijuana states, have
taken a little leadership. The least the feds could do now is leave us
alone.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin