To be fair to President-Elect Obama, he never pledged to legalize marijuana. Quite the contrary, during his Presidential campaign he backtracked from his previous comments supporting pot decriminalization, and he even went so far as to pick one of the chief architects of the modern drug war to be his Vice President. In short, to believe that the Obama team would have responded to the legalization question any other way was idealistic at best, and foolish at worst.
Capitol Hill is talking about cannabis, again!
It has been painful from the outside looking in to watch President-elect Barack Obama begin to cobble together his cabinet officers and senior staff in regards to what prospects there are for substantive cannabis law reforms in this first term.
In Massachusetts, where 65 percent of voters mandated an end to minor marijuana possession arrests, police and pundits are already calling on lawmakers to amend — or even repeal — the new law. Therefore, if you reside in Massachusetts, it is critical that you contact your state elected officials, as well as Democrat Gov. Deval Patrick and Attorney General Martha Coakley, and demand that they fully implement the will of 1,938,366 registered voters of the commonwealth of Massachusetts who voted “yes” on 2.
Take California’s Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act, which would require the diversion of certain non-violent offenders to drug treatment and increase funding for state-sponsored rehabilitation programs. The measure seeks to expand upon the alternative sentencing programs initially enacted by Proposition 36, which is estimated to have saved taxpayers some $1.7 billion dollars and reduced the number of people incarcerated for simple drug possession by one-third. So who would oppose this proposal?
For those of you who may not know, even though I’m NORML’s Deputy Director I live in California. Let me tell you that the claim that so-called “pot smoking clubs [are] in every neighborhood” is as false as it is absurd.
Why does NORML work so diligently to provide this information to the general population? We do so, in large part, because we know that our politicians opponents — including many members of the before-mentioned groups — have no qualms lying about pot in order to stifle our reform efforts. We also know that the mainstream media rarely takes the time or effort to challenge their disinformation.
Today there is a whole universe of information on the subject of marijuana that is brand-new since the Shafer Commission last studied marijuana in the 1970’s. The information then available lead Nixon’s own handpicked commission come to a surprising conclusion: they recommended no legal penalties for adults possessing up 100 grams of marijuana.