Comments on: As states legalize pot, will Obama continue the federal War on Weed?

By: GregS

GregS — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:17:00 +0000

Of course he doesn’t want to. If had he wanted to end it, he wouldn’t have picked the most enthusiastic supporter of the war on drugs in the Democratic party as his vice president.

By: pacificwaters

pacificwaters — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:07:00 +0000

Oh please. He has shown what he thinks of our laws. He ignores them whenever he likes. The list is too long to list here but look it up.

By: Ito Kagehisa

Ito Kagehisa — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:50:00 +0000

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it looks like that corporate-puppet-in-chief power’s pretty corrosive too.

By: electronicnonsense

electronicnonsense — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:30:00 +0000

I think Obama’s stance on legalization is solidly against, as he stated at the Summit Of The Americas when several central American countries expressed interest in legalization in an effort to curb drastic problems with organized crime networks. He made it clear, in contrast to the majority opinion at the summit, that he didn’t think legalization was the answer and that he was opposed to it.

By: donovan acree

donovan acree — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:41:00 +0000

All he needs to do is have the drug re-classified to a lower schedule. No laws need be changed. Once it is no longer a controlled substance, the DEA would have no choice but to stop arresting pot smokers.

By: lafave

lafave — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:48:00 +0000

It’s sort of amazing how people on this thread disregard how conservative Obama is. Nevermind what he says – what does he do?

By: lafave

lafave — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:46:00 +0000

Obama can fire the head of the DEA and replace her with someone who will listen to him, but since we can’t read his thoughts, we can only assume by his inaction on that regard that he supports the DEA entirely.

By: lafave

lafave — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:05:00 +0000

since he isn’t running for re-election, that doesn’t appear to be a viable disencentive.

By: elix

elix — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:22:00 +0000

It’s not exactly the same system because Canada, but that’s something that marijuana proponents are trying to do in BC for the 2014 provincial election: Put a provincial referendum vote to basically force police in BC to put simple marijuana possession at the absolute bottom of their priority list and to expend no resources chasing it.

Of course, that conflicts with federal perogative, so it’ll need to be sorted out with the federal government (which is also part of the proposed act’s details).

By: Felton / Moderator

Felton / Moderator — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:02:00 +0000

What, nobody else thought this was funny? Bunch of stiffs.

By: aikimoe

aikimoe — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:45:00 +0000

Obama controls those agencies, not vice versa. Nothing bad would happen to Obama if he acted sanely and liberally in regards to marijuana, and bad things would happen less often to good people.

Obama and his devotion to politics over sane policy is a major part of the problem.

By: aikimoe

aikimoe — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:40:00 +0000

This is simply false. The President has already stopped enforcing and defending DOMA and he could, with a single order, reschedule marijuana so that it isn’t considered as dangerous as cocaine and heroin.

It’s a fact that every President for at least the last 50 years has selectively enforced laws and broken laws with impunity, so I think it’s well within Obama’s power to ignore Washington’s and Colorado’s experiments in sanity, instead of attacking them.

By: grant11

grant11 — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:22:00 +0000

Ha! And there’s no better judge of constitutionality than the guy who executes Americans without trial.

By: AnthonyC

AnthonyC — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:06:00 +0000

At the very least, since the laws as written are unenforcable anyway (based on marijuana usage statistics alone there should be at least 30 million people in jail in the US) so the president has no choice but to prioritize enforcing some laws over others.

By: L_Mariachi

L_Mariachi — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:19:00 +0000

State and local laws can be passed forbidding the LEOs under their purview from cooperating with Federal enforcement efforts. IIRC, San Francisco did something like that a few years ago in regards to ICE immigration crackdowns.

By: m577a2

m577a2 — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:13:00 +0000

Check it out. Here is a link to hundreds of peer reviewed studies proving marijuana’s
harmless nature. Don’t believe the government and law enforcement lies. http://www.beyondchronic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Grannys-List-July-2012.pdf

By: L_Mariachi

L_Mariachi — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:13:00 +0000

There’s an easy counter to that: Make those critics say out loud that they want him to be “hard on drugs,” and then crack a Viagra joke.

get it, hard-on drugs, see what I did there

By: L_Mariachi

L_Mariachi — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 19:10:00 +0000

There is still the concept of prosecutorial discretion. Any police chief or district attorney who decided to expend his department’s budget on chasing down jaywalkers in lieu of dealing with a rampant epidemic of homicides would be out on his ass in short order, or at the very least called onto the carpet for a stern talking-to.

Unfortunately, there’s no carpet for the President to be called onto, and we voters whom he’s supposed to be accountable to didn’t have any say in the matter since the only viable alternative would have been even worse.

By: AnthonyC

AnthonyC — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:48:00 +0000

A constitutional amendment is not a congressional law. Because Prohibition was an amendment, that would make the NY law (I’m assuming you’re right on the historical details, IDK) would have been unenforceable. Just like the states rights folks in the South half a century before.

By: PathogenAntifreeze

PathogenAntifreeze — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:48:00 +0000

… said the giant pharmaceutical corporations who donated a lot more than human constituents. :-(

By: PathogenAntifreeze

PathogenAntifreeze — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:33:00 +0000

Indeed; if we’re lucky, that was his main reason for continuing and increasing the nonsense during his first term, but he has no re-election to worry about anymore.

By: smallteam

smallteam — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:29:00 +0000

The Aristocrats?!

By: Itsumishi

Itsumishi — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:42:00 +0000

That’s generally how government works. Government never identifies problems, they react to problems identified by the people.

By: Itsumishi

Itsumishi — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:39:00 +0000

Oh please, everyone knows Chomsky is just a left-wing conspiracy theory nutjob!

/sarcasm

By: Alan Wendt

Alan Wendt — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:10:00 +0000

Notice that all the real progress in this country is being made by citizen petition as opposed to State or Federal government.

By: Marko Raos

Marko Raos — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 09:40:00 +0000

touche!

By: ocker3

ocker3 — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 07:28:00 +0000

”Soft on Drugs”!!!!!

By: corydodt

corydodt — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 07:09:00 +0000

Fire. Eric. Holder.

That is all.

By: jtiii

jtiii — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 06:52:00 +0000

From NORML’s website -
———–
United States Representatives have introduced bipartisan legislation in Congress — House Bill 6606, The Respect States’ and Citizens’ Rights Act of 2012 — to amend the US Controlled Substances Act to provide that federal law shall not preempt state marijuana laws.The measure is sponsored by Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, and is co-sponsored by Reps. Blumenauer (OR), Coffman (CO), Cohen (TN), Farr (CA), Frank (MA), Grijalva (AZ), Lee (CA), Paul (TX), and Polis (CO).
Holy shit! This is actually happening! Everybody, and especially everybody in states that have progressive marijuana laws, needs to let their Congressmen know that they need to support this bill, and to introduce it in the Senate as well! Okay, those of you that disagree with this bill don’t have to, but I’m not sure, but I think that might make you fascists…
It’s one thing for Obama to say he trumps the states, but if Congress changed the law to respect states’ rights in this issue, Obama would have to get it ruled unconstitutional. It would be a wildly unpopular thing to do.
Also at that point he’d be smart enough to realize that that would really mar his legacy; he would be seen as one of the last, or very likely the last, presidential stooge in the War On Drugs. He’s only 51, he could spend 20 years living with that around his neck.

This needs to get some attention. Right now if you Google The Respect States’ and Citizens’ Rights Act of 2012, the top four are the Huffington Post, the 420 Times, the actual bill on congress’s site, and the Daily Chronic. Nowhere on the first two pages are any major news outlets, but FAR MORE TERRIFYING are the absence of BoingBoing and Reddit!

So start your own chainmails and tweets and what have you, and for god’s sake, somebody reading this knows how to make it go viral, including the admins and editors of our lovely and beloved BoingBoing. For us to not get motivated to support this, we’d have to be a bunch of, uh, potheads.

By: Aloisius

Aloisius — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 03:29:00 +0000

The President takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. In order to decline to enforce the law, the President has to come up with an argument as to why it is unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable.