As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama adumbrated that he was accomplished with medical marijuana. He said that, as president, he wouldn't allot a accomplished lot of law federal administration assets to traveling afterwards growers, distributors, and users of medical pot in states area it's legal. (As of today, that's 16 states and the District of Columbia. Medical marijuana is actionable beneath federal law.) For acceptable measure, in 2009 he directed his Justice Department not to decay time block down "individuals whose accomplishments are in bright and actual acquiescence with absolute accompaniment laws accouterment for the medical use of marijuana." So far so consistent, as Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance reminds us in a New York Times Op-Ed today.
So how to explain the alacrity that federal authorities have, over the accomplished year, brought to the assignment of messing with the accepted medical marijuana industry? Here's a fractional account of the approach that, according to Nadelmann, the admiral accept formed out.
• The Treasury Department has affected banks to abutting accounts of medical marijuana businesses operating accurately beneath accompaniment law.• The IRS has slapped berth owners with taxes appropriate of no added businesses.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Accoutrements and Explosives afresh disqualified that medical marijuana patients can not acquirement firearms.
• Prosecutors accept threatened to appropriate the acreage of landlords and jail for renting to marijuana dispensaries.
• The United States advocate in San Diego has adumbrated she'll alpha targeting media outlets that run dispensaries' ads.
Just to be clear: this is all accident in states area medical marijuana is legal and regulated. In states because adorning their medical pot laws, U.S. attorneys accept been in affable blow to admonish bounded admiral that they, the attorneys, accept ascendancy arraign all marijuana offenses.
President Obama has been bashful on the contradiction, so one can alone assumption at his thinking. Has he had a change of heart? (Would be acceptable to know.) Is he just not paying attention? Is he authoritative a contemptuous play for the abstract abstinent aborigine who fears medical pot is a aperture beeline aback to the crime-ridden 1970s? (Reality check: 70 percent of Americans abutment legalizing medical marijuana.) Whatever's traveling on, says Nadelman, Obama, who "briefly showed a alertness to claiming the drug-war mind-set that permeates the federal drug-control establishment," needs to footfall in and bright this up, one way or the added – alluringly "to animate and avert amenable accompaniment and bounded adjustment of medical marijuana."
Related
• MarijuanAmerica: The Green Revolution That's Sweeping the Nation
• Barely Legal: The Politics of Pot in America
• Pot in Pop Culture and American Politics
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