Obama's Pot Breakthrough

By Jann S. Wenner and Ethan Nadelmann

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, President Obama did something both brave and extraordinary for the commander in chief of the nation's War on Drugs: He told the truth.

Asked about state efforts to legalize pot, Obama declared of the drug, "I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol." Without fanfare, Obama had just flouted decades of anti-pot propaganda by the federal government. And he wasn't done: Obama followed his Drug War apostasy by linking the prohibition of marijuana to the racist enforcement of the nation's drug laws. "Middle-class kids don't get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do," the president said. "And African-American kids and Latino kids are?.?.?.?less likely to have the resources?.?.?.?to avoid unduly harsh penalties."

Despite the offhand delivery, Obama's honest assessment of the safety of marijuana and the harm of criminalizing pot users marks a seismic shift in the War on Drugs. Just as important, the president connected his cleareyed rhetoric to policy changes at the Department of Justice. Attorney General Eric Holder has even pushed drug reform beyond pot, by renouncing draconian mandatory-minimum sentencing for low-level sellers of cocaine and other drugs.

The difference from the first Obama term has been remarkable. Previously, the president mocked the notion of pot legalization and even dispatched Holder in 2010 to warn Californians that federal agents would "vigorously enforce" federal law if the voters approved a legalization initiative on that year's ballot. But two years later, foreshadowing changes afoot, Holder refrained from delivering similar warnings to voters in Colorado, Washington and Oregon who were considering legislative initiatives of their own.

The real break came in late August 2013, when the Justice Department gave the two states where these initiatives had passed – Washington and Colorado – a qualified green light to proceed with taxing and regulating recreational marijuana. That light grew brighter in January, when Holder announced he'd be issuing new guidelines to enable the marijuana industry to bank at federally regulated financial institutions. And in that New Yorker interview, Obama did more than express a willingness to tolerate state legalization experiments. He praised them as "important" because they address the injustice and hypocrisy of selectively punishing black and brown kids for marijuana crimes when "some of the folks who are writing [anti-drug] laws have probably done the same thing."



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obamas-pot-breakthrough-20140305