President to Downgrade Drug Czar Position from Cabinet Rank — A Move Biden Criticized in 1989

It’s often said that if you live long enough you’ll see everything. I suppose Joe Biden has officially seen it all.

When Vice President Biden… formally announce[d] the nomination of Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske as the new Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, he [was] also …  formally downgrading the office from Cabinet-level status to non-Cabinet level status. Interestingly, Biden himself criticized a similar move by then-President George HW Bush in 1989…

Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticized the elder Bush’s position, telling the Washington Post in 1989 that it would lower the profile of the drug war.

I guess the old un-winnable war is just not that important anymore. Nope, the new hotness is that Biden is a “veteran” of the war and knows it all.

The Obama administration “is fortunate to have a vice president with an unrivaled breadth of knowledge about federal drug policy,” says an administration official. “Never before has there been someone with this level of knowledge who is as close to the president as Vice President Biden.”

It’s unmistakable that the longest war is beginning to show it’s age, even amongst it’s strongest supporters.

EXTRA CREDIT: Joe Biden was the man who “invented” the phrase “Drug Czar”. I guess we can credit him for the name of every position in charge of a hopeless effort like the newly proposed “Car Czar”.

President Obama will name Seattle Police Chief R. Gil Kerlikowske as the nation’s drug czar today, ending a long search that was slowed as details of drug arrests involving Kerlikowske’s son came to light.

The administration will remove the job’s Cabinet designation — reversing an elevation of the office under President George W. Bush — although one senior official said that Kerlikowske would have “full access and a direct line to the president and the vice president.” The source also noted that Vice President Biden was instrumental in the creation of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and would continue to be an outspoken advocate on the issue.

Kerlikowske has long been speculated to be the front-runner to serve as the drug czar. But revelations concerning the arrests of his son, Jeffrey, on drug-related charges complicated the process.

The White House acknowledged Jeffrey Kerlikowske’s past drug use but offered no specifics or comment.

In his remarks today accepting the nomination, Kerlikowske is expected to reference his family struggles with drug abuse. “Our nation’s drug problem is one of human suffering,” according to his prepared remarks. “As a police officer, but also in my own family, I have experienced first-hand the devastating effects that drugs can have on our youth, our families and our communities.”

via Seattle Police Chief to Be Named Drug Czar – washingtonpost.com.

It’s nice to see the Drug Czar’s office demoted to a non-Cabinet post again. It’s even nicer that a police chief with experience in one of America’s most cannabis-friendly cities, home to a peaceful annual gathering of 300,000 stoners, and some personal experience with drug problems in his own family is going to be in charge of our drug policy.  I look forward to these confirmation hearings.

Now if we could just change those words “Drug Control” to “Drug Harm Reduction” or “Drug Regulation”…

President-elect Obama continues to name members of his new cabinet.  Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle from South Dakota has been named to head up Health & Human Services.  As a Senator in 2003, Daschle was the sponsor of S. 22, a sneaky way to get the unpopular “RAVE Act” through Congress after now-Vice President-elect Biden was unsuccessful in passing it the year before:

Dave Kopel & Glenn Reynolds on RAVE Act on National Review Online
Last year, there was a big push in Congress to enact the so-called “RAVE Act,” sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (D., Tex.) as H.R. 5519 and in the Senate by Joseph Biden (D., Del.). Both lead sponsors were very forthright; the very title of the bill announced its intention to go after “raves” — dance parties popular with Generations X and Y.

But the “RAVE Act” aroused enormous opposition, so much so that the Senate Judiciary chairman withdrew his co-sponsorship of the bill.

This year, the same act is back; but this time it’s concealed deep within an immense, omnibus bill sponsored by Tom Daschle — the so-called “Justice Enhancement and Domestic Security Act of 2003″ (S. 22). … And the “RAVE Act” reappears too — only this time, the word “RAVE” never appears in a title. Rather, the “RAVE Act” language is found in sections 5131-36, under the misleading title “Crack House Statute Amendments.”

The Daschle bill extends the federal “crackhouse law” — which makes it illegal to maintain a building for purposes of drug consumption — to cover musical performances and other events of a temporary nature, and to make liable even those who make their premises available at no charge. The idea is to make the promoters of musical events liable for drug consumption at those events — even when the consumption is entirely incidental, and has nothing to do with any action by the promoters. The legislation is, in effect, an admission of failure by the Drug Enforcement Agency: Unable to control drug use, it’s looking to force concert promoters and theaters to do it, on pain of imprisonment.

As amended by Daschle, …this language is broad enough to encompass not only rave promoters and disc jockeys, but also bar owners, hotel or motel owners, concert promoters, tour bus or cruise ship operators — and even home owners. Literally read, the statute would even apply to a homeowner whose teenagers occasionally smoked marijuana on the property.

Fortunately Daschle’s stealth RAVE Act died in committee.  Unfortunately, President-Elect Obama’s initial choices for the law enforcement, government, and health posts that will most impact cannabis in this country include Vice President Joe “Mandatory Minimums” Biden, Chief of Staff Rahm “Silence Doctors on MedMJ” Emanuel, Attorney General Eric “5-years for pot” Holder, Drug Czar Jim “Raid the MedMJ States” Ramstad, and now Secretary of Health & Human Services Tom “Stealth RAVE Act” Daschle.  If only they could get Sgt. Stedanko for head of the DEA!

Jacob Sullum : Obama on Drugs – Townhall.com

Last week, voters in Massachusetts approved a ballot initiative that eliminates criminal penalties for possessing up to an ounce of marijuana, replacing them with a $100 civil fine. Michigan, meanwhile, became the 13th state to allow the medical use of cannabis.

Yet President-elect Barack Obama has retreated from his support for marijuana decriminalization, and his position on medical marijuana remains ambiguous. His reticence on these issues suggests he may disappoint those who hope the Obama administration will move drug policy in a less punitive, more tolerant direction.

One cause for that hope: Obama has been more candid about his own youthful drug use than any president in U.S. history. Although he portrays his pot smoking and cocaine snorting as behavior he regrets, it would be hard for him to justify harsh treatment of drug users when he himself escaped punishment for the same actions and clearly is better off than he would have been had he been arrested.

Obama’s position on medical marijuana is clearer but still fuzzy around the edges. He has promised to stop the Drug Enforcement Administration’s raids on patients and the growers who supply them in states that allow medical use of marijuana. 

The main danger with Obama is that his history of drug use, instead of making him more open to reform, will make him anxious to show he’s tough on drugs. Something like that seems to have happened with Bill Clinton, who bragged about ever-escalating drug war budgets and threatened doctors who recommended marijuana to their patients with jail, trampling the First Amendment in his rush to prove his anti-drug bona fides.

“We are going to continue to find ways within the administration to fight legalization and the notion of legalization,” a key Clinton drug policy adviser said in defense of this unconstitutional policy, which ultimately was overturned by a federal appeals court. “We’re against the message that [California's medical marijuana initiative] sends to children.”

Who was this zealous drug warrior, eager to forcibly suppress “the notion of legalization” in the name of protecting children? Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff.

So President-Elect Obama has Clinton’s drug war bulldog, Rahm Emanuel, as his chief of staff, and Joe “mandatory minimums” Biden as his Vice President.  Have their positions changed in the past fifteen years?  Will Obama be Jimmy Carter and move us toward the sane policy of federal decriminalization and medical marijuana, or will he be Bill Clinton and arrest three times more cannabis consumers than his predecessor and unconstitutionally try to squash medical marijuana?

That Queasy Feeling | Slog | The Stranger | Seattle’s Only Newspaper
As former chairman for the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden is the person most responsible for passing a package of laws in the mid-80s that we think of as today’s drug war. Biden presided over the mandatory-minimum sentencing guidelines that required judges to sentence dealers’ girlfriends and small-time peddlers to decades-long terms in state and federal prisons, where thousands are rotting to this day. 

He used hearings “to mislead his colleagues and the public… on drug policy where police, prosecutors and DEA officials got the opportunity [to speak] while opponents were kept out,” says Kevin Zeese, a former director of Common Sense for Drug Policy and a leading drug-law reformer in Washington, D.C. since the 1980s. “Pick a drug law you don’t like from the last 25 years and thank Senator Biden.”

It wasn’t just coincidence that these laws were passed while Biden was at the helm of the judiciary committee. He was the leading advocate for establishing the Office of National Drug Control Policy—the White House Drug Czar’s Office—an agency that to this day gives lip service to drug treatment programs but spends its millions on ads linking pot to terrorism. The ads actually increased drug-initiation rates among teenagers. He’s a conservative on most crime issues. And in recent years, Biden pushed the so-called RAVE Act, which criminalized everyone attending parties where drugs were found. Biden is the drug war embodied.

But, since this is Obama’s campaign, I’m trying to hope—hope that Biden can change.

“Our intentions were good, but much of our information was bad,” Biden said in February. He decried the very sentencing disparities he created between crack and cocaine, which is one of the reasons prisons are full of young black men. “Each of the myths upon which we based the sentencing disparity has since been dispelled or altered,” he said.

A change of heart, perhaps. And when it comes to the playing the old white guy card—a requisite in the run against McCain—Biden’s the king of hearts. Also, nice teeth. They must be fake. Anyway, I like to think that the folks who pushed the drug war in the 1970s and 1980s—Richard Nixon, Nancy Reagan, Joe Biden—believed that it may have worked. Clinton should have known better. But by every measure of efficacy, it’s failed.

Obama cannot alter drug laws on his own—he’s lived a youth of indiscretions. (Realistically, no politician can make any sweeping changes; it must be incremental.) But if anyone has the credibility at the federal level to say we were wrong, to push the Senate for sentencing reform, to back Barney Frank’s bill in the House to decriminalize pot—nobody is more more capable than Joe Biden. And if he does, this could be an excellent four years.

As one commenter at The Slog noted, with Obama/Biden, we may have a shot in hell at getting some positive drug law reform.  With McCain/Palin, we have no shot in hell.  And while the Greens and Libertarians are much better on the drug issue, they’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected.

My personal recommendation – not a NORML official stance – when asked how a drug law reformer should vote is to first figure out whether your state is “safe”.  If it is a lock for either McCain (say, Utah) or Obama (say, California), then vote the issue and throw some love to the Greens or Libs.  The more votes they get the more their platform has to be recognized by the Dems.

But if you’re in a “battleground” state, I believe personally that you’ve got to put your hope on Obama and cross your fingers with Biden.  John McCain literally has turned his back on wheelchair-bound medical marijuana patients and said he doesn’t believe in medical marijuana.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“I believe that there is some possibility that quote ‘medical marijuana’ could spread into other areas and that the definition of medical could expand rather dramatically. You’ve seen that in other cases.” (July 14, 2007, town hall meeting in New Hampshire)

“I don’t think marijuana is healthy, I don’t think that it is good for people, and I also, there is a large body of medical opinion that says there is plenty of other medications that are more effective and better and less damaging to one’s health to use to relieve pain.” (July 14, 2007, town hall meeting in New Hampshire)

“I think there’s other ways to relieve pain … I do not believe in legalizing it because I think there’s other ways of relieving pain and applying medical help than that, and that’s my position.” (August 9, 2007, town hall meeting in Merrimack, New Hampshire)

“I believe that marijuana is a gateway drug. That is my view and that’s the view of the federal drug czar and other experts, although that is also a debatable question. I think that there is much more effective ways of relieving pain and suffering than the use of marijuana, and so therefore I view it as something that I do not support. That’s just my considered opinion, I’d be glad to receive additional information.” (August 11, 2007, house party in Milton, New Hampshire)

“No town hall meeting in New Hampshire is complete without some young man who has been sent here to talk to me about medical marijuana … The fact is I do not approve of the medical use of marijuana, I never have and I never will, and you all keep coming to the town hall meetings. I’m always glad to see you, it helps with the attendance.” (September 29, 2007, house party in Exeter, New Hampshire)

“Every medical expert I know of, including the AMA, says that there are much more effective and much better treatments for pain than medical marijuana … I still would not support medical marijuana because I don’t think that the preponderance of medical opinion in America agrees … that it’s the most effective way of treating pain.” (September 30, 2007, town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire)

“The law is the law, and I do not believe it’s going to be changed, and it’s not going to be changed by me.” (October 23, 2007, town hall meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire)

“The will of the people, my friend, is that medical marijuana is not something that the quote ‘people’ want. Certain people feel strongly about this issue, and they show up at most town hall meetings, obviously feel very strongly about it. There is no convincing evidence … there’s evidence, but no convincing evidence to me that medical marijuana relief of pain and suffering cannot be accomplished by prescriptions from doctors.” (Nov. 14, 2007, McCain blogger conference call)

“There may be times when the will of the people, for example Iraq, the will of the people, unfortunately is that we withdraw from Iraq immediately or very very soon. I don’t share that view of the will of the people. And I think the will of the people was that we get out of Korea when Harry Truman was president of the United States, but then he decided to do what he thought was best for the will of the country. Now, I don’t compare this issue with Iraq or Korea, but, look, I’ll be glad to continue this discussion, and read the stuff about it, but I am not changing my position on quote ‘medical marijuana,’ okay?” (Nov. 14, 2007, McCain blogger conference call, said upon being reminded that the will of the people in California was to make medical marijuana legal)