From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/11/obama-war-on-weed-american-voters
The White House seems stuck in its failed ‘war on drugs’ policy, even as voters in states approve marijuana legalisation
Naomi Wolf
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 January 2013
Two states took the plunge: Colorado and Washington State recently voted to decriminalize possession, if you are over 21, of small amounts of marijuana (although you still can’t smoke it in public there). But the White House is warning that these state moves are in violation of federal law – the Controlled Substances Act – which the government gives notice it intends to continue to enforce.
Indeed, Obama is thinking about more than a warning: he might actually sue the states, and any others that follow Colorado‘s and Washington States’ leads. Pot legalization proponents, however, point to the fact that the states’ change in the law has been hailed by local law enforcement, because being able to leave small-scale pot users alone means freed-up resources for police to go after violent crime.
David Sirota reported, in Salon this past week, on a petition he submitted to the White House, in which 46,000 people asked Obama to support proposed legislation that would not legalize marijuana on a federal level but simply change federal law so that states could choose to legalize personal use if they wished to do so. Sirota points out that polls demonstrate that “between 51% and 68% of Americans believe states – and not the feds – should have marijuana enforcement authority.”
The White House ignored the petition – in spite of Obama’s promise to take action on petitions that garner such levels of support. And the New York Times reports that the administration is considering taking legal action against any states that claim the authority to legalize marijuana. One approach being contemplated is for the federal government to sue the states “on the grounds that any effort to regulate marijuana is pre-empted by federal law”.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/11/obama-war-on-weed-american-voters
