The reason why the editor of Foreign Policy magazine Moises Naim’s recent column is significant is because for far too long the foreign policy community has been a willing conduit for exporting America’s wrongheaded and failed cannabis prohibition around the globe.
Remember this statement from our Drug Czar that “legalization” is not in the president’s vocabulary, nor in his own?
In the coming days, legislators in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Montana will hold hearings and/or votes on significant marijuana reform measures. On Tuesday, March 10, members of the Montana House Judiciary Committee will hear testimony in favor of House Bill 541, which seeks to reduce marijuana possession penalties to a $100 fine! Want to see this proposal become law? Then consider sending and e-mail or getting on the phone.
It is hard to imagine liberal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and conservative Minority Leader John Boehner as soul mates on any discernible level, however, on the issue of marijuana law reform, for entirely different reasons, they’re two peas in a pod.
Since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, despite the government’s best, but utterly feckless efforts to suppress cannabis culture and use in America, the ‘buzz’ in Washington D.C. and nationwide these days about alternatives to cannabis prohibition is palpable.
If these are Mr. Goddard’s genuine concerns then he should consider joining NORML’s staff on a ‘fact finding’ mission to Amsterdam to see how readily cannabis can be distributed to adults for responsible use and his staff should download and read NORML’s drugged driving information and recommendations.
Nevertheless, the marijuana community is guardedly optimistic. “Reformers will probably be disappointed that Obama is not going to go as far as they want, but we’re probably not going to continue this mindless path of prohibition,” NORML executive director Allen St. Pierre tells me.
Some of Obama’s biggest financial donors are friends of the legalization movement, St. Pierre notes.
Obama, it seemed, was the right politician to take an executive hammer to the cracked marble pillars of America’s disastrous war on drugs. Throughout the primaries and general election, Obama gently encouraged these hopes by advocating commonsense drug-policy reforms. He criticized federal paramilitary raids on state-sanctioned greenhouses and called for ending racist discrepancies in cocaine sentencing laws.