Dictionaries for Drug Czar Kerlikowske - click here to donate online to NORML and we'll remind Director Kerlikowske and President Obama that "legalization" needs to be in their vocabularies.

Remember this statement from our Drug Czar that “legalization” is not in the president’s vocabulary, nor in his own?

Numerous writers in the blogosphere (including me) said, “Somebody get Gil a dictionary!” So we decided here at NORML to launch the official “Dictionaries for the Drug Czar” Campaign.  Here’s how you can participate:

Dictionaries for the Drug Czar Campaign

1. Go to your local discount store and buy a cheap pocket dictionary.
2. Find legalization inside and mark it with a yellow highlighter and a Post-It® or paper-clip on that page
3. Mail that dictionary to the Drug Czar at the address below.

Cheaper Option:

1. Buy a postcard.
2. On the postcard write: “Director Kerlikowske, here is a new word for your vocabulary: le·gal·i·za·tion (noun): the act of authorizing something previously illegal.”
3. Mail that postcard to the Drug Czar at the address below.

Cheap and simple no-mail option:

1. Click that graphic up above to donate online to NORML.
2. Fill in the boldfaced fields.
3. Click the “Comments (Add any group affiliation here)”.
4. Enter “Dictionary for the Drug Czar” in that line.

MAIL YOUR DICTIONARIES AND POST CARDS TO:

Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)
Executive Office of the President (EOP)
Attn: Director Gil Kerlikowske
Washington, DC 20503

Over the past few weeks, an unprecedented number of you have used NORML’s Capwiz tools to write your legislators in support of pending marijuana law reform in your state. In fact, so far this week more than 2,500 of you have taken the time to e-mail your elected officials! And while this tally is impressive — and your actions are making a political difference — think about this:

Did you know that each time a legislator hears from a constituent, they count it as representing much more than that one person’s opinion? The numbers below illustrate just how much of a difference you can make by sending an e-mail, writing a letter, or placing a call.

one e-mail represents 100 people

one letter represents 500 people

one phone call represents 500 people

one personal visit represents 1000 people

In other words, the 2,500 e-mails (and counting) generated this week represent the public opinion of 250,000! And those 8,500 e-mails generated by NORML supporters in February represent the public opinion of 850,000 Americans!

Is it any wonder that legislators in Montana, New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota have all voted in favor marijuana law reform in just the past few days? Politicians in those states heard from you — and they received the message loud and clear. And they have responded!

With this kind of strong showing of support, how could they not have?

Of course, now is hardly the time to rest on our collective laurels. In fact, now is the time to step up our efforts and make our voices heard at an even higher decibel!

If you haven’t written your state elected officials, now is the time to visit NORML’s Action Alert page and do so. If you have already written your state senator and representative, why not pick up the phone today and give them a personal phone call? Or even better, if legislation is currently pending before a Committee in your state, take time out to call the Chairperson of that Committee and urge him or her to support sensible marijuana law reform. Need contact information? You can find it all here.

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.

In the fifteen years I’ve been with NORML, I’ve never witnessed legislators more responsive to enacting common sense pot law reform than right now. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t need to hear from you.

So keep up the pressure and act now! Changes are on the horizon, and your efforts are helping to make them a reality.

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.

Shortly after the conclusion of this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, NORML’s Deputy Director Paul Armentano posted a blog highlighting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) comments exhorting the public to take the lead on communicating with their elected policymakers regarding any desired major marijuana law reforms in the upcoming 111th Congress.

With that call to action in the minds of many, American voters elected Democrats into workable majorities in both chambers and elected Barack ‘Change’ Obama—while voters in both Massachusetts and Michigan voted in strong favor for ‘change’ regarding their states’ antiquated marijuana laws—when given the chance and medium to express their viewpoint regarding what other ‘changes’ are on the American peoples’ minds, since the mid 1990s and despite strong, bias media opposition, marijuana law reform has emerged as a major policy change sought by the American public.

House Speaker Pelosi supports medical access to marijuana. That is not in question. However, it is not known whether she publicly endorses decriminalizing marijuana, but, as a longtime representative in the House from San Francisco, she likely supports California laws regarding marijuana, notably the state’s long time decriminalization laws for personal, adult use.

Does she have the power to move medical marijuana through the Congress? Yes, likely she does. Is she going to expend the kind of political capital needed so early in the 111th Congress and this ‘New Dealish’ presidency to accomplish this? I don’t believe so.

Well now, to make matters worse, we have the Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner (R-OH), appearing

Full Story

Capitol Hill Cannabis Law Reform Lobby Highlighted

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.

One interesting tea leaf for me to gather in this evolution towards cannabis law reforms at the national level is to see otherwise staid, Capitol Hill-based print publications such as The Hill and most recently Roll Call taking interest in the cannabis law reform lobby’s efforts in Washington—after decades of ignoring us.

Is real change afoot here as indicated by these mainstream, political publications casting needed public and political attention towards NORML’s nearly 40-years of grassroots advocacy?

Time, and increased public efforts by reformers, will tell…

Read a scanned version of Roll Call’s ‘Vested Interests’ article, here.

When responding to media questions directed at him last Tuesday in regards to a big cannabis smuggling ring being taken down by local law enforcement, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard (D) either delivered a gaffe (i.e., a politician saying something they believe to be true but didn’t mean to reveal publicly…) or is amenable to alternatives to cannabis prohibition laws. If the latter, Mr. Goddard has immediately arrived on NORML’s radar scope.

Full Story

Esquire contacted NORML as well this week curious about what appears to be an opportune time for cannabis law reformers at the nascent stages of the new Obama administration. Below is Esquire’s John Richardson’s take on these interesting and active times in cannabis law reform.

-Allen St. Pierre, Director, NORML

The stoner community is clamoring to say it: “Yes we cannabis!” Turns out, with several drug-war veterans close to the president-elect’s ear, insiders think reform could come in Obama’s second term — or sooner

———-
Writer-at-large John H. Richardson’s column, “The Richardson Report,” runs each Tuesday.
———-

Why Obama Really Might Decriminalize Marijuana

Famously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the United States banking system during the first seven days of his first term.

And what did he do on the eighth day? “I think this would be a good time for beer,” he said.

Congress had already repealed Prohibition, pending ratification from the states. But the people needed a lift, and legalizing beer would create a million jobs. And lo, booze was back. Two days after the bill passed, Milwaukee brewers hired six hundred people and paid their first $10 million in taxes. Soon the auto industry was tooling up the first $12 million worth of delivery trucks, and brewers were pouring tens of millions into new plants.

“Roosevelt’s move to legalize beer had the effect he intended,” says Adam Cohen, author of Nothing To Fear, a thrilling new history of FDR’s first hundred days. “It was, one journalist observed, ‘like a stick of dynamite into a log jam.’”

Many in the marijuana world are now hoping for something similar from Barack Obama. After all, the president-elect said in 2004 that the war on drugs had been “an utter failure” and that America should decriminalize pot (watch video here).

In July, Obama told Rolling Stone that he believed in “shifting the paradigm” to a public-health approach: “I would start with nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives — it’s expensive, it’s counterproductive, and it doesn’t make sense.”

Meanwhile, economists have been making the beer argument. In a paper titled “Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition,” Dr. Jeffrey Miron of Harvard argues that legalized marijuana would generate between $10 and $14 billion in savings and taxes every year — conclusions endorsed by 300 top economists, including Milton “Free Market” Friedman himself.

And two weeks ago, when the Obama team asked the public to vote on the top problems facing America, this was the public’s No. 1 question: “Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?”

But alas, the answer from Camp Obama was — as it has been for years — a flat one-liner: “President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.” And at least two of Obama’s top people are drug-war supporters: Rahm Emanuel has been a long-time enemy of reform, and Joe Biden is a drug-war mainstay who helped create the position of “drug czar.”

Meanwhile, in 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, 782,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana-related crimes (90 percent of them for possession), with approximately 60,000 to 85,000 of them serving sentences in jail or prison. It’s the continuation of an unnecessary stream of suffering that now has taught generations of Americans just how capricious their government can be. The irony is that the preference for “decriminalization” over legalization actually supports the continued existence of criminal drug mafias.

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. “Frankly, George Soros, Peter Lewis, and John Sperling — this triumvirate of billionaires — if those three men, who put up $50 to $60 million to get Democrats and Obama elected, can’t pick up the phone and actually get a one-to-one meeting on where this drug policy is going, then maybe it’s true that when you give money, you don’t expect favors.”

Another member of that moneyed group: Marsha Rosenbaum, the former head of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, who quit last year to become a fundraiser for Obama and “bundled” an impressive $204,000 for his campaign. She said that based on what she hears from inside the transition team, she expects Obama to play it very safe. “He said at one point that he’s not going to use any political capital with this — that’s a concern,” Rosenbaum tells me. And the Path to Change will probably have to pass through the Valley of Studies and Reports. “I’m hoping that what the administration will do,” she says, “is something this country hasn’t done since 1971, which is to undertake a presidential commission to look at drug policy, convene a group of blue-ribbon experts to look at the issue, and make recommendations.”

But ultimately, Rosenbaum remains confident that those recommendations would call for an end to the drug war. “Once everything settles down in the second term, we have a shot at seeing some real reform.”

Still, a certain paranoia prevails. Rumors about Obama’s choice for drug czar have lingered on Republican Congressman Jim Ramstad. “He’s been a standard anti-drug warrior for the whole time he’s been in Congress,” says St. Pierre. Another possibility is Atlanta police chief Richard Pennington, who raises fears in the legalization community of more of the same law-enforcement model. Another prospect stirring the pothead waters is Dr. Don Vereen, the chief drug policy thinker on the transition team. “He’s really a believer in prohibition and he can excite an audience,” says Rosenbaum, who says a friend on the transition team refused to hint at final contenders for the drug czar pick. “I’m joking with him, ‘I’m going to have to open up the New York Times for this, aren’t I?’” His answer: “We’re going to send out smoke signals.”

More and more journalists and columnists are starting to read into the tea leaves and seeing signs of generational change seemingly embodied in the incoming White House administration. A prime example is found today at AlterNet, in a well written column by Alexander Zaitchik that, like NORML’s staff, seeks balance between an undeniable enthusiasm for the potential of substantive changes in cannabis laws under a more enlightened and science-based Obama administration and the stark reality of the collective histories of many of his important cabinet members opposing cannabis law reforms–even for medical access and industrial purposes.

-Allen St. Pierre, Director, NORML

If Obama Is Pro-Science and Honest, He’ll Put the Kibosh on the Drug War

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet

Posted on December 23, 2008

One of the many things that made Barack Obama such a refreshing candidate was his frank and unapologetic admission of drug use. True, Anderson Cooper extracted curt “yeses” from some 2004 Democratic candidates when he asked them point-blank if they had ever smoked pot. But Obama has written openly and without prompting about his experiences, not only with marijuana, but cocaine, a “hard” drug. On the campaign trail he even joked about inhaling deeply — “that was the point,” he said more than once. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama didn’t hide behind evasive murmurs about “irresponsible behavior,” or turn his drug experiences into a setup for some maudlin born-again conversion story.

As recounted in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama was a normal American kid. Which is to say he used drugs, had fun and survived. The book doesn’t romanticize the president-elect’s days of smoking pot and snorting “a little blow when [he] could afford it,” but it’s easy to take what details he provides and imagine him with his basketball buddies on some Oahu beach blazing bowls of Maui Wowie, alternately laughing until his guts hurt and sitting in quiet wonder before a magnificent pink-and-yellow Pacific sunset. Obama has even written about his pursuit of heroin’s moon-shot high. As a teenager, he went so far as to ask a junkie friend for an assisted first hit, but recoiled when presented in a deli freezer with the surgical tools of the mainliner’s trade: rubber tubing and second-hand syringe.

Partly because Obama was so reasonable and matter-of-fact about his own All-American experiences getting high, drug-policy reformers were among those most excited by his candidacy. If any aspect of America needs change, it is the country’s prohibitionist and punitive approach to drugs and drug use. 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. (As a little-mentioned footnote to the first of these positions, Obama’s mother died from cancer five years before the Hawaii legislature legalized medical marijuana.)

Nobody expected Obama to tap Tommy Chong to run the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But maybe, just maybe, Obama would have the political courage to publicly acknowledge what an emerging majority of Americans now grasps: that the war on drugs is a failure, that it is unjust, and that it is an epic waste of law-enforcement time and resources.

Full Story

Is saving the Drug Czar nominee as the last cabinet pick indicative of the low priority assigned by the incoming Obama administration to the so-called ‘war on drugs’?

With the entire cabinet nominated (save for US Ambassador to the United Nations and director of the Central Intelligence Agency), who is President–elect Obama going to nominate as director of the Office Of National Drug Control Policy (a.k.a. ‘Drug Czar’).

To date, Obama and Co. have prioritized the cabinet nominations of:

Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Secretary of Interior, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Environmental Protection Agency, Secretary of Veteran Affairs, National Security Adviser, Director of National Intelligence, Director of National Economic Council, Director of Securities and Exchange Commission, US Trade Representative and Director of Office of Management and Budget.

But no Drug Czar (or Czarina)!

Obama told the media yesterday that his entire cabinet would be nominated before he is to begin his last semi-sane holiday break this week with his family. But as of 10AM this morning (eastern), there has been no nominee announced for ‘Drug Czar’.

Hmmmmm. One wonders why not?

Looks like one reputed nominee for Drug Czar, retiring Republican congressman Jim Ramstad of Minnesota is getting hung up in the political vetting process. Some in the media and in drug policy reform inform NORML that Atlanta police chief Richard J. Pennington might emerge as the potential nominee. Some speculate that current Drug Czar transition team leader, Dr. Don Vereen, might pull a ‘Cheney’ and offer himself up as the best person to head the ONDCP.

Whatever the case and whomever the nominee, is the ONDCP nominee and their staff going to closely adhere to Obama’s stated goal that health (and environmental) policy-making in his administration, unlike the current Bush White House, will be guided by contemporary and credible science—and not ideology or politics?

In Obama’s now weekly radio address, he asserted this morning that science and rational thinking is going to instruct much of his decision-making in the realms of education, public health and environmental protection. To demonstrate such, this morning Obama nominated two prominent scientists—not political hacks—to fill important science policy-making roles in his new administration (Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

“Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient - especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States.”
-President-elect Barack Obama (December 20, 2008)

NORML certainly hopes that Obama’s professed support for science over political ideology logically extends to repairing and overhauling the country’s totally flawed and decidedly unscientific approach in administering a functional and economical criminal justice system—fueled in large part by antiquated and misguided illicit drug laws, notably the abject failure of 70 plus years of cannabis prohibition laws.

In the interim, please join me (and thousands of other drug policy reform supporters), with a bit-of-tongue-in-cheek, in advancing Drug Policy Alliance director Ethan Nadelmann, Ph.D as Obama’s next Drug Czar. Now that is change I can believe in!

Who President-elect Obama nominates for Drug Czar I believe will strongly demonstrate whether or not he genuinely believes in science as a guiding principle in replacing failed, feckless, racist and politically expedient law enforcement efforts to ‘control’ drugs with, ultimately, effective, commonsense, scientific and public health-based alternatives to America’s failed war on some drugs.

The website of President-Elect Barack Obama, www.change.gov, has added a new feature that allows visitors to submit and vote on specific public policy questions. Not surprisingly, over 130 separate questions have already been added to the site demanding the incoming administration to reform America’s failed marijuana laws.

Of these, one of the most widely voted on questions for Obama is: “Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?”

So far, votes are running more than 2 to 1 in support of legalizing marijuana. Pete Guither over at drugwarrant (Thanks for the tip!) reports that the question ranks in the top 30 of all questions submitted to the Obama website.

If you haven’t done so already, considering logging on to the website at:

http://change.gov/page/content/openforquestions

Type “marijuana” in the search questions box and tell the incoming administration to enact sensible marijuana law reform, including: ending the federal raids on state-authorized medical marijuana patients, and taxing and regulating the personal use of marijuana by adults.

Please note: Change.gov is not affiliated with the website Change.org, which is also accepting votes whether the new administration should “legalize the medicinal and recreational use of marijuana.” (Be patient; page is slow to download.) As I noted yesterday on NORML’s blog, cannabis legalization is the is the top vote-getter of all criminal justice related questions on the site, which intends to present the top 10 ideas to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day.

As the old saying goes, “Things are starting to get very interesting…”

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.

There are only a couple of key appointments left that may signal the political tea leafs for cannabis law reforms in Obama 1.0 — head of Drug Enforcement Administration (which serves under the Attorney General at the Department of Justice) and the Drug Czar (see below regarding rumored nominee).

Who among current Obama nominees are giving me some acid burn?

In order of importance:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel

“For us regarding opposing drugs and any reforms, it is: harms criminal justice; children; the pharmaceutical process and the legalization stalking horse.” -R.E., 1997

As a longtime observer of Rahm’s ascendancy into the stratosphere of politics (Chicago Mayor Daley’ staff, President Clinton’s White House, Congress, and now back to the White as Chief of Staff) what has me most concerned about Rahm is that for so long he has been so consistent in opposing drug policy reforms, most especially cannabis law reforms. In the Clinton White House he played a major role in domestic policy making, with a strong nod to matters of criminal justice. He was effectively the White House’s point man with the Drug Czar. In my view, Rahm was not concerned with effective policy-making as much as image making, so as to help inoculate the President (and Democrats) from the historical albatross hanging from their necks during most national elections—fear of being viewed by the Republicans, and more importantly the general public, as being ‘weak on crime’.

To put it bluntly, Bill Clinton and Al Gore lied their way up and down the countryside running for the Oval office in the summer of 1992, promising liberal donors, gay activists and drug policy reformers that if elected, at a minimum, they would expand the federal government’s Compassionate Investigative New Drug Program (a.k.a. IND, run by the Public Health Service), which allowed for a small handful of federally-approved medical patients to receive up to 300 ‘joints’ per/month for a serious medical condition.

When Clinton and Gore took office in 1993, they immediately felt the political pressure from state politicians, major gay donors and activists, notably from California, who’d impressed upon Clinton the need for medical cannabis for AIDS and cancer patients.

However, and disappointingly, rather than expand the important research program, Rahm and Co. moved to dismantle it, and by late July 1994 Clinton had canceled the IND program, grandfathering the group of eight patients in the program a columnist at the Washington Post deemed the Acapulco Eight.

Taking a far more politically pragmatic path than a compassionate one, Rahm chose to ignore the science (and the Constitution I’d hastily add) and conflate the somewhat easy to distinguish and politically popular battle for patients to access medicinal cannabis with the decidedly unpopular ‘War on Some Drugs’.

In the spring of 1997, a writer and author who interviewed Rahm for a major Rolling Stone piece on the ‘Drug War’, after he’d walked the 3 blocks from Rahm’s White House office to NORML’s K St. office, kindly shared with me his three pages of shorthand notes. The writer, who’d spent a few days in DC interviewing all of the major players in drug enforcement and drug policy reform had wanted to get an interview with Rahm, because absent the President, there was likely no other person in the nation at the time who had more sway over which way the Executive branch implemented drug control strategies.

When I asked, “Well, how was the interview, where does Emanuel stand on the issue of marijuana?” The writer looked up from his notes and said, “NORML is so screwed. In Emanuel you have the prototypical liberal drug warrior: More government intervention, more laws, more arrests; less freedom and personal responsibility.”

What do these notes reveal from 1997?

When asked why did the Clinton Administration so actively oppose the 1996 ballot initiatives in California (and Arizona) to legalize medical access to cannabis, Rahm’s replies:

-We opposed the Arizona initiative because it had to with sentencing and harder drugs;

-We opposed the California initiative because it sent the wrong message to children and we believe that there is downward trend in use right now that these laws will hurt; send wrong message.

-This procedure should not be done by initiative. We have procedures whereby drugs are tested and approved. These initiatives don’t follow those procedures.

-We took an unpopular position on this. Our position is based on policy even if polls are going the other way.

When asked ‘what makes Clinton’s drug policy any better than George Bush. Sr.’s?’, Rahm’s replies:

-We have passed anti-meth legislation before meth has taken off nationally. Law enforcement are telling me that we got ahead of it.

-Our four points for control: drug testing, drug treatment, coerced abstinence works and if the states want the money for prisons they have to adopt what is proven successful.

-Some members of Congress want to defund the ONDCP, but General McCaffrey is different, brings energy and focus to the job.

-We [Clinton Administration] shifted resources from borders to domestic, community policing and drug free school efforts.

-There is nowhere near enough treatment space for the demand.

-This is about attitude and putting federal dollars to work.

When asked about medical marijuana community (doctors, patients, AIDS and drug policy reform organizations), Rahm slapped his head with his hand and said…

-“We oppose it [cannabis] because there is no doubt that the funding comes from those who advocate legalization. We thought this was the first of many battles and needed to fight.”

When asked about the high number of annual cannabis arrests in the US, Rahm said:

-“I’ve never heard of a police chief who says they waste their time on small time marijuana arrests. I would be surprised if very many people are being arrested for small marijuana possession.”

Further, “For us regarding opposing drugs and any reforms, it is: harms criminal justice; children; the pharmaceutical process and the legalization stalking horse.”

-“I think there is a sadder side to all of this that McCaffrey has spoken eloquently about how people who have used drugs in the past should not be disqualified or attack for their pasts.”

Regarding “marijuana”:

-“Yes, we believe it is a genuinely dangerous drug when it comes to kids. I’ll show you data after data that kids who go onto to harder drugs started off with marijuana.”

-“Laws signal acceptability or not. In this area we say its unlawful and we think that it helps parents say this is wrong.”

Whew. Well, there you have it, from NORML’s huge archives and directly from the writer’s notebook circa spring 1997. A couple of closing thoughts on Rahm and his views on cannabis…

Tactical and political savvy as Rahm clearly is, history proves the decisions President Clinton and he made regarding medical cannabis (and decriminalization) were demonstrably wrong. Rather than yield any quarter or embrace science, compassion and the Constitution in being so rigid and recalcitrant on the public health/criminal justice conundrum of medicinal cannabis, Rahm actually helped accelerate, not retard, the state-based strategy of reformers. From 1996-2000, the Clinton Administration failed to stop grassroots efforts to pass state initiatives or legislation in eight states that ‘legalized’ medical cannabis (Bush 2.0 and his Drug Czar John Walters have not faired much better opposing state medical marijuana laws, save for prevailing in the US Supreme Court twice, in 2001 and 2005. Though, despite the ‘high’ court’s adverse rulings in these cases, the number of medical cannabis dispensaries, cooperatives and even automated medical cannabis machines have steadily increased. If reformers lost at SCOTUS, functionally, what did we actually lose? My contention is not much as the court’s rulings don’t reflect the current political, public health and economic realities facing the respectable minority of Americans who, regardless of their state’s laws, currently employ cannabis as a therapeutic, often with their physician’s recommendation. Reminds one of prior SCOTUS rulings in our nation’s past regarding race, labor laws, women’s rights, internment of Japanese Americans, gay and lesbian equality and sexual reproduction laws where society (and often technology) is leagues ahead of legislation, and ensuing appellate court action–both of which move at a glacial rate (unless of course there is multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-funded ‘bailout’ to be performed, then federal legislative and court action is performed post haste).

Emanuel’s new boss, and admitted past cannabis consumer President-elect Obama has repeatedly indicated that he does not support the use of federal law enforcement to harass medical cannabis dispensaries in states that have approved medical marijuana laws; Obama historically supported decriminalizing small amounts of cannabis (until the end of the contentious Democratic primaries this spring where Obama ‘flipped-flopped’ on the issue, and now claims to oppose the decriminalization of cannabis) and believes that far too many young people are ensnared in an unwieldy and expensive criminal justice system.

Rahm is politically smart if nothing else, so I hope that he’ll follow his boss’ lead in the area of criminal justice reforms. Also, to his credit, after voting years against the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment, in 2007, as member of Congress from Illinois, Rahm voted in favor of holding back federal funding from law enforcement (read DEA) to raid or harass medical marijuana cultivators and dispensaries.

Interestingly, and I don’t think a coincidence, from 2005 forward Illinois’ state legislature has held hearings on medical marijuana and prominent (and compelling) cases like medical marijuana patient Brenda Kratovil have been featured all over the major news media in the state. My supposition is that Rahm, in fact a smart, keenly attuned politician, only came to support clipping the DEA’s wings regarding medical marijuana raids on the west coast after paying close political attention to how citizens in his state—along with its editorial boards and prominent columnists—readily support seriously ill, dying or sense threatened medical patients with a physician’s recommendation to access cannabis.

However, I fear that Rahm will continue to advocate for a politically cautious (I’d say paranoid) path regarding cannabis law reforms; is prone to engage in the most oft-trotted out, and easily deflated, myths and canards about cannabis; and will be too centrist and deferential to law enforcement for political expediency sake.

I just hope his boss and can talk him out of it. If not his new boss, maybe he should listen to his old boss, Bill Clinton, who has acknowledged that he was wrong to oppose harm reduction tenets: cannabis decriminalization and needle exchange efforts.

Attorney General Nominee Eric Holder

Much has been written and fretted about in the last few days about Obama’s pick to be the nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General nominee Eric Holder.
There are excellent and probing commentary penned regarding what prospects for criminal justice policy reforms the appointment of Holder portends.

My remarks to Reason’s excellent ‘Hit and Run’ Blog:

“NORML has serious concerns about the choice of Eric Holder as the next Attorney General because he has a long history of opposing drug policy reforms, perceiving cannabis smoking by adults as a public nuisance worthy of constant harrassment, promoting violent governmental intervention into the private lives of citizens who consume cannabis, supporting mandatory minimum sentencing and so-called civil forfeiture laws.

His attraction to the myth of ‘fixing broken windows’ and using law enforcement to crack down on petty crimes will swell an already overburdened, bloated, expensive and failed government prohibition against otherwise law-abiding citizens who choose to consume cannabis.”

Vice-President Joe Biden

The pick of Joe Biden to be Obama’s running mate was my first sign of digestive tumult regarding the prospect of ‘CHANGE’ for drug policy reform. Suffice of to say here, because it was already said here, that Biden represents the decade and type of ‘liberal’ politician in the 1980s, who, rather than oppose the Reagan-inspired War on Some Drugs, decided to become an enthusiastic supporter and legislative booster. Biden was at the center of creating the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), mandatory minimum sentencing, civil forfeiture laws, the Rave Act, funding for DARE in public schools and the ad campaigns for the Partnership for a Drug Free America.

When asked in Connecticut this past May of pain management, Biden exhorted that “There’s got to be a better answer than marijuana.”

With Biden (and Emanuel) loyally by his side, from a purely political point of view, Obama (like a fellow Baby Boomer-type Bill Clinton before him) has wisely guarded against right wing attacks that he may be ‘soft on drugs’.

ONDCP Transition Team Director Dr. Don Vereen
As amazingly as it seems to most who come to know that the ONDCP is a cabinet level office (Thanks Joe Biden!), all cabinet level offices need an official transition team. So who is heading up the ONDCP transitional team? One of the principals is Don Vereen, a former ONDCP deputy director from 1998-2001.

Is Vereen a reform-minded health care professional and ready to embrace ‘change’?

Unlikely in my view as Vereen told the Psychiatric News in 1999 that he believed that doctors who prescribe marijuana as irresponsible and actually advocated arresting medical patients caught with marijuana. Yikes!

Vereen, like Emanuel (and so many other selective prohibitionists), has adopted the same rote cited rationalizations why cannabis can’t be legally controlled and taxed like thousands of pharmaceuticals currently: marijuana can’t be thought of as a therapeutic treatment because it’s usually smoked and because dosages are difficult to control.

Also, Vereen was on the losing side this past Election Day in Michigan where, in his capacity as director of Community Based Public Health at Univ. of Michigan, he claimed that a medical marijuana initiative ‘sends the wrong message to children’.

These folks sure do stick to the same talking points….I hope Vereen doesn’t pull a Cheney here and conclude that he is the best person for the job.

Former Congressman James Ramstad for Drug Czar?

As one of my favorite policy writers and commentators Maia Szalavitz aptly points out in her November 21 Huffington Post article regarding Ramstad:

On paper, Jim Ramstad — who is rumored to be Obama’s choice for drug czar — looks like the ideal man for the job . He’s a recovering alcoholic himself and a Congressman who championed legislation recently passed to provide equal insurance coverage for addictions and other mental illnesses.

Unfortunately, Ramstad may be a drug warrior in recovering person’s clothing. There is one issue that has consistently separated those who put science and saving lives in front of politics. That is needle exchange programs for addicts to prevent the spread of HIV and other blood borne illnesses.

Even President Clinton now says he was “wrong” when he ignored the recommendations of every scientific and medical organization in the world that has examined the question — from the AMA to the World Health Organization — and refused to lift the federal ban on funding.

Needle exchanges have been shown repeatedly to reduce HIV and contrary to the claims of opponents, they help addicts get into treatment.

But Bill Clinton had a drug czar — Barry McCaffrey — who said that needle exchange “sent the wrong message,” and would make him seem soft on drugs. McCaffrey fought against it and Clinton now says he “regrets” caving in to drug war politics.

Ramstad also — again, against the evidence – opposes medical marijuana and supports federal policing and prosecution of providers and patients in the states that have made it legal. These states have not seen the rise in teen drug use that opponents like the Congressman predicted.

The opposite, in fact, happened — as is the case in countries that have decriminalized marijuana like Holland. The UK’s “downgrading” of cannabis offense to a lesser status was also accompanied by a drop in use.

There’s simply no evidence that allowing sick people to get needed medication conflicts with helping addicts. Obama has said he does not support these prosecutions — will Ramstad push him in the wrong direction here, too? In an economic crisis, do we really want to spend federal time and money locking up medical marijuana providers and sick people?

That’s not change, President Obama — that’s more of the same. Don’t make the mistake that Bill Clinton did and install a drug czar who will ignore science and push dogma.

Amen Maia!