Mike Malloy

[greg]

Here is the question from a Rolling Stone reporter in a recent (on newsstands now) interview. Sorta felt inclined to post it here knowing audience on this board.


Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not "use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana." Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What's up with that?



Here's what's up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana - and the reason is, because it's against federal law. I can't nullify congressional law. I can't ask the Justice Department to say, "Ignore completely a federal law that's on the books." What I can say is, "Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage." As a consequence, there haven't been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes.

The only tension that's come up - and this gets hyped up a lot - is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we're telling them, "This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way." That's not something we're going to do. I do think it's important and useful to have a broader debate about our drug laws. One of the things we've done over the past three years was to make a sensible change when it came to the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. We've had a discussion about how to focus on treatment, taking a public-health approach to drugs and lessening the overwhelming emphasis on criminal laws as a tool to deal with this issue. I think that's an appropriate debate that we should have.

Link to full interview.

http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/11134-focus-obama-interview-ready-for-the-fight
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"I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing" Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826

[lyris]

I may not always agree with our President, but I like him, and I respect him.

As for marijuana, I firmly believe that lungs were made to breathe in air, not smoke, but I don't believe that while people are dumb enough to smoke pot they shouldn't be arrested for it unless they are driving under the influence.

Now if they some how made marijuana into a form of medicine that can either be swallowed or injected into the body of a person who needs it for medical reasons then there would not be a problem.
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Corporations weren't born with a brain a heart or a soul, people were.

Most people do know right from wrong. Corporations can never be people unless they are sociopaths. Then they would need to have strong structures to keep them from doing harm to others. Just as we have structures for people when they do harm.