Pubdate: Sun, 27 Jul 2014
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2014 Albuquerque Journal
Contact:  http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau
Page: C6

DEA FINDS ITSELF AMONG THE WOUNDED IN WAR ON DRUGS

The Agency Is Caught Between States That Lean Toward Marijuana 
Legalization and Law Enforcement That Maintains a Hard Line

WASHINGTON - For narcotics agents, who often confront hostile 
situations, Capitol Hill has been a refuge where lawmakers stand 
ready to salute efforts in the nation's war on drugs.

Lately, however, the Drug Enforcement Administration has found itself 
under attack in Congress as it holds its ground against marijuana 
legalization while the resolve of longtime political allies - and the 
White House and Justice Department to which it reports - rapidly fades.

"For 13 of the 14 years I have worked on this issue, when the DEA 
came to a hearing, committee members jumped over themselves to 
cheerlead," said Bill Piper, a lobbyist with the Drug Policy 
Alliance, a pro-legalization group. "Now the lawmakers are not just 
asking tough questions, but also getting aggressive with their arguments."

So far this year, the DEA's role in the seizure of industrial hemp 
seeds bound for research facilities in Kentucky drew angry rebukes 
from the Senate's most powerful Republican. The GOP-controlled House 
recently voted to prohibit federal agents from busting medical 
marijuana operations that are legal under state laws. And that 
measure, which demonstrated a shared distaste for the DEA's approach 
to marijuana, brought one of the Senate's most conservative members 
together with one of its most liberal in a rare bipartisan alliance.

Feeling the heat

How much the agency's stock has fallen was readily apparent in the 
House debate, when Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., denounced the agency's 
longtime chief.

"She is a terrible agency head," Polis said of Administrator Michele Leonhart.

The two had previously clashed over the DEA's insistence that 
marijuana continue to be classified as among the most dangerous 
narcotics in existence.

"She has repeatedly embarrassed her agency before this body," Polis said.

Leonhart, who declined through a spokesman to be interviewed, is not 
getting much backup from the White House.

This year, she complained that President Barack Obama seemed 
alarmingly blase about what she sees as a pot epidemic. Her remarks 
to dozens of sheriffs gathered at a conference in Washington came 
soon after Obama told the New Yorker magazine that marijuana seemed 
no more dangerous to him than alcohol.

"She said, 'I am so angry the president said what he said and 
completely ignored the science,' " recalled Thomas Hodgson, the 
sheriff of Bristol County, Mass.

Her remarks were so frank, Hodgson said, that another sheriff who had 
been attending such meetings for three decades interrupted Leonhart 
to tell the crowd what a risk she was taking. The audience then gave 
her a standing ovation, Hodgson said.

Leonhart went on to complain about a softball game White House staff 
had participated in with marijuana advocates, and declared that one 
of the low points of her career had been seeing a hemp flag fly over 
the Capitol - a display Polis had requested.

When Leonhart left, Hodgson said, she got another standing ovation.

Conflicting agendas

The enthusiasm from law enforcement agents suggests why Leonhart, a 
holdover from the George W. Bush administration, where she served as 
acting DEA chief, remains ensconced in her post even as more than 
42,400 people have signed a petition demanding her resignation.

"The Obama administration has to walk this tightrope," said Sam 
Kamin, a law professor at the University of Denver. "The youth vote 
and a number of populous states are moving in one direction, and 
elements of law enforcement are not."

He added: "These are people who have spent their lives enforcing 
marijuana laws. To say we are going to let the states decide what 
federal law is, is difficult for them to swallow."

The DEA also is operating amid mixed signals.

Many lawmakers think marijuana should no longer be classified among 
the most dangerous drugs, but they're reluctant to vote to change 
federal narcotics law. And despite cautious acceptance of state 
legalization laws by the White House, its enforcement strategy is 
ambiguous. The statutes that guided narcotics agents at the height of 
the war on drugs to aggressively go after pot remain on the books.

After word spread in May that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had 
called Leonhart in for a private chat and admonished her to stop 
contradicting the administration, Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va., rushed 
to her defense.

Wolf accused Holder's office of a "Nixonian effort to pressure a 
career law enforcement leader into changing her congressional testimony."

Leonhart "has done an outstanding job leading this agency during a 
challenging time," Wolf wrote in a letter to Holder.

But that view no longer commands a clear majority in Washington, as 
the agency repeatedly has run into congressional opposition.

The usually unexcitable Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of 
Kentucky, reprimanded the DEA after it impounded 250 pounds of hemp 
seeds en route to the University of Kentucky from Italy. The seeds 
were to be used by researchers exploring the possibility of 
reintroducing the hemp industry in the U.S.

Hemp, the fiber of a non-psychoactive cannabis plant, can be 
manufactured into clothing and numerous other products. One thing it 
can't do is make a person high. Nonetheless, the DEA deemed the seeds 
a controlled substance.

McConnell said the agency was wasting limited resources on the 
seizure "at the very time Kentucky is facing growing threats from 
heroin addiction and other drug abuse."

Amid political pressure and a lawsuit from Kentucky's Department of 
Agriculture, the agency granted the university an expedited 
controlled-substances permit.

The hemp offensive bewildered even some longtime DEA allies.

"It is an unnecessary fight," said Robert Stutman, a retired director 
of the agency's New York division. "It doesn't affect the drug issue 
one way or another."

The hemp case also irritated Kentucky's other senator, tea party 
favorite Rand Paul, who signed on to sponsor the Senate version of a 
House measure that would curb raids on medical marijuana dispensaries.

A desire to rein in the DEA has kindled an intriguing political 
alliance between Paul and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., one of the 
chamber's most liberal members, who is co-sponsoring the measure.

Unwanted attention

As the DEA has struggled with the politics of marijuana, it also has 
faced a spate of incidents requiring administration officials to 
clean up after agents.

The Justice Department last year agreed to a $4.1 million settlement 
with a man whom DEA agents left handcuffed in a San Diego holding 
cell without food or water for five days. And federal investigators 
are looking into charges that the agency has been improperly 
collecting phone company data and concealing from defendants how the 
information was used against them.

But neither those problems nor changes in public opinion have caused 
the agency to shift its ground. The DEA's latest policy paper on pot 
declares the medical marijuana movement, which has won victories in 
22 states, to be a fraud.

"Organizers," it says, "did not really concern themselves with 
marijuana as a medicine - they just saw it as a means to an end, 
which is the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes."

Displayed prominently in the DEA Museum at its Arlington, Va., 
headquarters is part of a California dispensary that narcotics agents 
raided and shut down. It sits alongside the rebuilt front of a crack house.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom