Looks like DEA is trying to force a showdown with the new administration:
Despite President Obama’s campaign trail promises to end the DEA’s controversial attacks against state medical marijuana laws, the raids have continued under the leadership of Bush officials who have yet to be removed from office. It’s a disgraceful last minute effort to politicize the issue as the new attorney general takes office.
This is really a wicked strategy if you think about. The reality is that they simply have nothing to lose. Obama has already pledged to end these raids, so the folks who enjoy doing them are afraid they’ll be told to stop any day now. Clearly, they won’t stop until explicitly told to do so.
If DEA hopes to mount a defense of their tactics and try to persuade Obama to reverse his position, continuing the raids is their only apparent option. As ugly and unpopular as these activities have become, they must be continued in order to maintain the viability of their argument that the raids are important. After all, how important could the raids be if you aren’t even doing them?
I imagine the new president is thoroughly annoyed by all of this, as he’s hoping not to make headlines with his marijuana policy. Alas, neither the DEA nor the marijuana reform community intends to make that particularly easy for him. My assumption has generally been that Obama would quietly make the raids go away and we’d begin celebrating at an arbitrary point when it became clear that things were different. If DEA had been willing to accept that fate, things may well have played out that way.
Unfortunately, these maniacs won’t go quietly. So let’s spell it out for the new administration: You have to stop them. That’s exactly what you promised to do on the campaign trail and it clearly didn’t bite you at the ballot box. Fix this now.
Washington, DC -- On the day that Eric Holder was sworn in as the next U.S. Attorney General, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conducted raids on multiple medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. No arrests were made, but typical of such raids, money and medical marijuana were seized from the facility. [Americans for Safe Access]
Despite President Obama’s campaign trail promises to end the DEA’s controversial attacks against state medical marijuana laws, the raids have continued under the leadership of Bush officials who have yet to be removed from office. It’s a disgraceful last minute effort to politicize the issue as the new attorney general takes office.
This is really a wicked strategy if you think about. The reality is that they simply have nothing to lose. Obama has already pledged to end these raids, so the folks who enjoy doing them are afraid they’ll be told to stop any day now. Clearly, they won’t stop until explicitly told to do so.
If DEA hopes to mount a defense of their tactics and try to persuade Obama to reverse his position, continuing the raids is their only apparent option. As ugly and unpopular as these activities have become, they must be continued in order to maintain the viability of their argument that the raids are important. After all, how important could the raids be if you aren’t even doing them?
I imagine the new president is thoroughly annoyed by all of this, as he’s hoping not to make headlines with his marijuana policy. Alas, neither the DEA nor the marijuana reform community intends to make that particularly easy for him. My assumption has generally been that Obama would quietly make the raids go away and we’d begin celebrating at an arbitrary point when it became clear that things were different. If DEA had been willing to accept that fate, things may well have played out that way.
Unfortunately, these maniacs won’t go quietly. So let’s spell it out for the new administration: You have to stop them. That’s exactly what you promised to do on the campaign trail and it clearly didn’t bite you at the ballot box. Fix this now.
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raid stats
Do you have a comprehensive list of raids? It'd be easy enough to figure out their temporal distribution. Perhaps we'll never get a public confirmation from Obama that he pulled the plugs on the raids, but when we get three standard deviations from the mean time between past raids, perhaps we can breathe a sigh of cautious relief.
Showdown
What bothers me is the potential that DEA hard-liners are ready to play dirty.
What if Michele Leonhart, for example, has calculated that the President can't take the political risk to get in an open battle over marijuana? All she need do is tell Holder that if she is ordered to stop, or fired, she'll go talk-show public that Obama and Holder don't want her to enforce the drug laws passed by Congress.
That, of course, is just the little voice of conspiracy theories in my head. I hope.
Obama will not end
the medical pot raids until the FDA approves medical pot for prescription.
"I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors ( is ) entirely appropriate," Obama told Oregon's Mail Tribune newspaper in March. "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue."
The DEA is not circumventing state laws they are superseding state laws which has been the federal policy toward medical pot all along. Obama is simply maintaining the status quo.
Obama blew smoke up the asses of medical pot advocates, who wanted desperately to believe him in the campaign. Obama got what he needed from the campaign innuendo; namely that he needed to subvert potential opposition from the very politically active drug reform community. Success.
See my essay today: Why the War on Drugs Continues
Is Common sense Dead?
No arrest but money and medicine taken. That is NOT a raid my good friends, that is called ROBBERY!
Arresting Americans that use a product that the Gov't is currently growing on a farm outside Oxford, Miss and still distributes to (correct me if I'm wrong) 8 "patients" is called HYPOCRICY.
Anyone ever see the movie ROLLING KANSAS? I think I'm going to create some shirts with a map of the REAL taxpayer funded Magical Marijuana Garden.
Who's with me?
Robert Hutton
Actually its 4
There are only 4 left who smoke legally. One is a hard core advocate, 2 want to remain annonymous, 1 is silent. The rest have all passed on.
Now, if they didn't arrest anyone, all they did was confiscate the illegal substances, what are you guys crying about. Usually your agrument is innocent people being incarcerated. What now?
Seriously,
Do you really have to ask?!
why hasent a private army been raised
why not arm up and destroy these thieves .weapons are very available just shoot a few of these pretenders and these roaches will scurry back under the toilets they craweled out from under .these cowarerds should be sent back to the sewers.wtf
Martin Luther King
had the right idea, mass peaceful protest. But the reform leadership does not seem capable of directing any such actions so we suffer.
I would love to see Independence Day July 4th designated as Independence from drug prohibition day and national protests take place with massive civil disobedience in the form of lots of people lighting up their "pot smoking pipes", snorting in public and generally demonstrating public contempt for the drug war. But there are no reform leadership willing to organize it.
This just in
Got an email from the change.org team this morning. They've published the "top ten ideas for change", and guess which one is tops on the list . . .
wait for it . . .
"Legalize the Medicinal and Recreational Use of Marijuana
Sponsored by the Marijuana Policy Project"
Blew me away, after the way they treated similar questions in their two previous"surveys".
Another interesting things that is happening is this:
4 States Declaring Sovereignty!!! And More to Come!
This is for real! And happening as we speak!
Washington State:
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/81661
Arizona:
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/81631
New Hampshire:
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/81552
Missouri is about to do the same!
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/81555
and this was posted as a reply to the above:
Oklahoma:
House version: http://webserver1.lsb.sta...
Senate version: http://webserver1.lsb.sta...
As Dylan wrote and sang, "Oh the times they are a changing."
I'm pro-choice on EVERYTHING!
C'mon, President Obama, take care of business
Or if you're going to stab us in the back, come out and say so.
DEA wolves
Please President Obama, please call off the DEA wolves stealing Medical Marijuana from legal California Dispensaries.
Call off the Bush thugs.
buzzzzzzzz
Just like flies. They wont go away. This is insane, What a waste of precious resources. On both sides.
aahpat, I agree with you, July 4th is the logical day to protest
The day they all celebrate their liberty is the day to remind them of how they've taken away other people's liberty without a second thought. Slow news day too
What better
way to show our Independence and freedom than to actually stand up for freedom on Independence Day.
Obama has announced that he will get the medical pot raids stopped, eventually. But I don't think that he can do it legally.
I wrote about my reasons and the solutions to this on my blog, Aid & comfort.
President Obama's Medical Marijuana Quandary
If we play this right I think that we can come out of this thing with a really big win for medical marijuana and maybe even pot legalization.
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