Will Obama bring audacity to US dope law reform?

Obama was sworn in as president on January 20 and two days later the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) celebrated the new era by raiding a medical marijuana dispensary in South Lake Tahoe, up in the California Sierra. The feds carried off about 5lb of cannabis and a few thousand dollars in cash. They didn't arrest the dispenser, a wheelchair-bound fellow called Ken Estes who'd had similar brushes with the DEA before.

In the early days of a new administration, every lobby in the country fixes its eyes on the White House to see which way the wind is likely to blow. Straight off the bat, the left got curtailment of official torture by the CIA, as well as refreshing edicts on ethical guidelines and on equal pay. The women's groups got renewed government financing of abortion counseling overseas. Human rights groups got a pledge to close Guantanamo.

The lobby to legalise medical marijuana got the feds busting Ken Estes, in a state whose own statute book explicitly legalises medical marijuana.

If the DEA respects state drug laws, the balance sheets of Big Pharm will suffer It's not a small lobby. Polls regularly show that 70-80 per cent of Americans favour legalisation of marijuana used for medical purposes. People like substances that beat back pain and banish care, especially when painkillers dispensed by the pharmaceutical industry can wipe them out financially and have terrible side-effects.

Obama was the candidate who said last year that sure, as a young man he had inhaled marijuana, since that was the whole point. On the campaign trail he was very specific about the relative weight of federal law (which the DEA brandishes) as against state laws decriminalising or legalising medical marijuana sale and use in ten states.

"What I'm not going to be doing," he told Gary Nelson of the Medford Mail Tribune, an Oregon paper,  "is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue simply because I want folks to be investigating violent crimes and potential terrorism."

Oregon has on its books a state law legalising medical marijuana. Obama was in what was thought might be a tight race with Hillary Clinton. Every vote among liberal, dope-smoking Democrats might count. But this went beyond the usual candidate waffle about 'commissions of enquiry', 'panels of experts' and the like.

So, to the hopeful medical marijuana lobby, the federal DEA raid on Estes came like a punch on the nose. Fred Gardner, who edits O'Shaughnessy's, a pro-cannabis doctors' journal, reported the raid on the CounterPunch website on February 4. One day later the White House announced that President Obama's commitment to honouring state medical-marijuana law would be implemented by his yet-to-be-named DEA Administrator.

The Washington Times reported on February 5: "The White House said it expects those kinds of raids to end once Mr Obama nominates someone to take charge of DEA, which is still run by Bush administration holdovers. 'The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind,' White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said."

Of course there was joy unbounded among medical cannabis growers and dispensary operators in California. But it's one thing for a President's spokesman to ratify a campaign pledge, quite another to get a federal agency to change course. Millions of dollars are at stake. If the DEA is compelled to respect state laws, that seriously threatens the balance sheets of the pharmaceutical companies, collectively notorious as one of the most powerful political lobbies in America.

Three-quarters of Americans say drug reform would be fine with them

Gardner suggests that "If and when impediments to medical marijuana use are removed and the American people begin to avail themselves of it en masse, the pharmaceutical manufacturers could lose a third or more of their sales. Doctors who have monitored cannabis use by hundreds of thousands of patients in California and Oregon can document a consistent pattern of decreased use of pharmaceuticals - a 50 per cent reduction of opioid use, for example."

On February 11 DEA agents took part in a raid on the MendoHealing Co-operative farm in Fort Bragg, California, arresting dispensers. As yet the White House hasn't named a new DEA head. (The current acting chief, Michele Leonhart, may not make the cut. She has just been zinged by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow for chartering a jet last fall for $123,000 to fly her to Colombia. The DEA has its own fleet of planes and as Maddow pointed out, a round-trip commercial flight from New York to Bogota costs $410. As auto execs have discovered, costly charter flights are red meat to legislators these days.)

Obama told that same Oregon reporter last year that though he had no problem with a doctor prescribing marijuana under legal conditions "whether I want to use a whole lot of political capital on that issue when we're trying to get health care passed or end the war in Iraq, the likelihood of that being real high on my list is not likely." In other words he would tell the DEA to respect state laws but wouldn't push for more extensive legalisation, because that might mean excessive draw-downs of 'political capital'. 

Exactly why Obama thinks drug reform might drain his 'political capital' is mysterious. About three-quarters of the American people say reform and legalisation would be fine with them. Repressive approaches to drug control are a proven failure. A huge chunk of America's vast prison population are incarcerated at monstrous expense for non-violent drug offences.

Earlier this month the Speaker of the New York Assembly declared, with stentorian editorial endorsement from the New York Times, that New York state's savage Rockefeller drug laws, on the books since 1974, should be repealed.

These Rockefeller statutes stipulated mandatory prison sentences of eight to 20 years for selling two ounces or possessing eight ounces of drugs such as heroin or cocaine. Judges, denied sentencing discretion, were compelled to destroy the lives of thousands of young offenders.

The war on drugs is not popular in America. It has engendered violence, out-of-control police behavior, huge expense, grave injuries to constitutional freedoms and is a demonstrable failure. It seems fair to argue that it might actually enhance President Obama's political capital if he blazed a new path. 

It's true that he would get some grief from the establishment, the same establishment which has pushed for him to double the US force in Afghanistan, a move which will most certainly destroy his political capital quicker than anything.

In 1931, as the economy tanked, and America headed into the Great Depression, the National Economic League polled its members - a sound cross-section of educated opinion - on the nation's most pressing problems. The easy winner? Prohibition. It cantered home well ahead of 'employment and economic stabilisation'.

It wasn't officially part of the New Deal, but when prohibition was repealed in December 1933, millions felt that if the big economic reforms were still well over the horizon, at least they could get a legal drink, one that might not send them blind. The bars opened lawfully and FDR's popularity soared. ·