Pubdate: Mon, 17 Dec 2012
Source: Tribune Star (Terre Haute, IN)
Copyright: 2012 Creators Syndicate
Contact:  http://www.tribstar.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/448
Author: Froma Harrop
Note: Froma Harrop writes for Creators Syndicate.
Page: A8

CRASHING FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S HYPOCRISY ON MARIJUANA

Ah, the great American West, where man can generally breathe free and 
also inhale - woman, too. Thank you, thank you, voters in Colorado 
and Washington state, for legalizing marijuana. But will Washington, 
D.C., leave you alone? Attorney General Eric Holder said this week 
that the Justice Department will weigh its response to the state referenda.

A new national poll finds 58 percent of Americans in favor of making 
marijuana legal and only 39 percent against. A raft of other state 
laws easing the prohibition on pot and growing public contempt for 
the existing law should be enough to change the policy. And so should 
a basic sense of decency.

We persecute ordinary Americans for using an illegal drug smoked by 
the last three inhabitants of the White House. President Obama 
admitted - and George W. Bush all but admitted - to having 
experimented (don't you love the word "experimented"?) not only with 
pot, but with cocaine.

Courts rarely inflict heavy prison terms on users of marijuana these 
days, Tony Ryan, a retired lieutenant from the Denver Police 
Department, told me, "but it's still a drug arrest, so if you're 18 
years and older, it goes on your record."

That means you may not be able to get a job at a steel plant, join 
the Navy, obtain a student loan or keep your child in a custody 
battle. But wide knowledge that you smoked pot is apparently not 
enough to stop you from becoming commander in chief of the United 
States Armed Forces.

Ryan is on the board of a group called Law Enforcement Against 
Prohibition - former police and other law officers calling for the 
end to the War on Drugs. A Denver cop for 36 years, he's intrigued at 
what the Obama administration will do next. In Colorado, the feds 
decided to mostly leave medical marijuana alone. But to flex their 
muscles, they started picking on medical marijuana dispensaries 
within 1,000 feet of schools.

"I said, OK, what high school student is going to go to convince a 
doctor under threat of losing his license that he is ill and needs to 
have medical marijuana," Ryan commented, "when he can just walk down 
the halls of the school and get whatever he wants?"

In 2008, candidate Obama said he would not use Justice Department 
resources to frustrate state laws allowing medical marijuana. But 
President Obama did just that, even letting attorneys general 
threaten government employees at staterun medical marijuana facilities.

Ignoring the scientific evidence, the feds deem marijuana a dangerous 
substance that allegedly acts as a "gateway" to harder drugs. The 
political reality is that legalizing marijuana is a gateway to ending 
the ludicrous War on Drugs - a $40 billion-a-year failure off which 
many Americans find employment. Last year, 80 percent of the federal 
Drug Enforcement Administration's seizures were of marijuana. If 
marijuana were legalized, what would those agents, lawyers, judges 
and prison guards keeping us safe from marijuana do?

Oddly, liberal Democrats seem more afraid of letting go of the ban on 
marijuana than libertarian Republicans and even some social 
conservatives. (Evangelist Pat Robertson says it ruins the lives of 
too many young people.) In the Colorado vote, former Rep. Tom 
Tancredo, a hard-right Republican, supported the constitutional 
amendment regulating marijuana like alcohol, and Democratic Gov. John 
Hickenlooper opposed it. To his credit, Hickenlooper subsequently 
declared the amendment official and put a legalization advocate on 
the committee setting up a regulatory process.

The successful ballot measures in Colorado and Washington give the 
Obama administration another opportunity to find its bearings and 
stop throwing billions down the hole of marijuana prohibition. That 
money could be put elsewhere, so we're told.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom