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Out of context: Reply #9955
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In its first year, the Obama White House quietly has given critics of the nation’s 40-year “war on drugs” something rarely seen in their ranks: hope that the days of punitive, enforcement-first U.S. policy could be coming to a close.
With the Department of Justice agreeing to recognize state laws that legalize medical marijuana and Congress ending the decades-long ban on federal money for needle exchanges, advocates for tackling drug demand, rather than supply — by treating addicts and easing access for others — counted two crucial victories in 2009. If anything, their lingering question has become how much more Obama and the Democrats can do without encountering blowback or losing their political will.
“For the first time in many, many years, the wind is at our back instead of our face,” the director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), Bill Piper, told The Daily Caller.
The government relations director at the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), Aaron Houston, described the recent drug-policy moves as “the beginning of the fall of the Berlin wall of prohibition.”
“These are substantial, earth-moving changes,” he said. “We’re going to see the results of these changes, and policymakers are more likely to be willing and understanding.”
Supporters of a California ballot initiative regulating and taxing legal marijuana already claim to have enough signatures for a vote in November. Maine approved licensing for medical pot dispensaries last year, and New Jersey is nearing passage of its own similar law, perhaps as soon as today.
Rhode Island went a step further in July, creating a commission to study the effects of decriminalizing marijuana. Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron, a legalization proponent who serves on that commission, agreed that Obama’s approach to drugs would bring about “better outcomes overall” but preached more caution than optimism.
“Unlike most legalizers, I’m libertarian, not liberal,” Miron explained in an interview. “As a more pragmatic matter, I don’t see it in [Obama’s] interest as a politician to go much farther than he’s gone.”
That assessment could hold true this year, particularly as the midterm elections keep Democrats focused on the ailing economy. The two best bets for congressional action are Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-VA) bill empowering a criminal justice panel to propose broad drug enforcement reforms and a bid, long in the works, to eliminate the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity between cocaine and crack offenders.
What’s more difficult to predict is how this gradual rebalancing of U.S. drug policy would play out during a second Obama term, if he wins re-election. Piper, of the DPA, predicted that this year’s initial changes “will be a down payment on full reform, which would be — on the federal level — completely eliminating mandatory minimum sentencing and decriminalizing low-level possession” of marijuana.
Neill Franklin, a former colonel with the Baltimore police and member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, said an interview that he too sees federal movement on legalization after 2012, if Obama remains in office.
But no advocate was prepared to forecast similar relaxation of limits on cocaine or other drugs. Most emphasized that state governments — as well as national polling such as Gallup’s, which found public support for marijuana legalization hitting a record high of 44 percent in October — would continue to lead the way on easing prohibition.