Skip to main content

Drug Policy at WhiteHouse.gov

President Obama’s new WhiteHouse.gov site has several drug policy related items worth noting:

* End Racial Profiling: President Obama and Vice President Biden will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.
* Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support: President Obama and Vice President Biden will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama and Biden will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.
* Eliminate Sentencing Disparities: President Obama and Vice President Biden believe the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.
* Expand Use of Drug Courts: President Obama and Vice President Biden will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.
...
The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.


Seeing racial profiling, sentencing reform and needle exchange on the White House website ain’t bad at all. If these are the issues the new administration is prepared to address immediately, that’s a respectable forward step for criminal justice reform.

Heck, its decent enough that I wonder why his transition team didn’t mash this together into a response to that tricky drug war question they so blatantly dodged over at Change.gov. Regardless, it’s interesting to consider these policy statements in light of the unresolved drug czar selection process. Any candidate who embraces this stuff would be a major improvement to be sure.

Unfortunately, the site isn’t completely devoid of tough-guy drug war talk:

Obama and Biden will demand the Afghan government do more, including cracking down on corruption and the illicit opium trade.

Thus, despite the positive steps outlined above, Obama still suffers from the notion that drug prohibition can be a stabilizing force in international politics. This will prove to be our greatest obstacle under the new administration, as we’ve heard nothing encouraging from Obama with regards to international drug policy and things are getting damn ugly out there.

Barack Obama is the President

We’ve talked a lot here about Obama’s reluctance to openly discuss drug policy. We’ve been disappointed if not surprised that our domination of his Change.gov website failed to provoke an intelligent response. As activists, that’s just what we do and we won’t stop anytime soon.

But we’d be foolish to let our frustration obscure the magnitude of what just happened. The American people just put a person of color in the White House. How many of you thought you’d see this in your lifetime? I didn’t. It’s so incredible to me, I still struggle to process it as the reality of all this periodically penetrates my entrenched political cynicism and I summon for a moment a hope-like sensation that must be what everyone’s been talking about.

It’s not about Obama or his policies, it’s about the American people. It shows that we’re capable of transcending centuries of prejudice and idiocy, provided that circumstances are properly aligned. It’s purely symbolic, of course, but powerfully so.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I thought we’d end the drug war long before electing an African-American president. I’m amazed to learn that legalizing drugs is actually the more difficult undertaking. But so be it. To anyone who says overcoming drug prohibition is just an impossible fantasy, I say "Barack Obama is the president."
Subscribe to