Saturday, April 21, 2012

Is Obama's pot promise a pipe dream?

A poster drawing depicting Barack Obama smoking is shown. | Reuters

I’ve been deeply disappointed by Obama’s lies regarding medical marijuana. I’m not the only one that feels that way either.

Obama’s campaign staff is going to face a tough time getting the support back from the cannabis industry and smokers who supported him the first time around.

I’ve written two columns this year addressing Obama’s duplicity when it comes to the subject of Medical Marijuana/War On Drugs:

Border patrol agents, cops declare war against marijuana prohibition  

and,

Growing global movement to legalize drugs faces uphill battle

The following article on the subject came out today:

                              By BYRON TAU

President Barack Obama has turned out to be a real buzzkill.

Back when he was running in 2008, Obama said he supported the “basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs” and that he was “not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws.” He didn’t go farther.

But he also didn’t do anything to dissuade speculation among medical marijuana proponents who took this as a sign that the man headed to the Oval Office was on their side.

Four years later, the raids on drug dispensaries have kept up — despite a Justice Department memo formalizing low-enforcement priority instructions from Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced in a March 2009 press conference that the raids would stop on distributors who were in compliance with state and local law.

Obama never said anything about supporting legalization or decriminalization, but his medical marijuana statements were enough to get him heralded by some in the larger pro-pot community as the best hope for chipping away at the decades-long drug war.

Read the whole story here

No comments:

Post a Comment

Feel free to comment on anything you see and read here. This is an open forum.
Please keep it clean.