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Hey Obama, those potheads have a point
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It's a little depressing that the top question asked of President Obama during yesterday's virtual town hall had to do with legalizing marijuana. Obama gamely answered it, though, first by poking fun at the questioners ("I don’t know what this says about the online audience") and then saying he didn't think legalization was a good way to help the economy.
Twitterers were upset, though, according to the Christian Science Monitor. (Pretty sure I know what that says about Twitterers.) Responses ran along the vein of this one, from @frekur: "Honestly? Obama is disappointing … me right now. Made a joke out of marijuana, and dismissed entirely universal healthcare."
Make fun of tokers all you want -- I frequently do -- but there's a serious point to be made here.
To say that the war on drugs is a failure is an understatement when you factor in all the innocent blood shed and lives lost in this pointless fight. Americans are finally waking up to the damages south of our border, mainly because of the very real threat it poses to border states. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the first major American politician to acknowledge our role in this failure.
"Clearly what we've been doing has not worked," Clinton said at the start of a two-day trip to Mexico. "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians."
A report from the EU for a U.N. conference on drug policy earlier this month found that drugs have become even cheaper in the West and that there was "no evidence that the global drug problem has been reduced during the period from 1998 to 2007."
Few dispute the damage narcotics cause. But as the saying goes, if what we're doing isn't working it's insane to keep doing it in the hope that it will. According to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, production of cocaine and opium hasn't changed from a decade ago, while production of marijuana has grown. Cocaine use in the States is down, but is higher than it was in the 1990s. Meanwhile, cocaine use is on the rise in Europe, according to an Economist analysis.
That a publication as conservative and staid as the Economist advocates legalizing drugs as "the least bad option" should be a wake-up call. Legalization of hard narcotics like heroin or cocaine will almost certainly never happen in the United States, at least in our lifetimes, for political reasons mostly. Since drugs and drug violence disproportionately affect the disenfranchised, there's little incentive for those who walk the halls of Congress to take radical steps to change drug policy.
But if there's ever been a shot at rational drug policy reform, it's now. Barack Obama is the first president in recent memory to have understood that the bifurcated state of the capital he lives in -- one half white and powerful, the other half black or brown and poor -- should not stand. When TV anchors wonder aloud whether the chaos in Mexico could happen here, they should just drive all the way through D.C. It's already happening here.
That the nation is once again being governed from the cities after eight years of rural rule is a good and hopeful thing. One of Obama's campaign pledges was to shift the focus from lockup to treatment for drug offenders. Considering the makeup of Congress, that's suddenly become possible. The easiest thing to get done -- legalizing medical marijuana -- is already getting done. Obama's decision to quit going after medical pot facilities in states where they're legal has opened the door for other states like New Hampshire and New Jersey to start the process of legalization. That's a good start.
More difficult to realize will be the steps advocated by the Economist:
"Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned."
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley summed up the opposition to legalization last week when he complained, "Marijuana is a gateway to higher drugs."
Please. Marijuana is a gateway to Cheetos consumption. Thankfully, the issue of medical marijuana will soon be a non-starter, as those who oppose its use by cancer patients are generally older. And even under the Bush administration the government relaxed its drug policies for new hires. So: Hope. And maybe even Change, someday.
To better understand where our drug policies went wrong, this must-read 2007 Rolling Stone piece from Ben Wallace-Wells should suffice.
[UPDATE] Looks like Change is on the way: Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., are fronting prison reform legislation that includes an overhaul of U.S. drug policy.
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