(Before we start: Change.gov is Barack Obama’s official transition website.  Change.org is not affiliated with Obama, but is a collection of non-profits lobbying the Obama Administration.)

The first time they asked The People what kind of change we wanted.  We overwhelmingly asked Barack Obama to legalize marijuana and made it the #1 question.  Obama answered “No” and offered no explanation.

The second time they asked The People what kind of change we wanted.  To balance the responses they created categories of requests instead of one big open poll.  We overwhelmingly asked Barack Obama to legalize marijuana, making it the #4 question overall and #1 within the National Security category (as “end the war on drugs”).  Obama didn’t even answer, but instead referred to the previous “No” and no explanation.

So now, the third time, Barack Obama’s Change.gov is opening up “the Citizen’s Briefing Book”, where once again, citizens can submit their policy ideas and vote on the ideas.  Guess which policy idea is #1 again, with “44,950 points” (whatever “points” are) as of this posting?

Ending Marijuana Prohibition
I suggest that we step back and take a non-biased “Science Based” approach to decide what should be done about the “Utter Failure” that we call the War on (some) Drugs.

The fact is that Marijuana is much less harmful to our bodies than other Legal Drugs such as Tobacco and Alcohol. And for the Government to recognize Marijuana as having Medicinal Properties AND as a Schedule I drug (Has NO medicinal Properties) is an obvious flaw in the system.

We must stop imprisoning responsible adult citizens choosing to use a drug that has been mis-labeled for over 70 years.

Click over if you like and vote.  It may get just as much notice as the first two times (none), but clicking is free and easy.  The effect of having one of the most popular issues rise again and again, only to be ignored, is building this story in the media.  We’ve got the people directly asking Obama three times to rethink the drug war, Change.org will present that same notion from The People tomorrow, and Congress had to resort to blackmail to get El Paso city leaders to shut up about it.  The ONLY person who doesn’t want to talk about this is Barack Obama, and that’s going to become a deadly meme for the “open and transparent, change we can believe in, government responsive to the people, reliant on science” aura Obama wants to build in his Administration.

(I think a few “Why Won’t You Talk About The Drug War?” signs at the Inauguration would be a beautiful site to see, don’t you?)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 9:46 am and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour, ALERT, Decriminalization, Legalization, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.