Pubdate: Fri, 14 Dec 2012
Source: Moultrie Observer, The (GA)
Copyright: 2012 The Moultrie Observer
Contact: http://www.moultrieobserver.com/extras/letters.shtml
Website: http://www.moultrieobserver.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1728
Author: Froma Harrop, Creators Syndicate
Page: 6A

THAT MONEY COULD BE BETTER SPENT

Ah, the great American West, where man can generally breathe free and
also inhale -woman, too. Thank you, thank you, voters in Colorado and
Washington state, for legalizing marijuana. But will Washington, D.C.,
leave you alone? Attorney General Eric Holder said this week that the
Justice Department will weigh its response to the state referenda.

A new national poll finds 58 percent of Americans in favor of making
marijuana legal and only 39 percent against. A raft of other state
laws easing the prohibition on pot and growing public contempt for the
existing law should be enough to change the policy. And so should a
basic sense of decency.

We persecute ordinary Americans for using an illegal drug smoked by
the last three inhabitants of the White House. President Obama
admitted -- and George W. Bush all but admitted -- to having
experimented (don't you love the word "experimented"?) not only with
pot, but with cocaine.

Courts rarely inflict heavy prison terms on users of marijuana these
days, Tony Ryan, a retired lieutenant from the Denver Police
Department, told me, "but it's still a drug arrest, so if you're 18
years and older, it goes on your record."

That means you may not be able to get a job at a steel plant, join the
Navy, obtain a student loan or keep your child in a custody battle.
But wide knowledge that you smoked pot is apparently not enough to
stop you from becoming commander in chief of the United States Armed
Forces.

Ryan is on the board of a group called Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition -former police and other law officers calling for the end
to the War on Drugs. A Denver cop for 36 years, he's intrigued at what
the Obama administration will do next. In Colorado, the feds decided
to mostly leave medical marijuana alone. But to flex their muscles,
they started picking on medical marijuana dispensaries within 1,000
feet of schools.

"I said, OK, what high school student is going to go to convince a
doctor under threat of losing his license that he is ill and needs to
have medical marijuana," Ryan commented, "when he can just walk down
the halls of the school and get whatever he wants?"

In 2008, candidate Obama said he would not use Justice Department
resources to frustrate state laws allowing medical marijuana. But
President Obama did just that, even letting attorneys general threaten
government employees at state-run medical marijuana facilities.

Ignoring the scientific evidence, the feds deem marijuana a dangerous
substance that allegedly acts as a "gate-

Columnist way" to harder drugs. The political reality is that
legalizing marijuana is a gateway to ending the ludicrous War on Drugs
- -- a $40 billion-a-year failure off which many Americans find
employment. Last year, 80 percent of the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration's seizures were of marijuana. If marijuana were
legalized, what would those agents, lawyers, judges and prison guards
keeping us safe from marijuana do?

Oddly, liberal Democrats seem more afraid of letting go of the ban on
marijuana than libertarian Republicans and even some social
conservatives. (Evangelist Pat Robertson says it ruins the lives of
too many young people.) In the Colorado vote, former Rep. Tom
Tancredo, a hard-right Republican, supported the constitutional
amendment regulating marijuana like alcohol, and Democratic Gov. John
Hickenlooper opposed it.

To his credit, Hickenlooper subsequently declared the amendment
official and put a legalization advocate on the committee setting up a
regulatory process.

The successful ballot measures in Colorado and Washington give the
Obama administration another opportunity to find its bearings and stop
throwing billions down the hole of marijuana prohibition. That money
could be put elsewhere, so we're told.
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MAP posted-by: Matt