The White House has released a “plan to reduce drug use and its consequences” that it says is a “science based” drug enforcement scheme. The administration says its drug enforcement policy will be “smart on crime” instead of “tough on crime” by “emphasizing prevention” and medical interdiction to “break the cycle of drug use, crime, incarceration, and re-arrest.” Obama’s view is that “addiction is a disease of the brain” that can be treated medically and as a matter of law enforcement.

The Obama plan is formulated upon dual overarching assumptions; that if a substance has been outlawed federally, then it is a harmful and addictive substance the legality of which cannot be reconsidered; and, that the use of banned substances is a fiscal drag on the US economy. The website promoting the Obama administration enforcement scheme policy begins by reporting that, “illicit drug use cost our Nation more than $193 billion in lost productivity, healthcare, and criminal justice costs.”

The Obama administration asserts that the federal government cannot imprison every drug criminal in the United States because to do so, the policy paper states, is “counterproductive, inefficient, and costly.” The policy white paper goes on to state, however, that the Obama administration views the movements by citizens in the states to use the democratic process to legalize cannabis for medical and personal consumption are extremist and contradict “a public health and safety approach to drug policy.”

The Obama administration claims that its drug enforcement program is science based, but in the US and around the world scientists and researchers have come to different conclusions from reviewing the science that shows quite clearly that the banned in the US substance cannabis has the ability to provide medical relief to patients.

Researchers from the Psychopharmacology Unit of the University of Bristol in the UK created a scale of the relative addictive qualities of abused substances that was reported in their 2007 paper, “Development of a Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs of Potential Misuse”. The medical researchers found that cannabis scored as less addictive and less physically harmful than both heroin and cocaine, this is the case even though cannabis is classified by the federal government as more dangerous than both heroin and cocaine. The researchers also found that cannabis is less physically harmful and less addictive than tobacco and alcohol, both of which are legal in the US.

Furthermore, suggesting that cannabis is a dangerous and harmful drug is increasingly becoming disconnected from the broadly held medical opinion that cannabis is a helpful drug that is both pain relieving and curative. In fact, over 20 years ago in 1991, the American Society of Clinical Oncology surveyed 2,430 cancer doctors across the US to find that nearly half supported their patient’s use of cannabis. More recently, the California Medical Association, the state’s largest doctor group called for legalizing cannabis in the US for medical use in 2011. In April 2013, a broad based group of 250 doctors practicing in the state of Illinois called for legalizing cannabis for the treatment of diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

And, this year the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press polled Americans to find that 77 percent of Americans think that cannabis should be made legal as a medicine to treat sick patients. The study also revealed that 72 percent of Americans think that the federal government spends too much money enforcing cannabis prohibition and that 54 percent of Americans support the full legalization of cannabis for use by American adults for recreational purposes. The poll also found that 60 percent of Americans do not agree with the US Justice Department’s attack on medical cannabis dispensaries that prevent the sick from obtaining prescriptions for medication.

As the Obama administration attempts to distract Americans by invoking the term “science based” it continues to threaten and pursue producers and distributors of medical cannabis. As recently as this week the Obama Justice Department sent letters to landlords who lease commercial space to state approved cannabis dispensaries in San Jose, California threatening forty-year jail sentences and forfeiture of the property of the landowners.

A letter received by one such dispensary in San Jose, as reported by the East Bay Express, made unambiguous threats to a landowner who leases property to a pharmacy, stating; “The office has been advised that there is a marijuana dispensary … operating at the real property located at …, which property you own or have under your management control. The dispensary is operating in violation of federal law, and persons and entities who operate or facilitate the operation of such dispensaries are subject to criminal prosecution and civil enforcement actions.”

The Obama administration’s determination that all illegal substances are addictive and can promote addictive disorders approaches enforcing drug laws with a broad-brush-stroke approach that lumps drastically different substances together for the purpose of streamlining enforcement determinations to save money and which is fundamentally a-scientific at its core. Moreover, the Obama administration’s effort to stamp out the sale and delivery of medicinal cannabis to patients reveals an amoral cynicism; one that holds out hope for the sick while moving to crush distribution networks for the medicine by imposing convoluted analysis of federal tax laws and employing aggressive enforcement to withhold medicine from those who need it.

cross posted at mLaw

Washington State’s highest elected officials and law enforcement officials met with their federal counterparts, US Attorney General Eric Holder and top officials from President Obama’s Justice Department, earlier this week to discuss the state’s program for implementing the will of the public, who late last year voted to legalize cannabis for recreational consumption by adults.

The governor and the state’s attorney general expressed their vision for constructing a statewide system that will allow for the public’s demand that cannabis be legal be actualized and that would make the legal product available in the consumer marketplace.

Attorney General Bob Ferguson told reporters that the intention of the state’s lawmakers and law enforcers is to “move forward in implementing I-502.” Ferguson reportedly conveyed to the federal officials that, “We have assembled a legal team in the Attorney General’s Office, and I have made legal implementation of this initiative a top priority.”

The federal officials, however, did not approach the meeting expressing their honest intent to use their offices to ensure that the ship of state will do all it can to facilitate will of the public. As has been widely reported, Attorney General Holder made no public statement regarding the meeting, and nowhere in the reporting about the meeting did the US Attorney General make any statement whatsoever with respect to the intentions of the federal government to facilitate, encourage, support or cooperate with state authorities in their expressed goal to bring to fruition the will of Washington’s people.

Silence on Holder’s behalf, as identified quite clearly in all reportage of this meeting between honest state authorities (who have a vision to bring the public will to fruition in a rational way that takes serious account of public safety) and dishonest federal officials (who are not interested in the will of the public but are sycophantic to the prison industrial complex and to drug warriors who carry out the bigoted ‘war on drugs’ that imperils public safety) can only indicate that Obama’s justice department’s plan is to go ‘full bore’ in implementing the enforcement scheme that it has used in California: let cannabis be legal but, make it impossible for users, even the sick, to access the legal product.

The editors of mLaw equate the federal government’s aggressive attack on our nation’s sick patients, many of whom have lifelong debilitating diseases that cause unbelievable pain and discomfort, to what has historically taken place with respect to abortion rights in the US.  Politicians, on both the state and federal level, who personally disagree with the will of the people as expressed in court rulings as in the case of abortion rights, have abused their power to limit the ability of pregnant women to be able to access abortion services even though abortion has been a legal medical procedure in the US for 50 years.

Obama’s Justice Department’s cynical and calculated attack on medical marijuana dispensaries in California and elsewhere is as bigoted, small minded, rooted in brute political calculation and, in a word, immoral as the abusive power wielding that anti-abortionist politicians have practiced over a half a century that has led to abortion, a fully legal medical procedure in the US, being unavailable to patients in 98 percent of America’s counties in 2013.

The lack of criminal prosecutions for the vast and coordinated illegality and fraud carried out by financial services companies and the nation’s largest banks that led to the New Depression, and the abandonment of our nation’s cherished legal requirement to afford due process to citizens accused of a crime illustrate that the Obama government has continually demonstrated its fealty to industry and the national security state and shown a predisposition to ignore, abandon and frustrate the will of the people as expressed through the ballot.

We have a Democrat in the white house who has used all of his power and the power of the state to make it impossible for sick Americans to access beneficial medicine, a stance that is anti-science, anti-patient, anti-small-d-democracy, anti-human and at the same time, pro-private prison complex, pro-racist drug war and pro-private drug company profits. In light of Obama’s vigor to make it impossible for sick Americans to access medicine, and, of much less import but still of significance, for adults to use cannabis recreationally, many Americans are now, quite reasonably asking, “who does this jackass work for, anyhow?”

cross posted at mLaw

From the ‘choomer in chief’ straight down to the phony fact peddling Frums of this world, all “reasonable people” are trying their hardest to deflect and project in their “very adult discussions” about how to navigate the turbulent waters caused by adult Americans expressing their opinion that cannabis is safe and the drug war is harmful, bigoted and wrong.  In general, both sides of the political perspective are gung-ho about expressing their “concerns for our children” when someone asks what the feds intend to do now that cannabis is legal in the US for the first time since 1937.

Strangely missing from all legacy parties’ analysis of the citizen’s initiatives in WA and CO are the facts that cannabis is a medicine, that cannabis has never in recorded medical history killed anyone, that one out of every 5 deaths yearly in the US is attributable to cigarettes, and that alcohol is involved in 37% of all traffic deaths among persons aged 16 to 20, and that’s not even getting into the deaths, injuries and lasting psychological trauma caused in families where alcohol is the “approved by Uncle Sam” destructive and debilitating drug of choice.

Whether it is to dry dopers like Obama, whose devious targeting of suppliers serves somehow to polish up his “I’m lookin’ real tough” head-fake to propagandized suburbanites, or it is to paid-off-by-parties-that-are-very-interested-that-cannabis-remains-”not legal”-for recreational-use-by-adults squalkers like Frum, why doesn’t anyone point out in these “on-going serious people” confabs that cannabis is safer than America’s legal drugs (alcohol & tobacco).  These “discussions” seem always to devolve into all “reasonable people” agreeing to use discredited faux statistics (whether medical or…wherever one would guess Frum’s boogie-man-misrepresentations to emanate from) for the purpose of instilling fear in Mr. and Mrs. America about cannabis.

If these fake cogitators (but very real cultural custodians) were to be honest, we would be on the way to rescheduling tobacco and alcohol and opening the doors to Amsterdam style coffee shops in every city in the US, given the fear-mongering lies that they proffer as they wring their hands in the face of Americans deciding, knowing and acknowledging that cannabis is both safer than America’s favorite drugs and is also medicine for sick people here in our country (that’s what the doctors really, really say and think).

How about this question for either the fox-enabled republicans or the dominated-by-a-dry-doper by their last 2 presidents democrats:

“When I grew up, I was told that totalitarian dictatorships are the kind of governments that willfully withhold known medicines from their populations, why does our country keep medicine from sick and suffering Americans?”

…cue crickets

cross posted at the marijuana legalization awareness wiki