Cindy McCain: Drug Dealer - DrugDealerCindy.com

Our friend Mason Tvert and the good folks at SAFER have announced a new publicity campaign called “Drug Dealer Cindy”, which highlights the fact that Mrs. John McCain is a beer heiress guilty of pushing a drug more harmful than alcohol.

I’d also like to add that Mrs. McCain drives around Arizona with a personalized license plate reading “MS BUD”, which I can guarantee would be yanked as a “drug promoting reference” if it were on a cannabis user’s car.  Also, don’t forget that Cindy McCain is an admitted drug addict who stole Percocet and Vicodin from her own non-profit charity medical relief organization.  Mrs. McCain did no prison time for that crime, which defense lawyers noted would probably have been the case if she were a poor minority woman not married to a US senator.

The Swamp: Jim Webb’s fighting political manifesto
In his new book, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb describes an America that lacks a coherent national security strategy while bogged down in a war that should never have been fought.

It is a country, he says, where the economic disparities between rich and poor have reached frightening levels.

And it is a nation, he says, that is waging an ineffective battle against crime by locking up more than 2 million residents– or 25 percent of the world’s reported prisoners.

It also serves as a political manifesto of sorts for Webb, who has been touted as a potential running mate for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in November.

On crime policy, Webb calls for rethinking a strategy focused on incarceration that he says is costly and ineffective.

“Either we are home to the most evil population on earth, or we are locking up a lot of people who really don’t need to be in jail, for actions that other countries seem to handle in more constructive ways,” he wrote.

“The time has come to stop locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana. It makes far more sense to take the money that would be saved by such a policy and use it for enforcement of gang-related activities.”

Can you imagine?  A president in Barack Obama who says he “inhaled frequently - that was the point” alongside a vice president in Jim Webb who says it’s time to “stop locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana”!

I try not to get my hopes up.  President Carter said we should decriminalize marijuana back in 1978, but then a cocaine scandal involving one of his staff sunk that initiative.  President Clinton became the first president from the cannabis-friendly baby boom generation, admitted to trying marijuana… and then presided over the rise in annual marijuana arrests from around 300,000 to around 700,000.

Yet this time I feel like we are on the verge of some serious change in federal cannabis policy.  Obama says he will not let the DEA raid medical marijuana states.  In 2004 he said we need to decriminalize marijuana, though he’s backed off of those statements during this campaign.  But during a time when our economy is busted and we’re fighting two wars in the Middle East, I’m hopeful that the lure of tax revenue from cannabis and expenditure reductions in the drug war will overcome the fear of change and the scaremongering about the “demon reefers”.

Then there’s John McCain, who has literally turned his back on medical marijuana patients on the campaign trail.  He talks a lot about reducing the size of government and eliminating wasteful spending.  Typical conservative points, but how come that never applies to the failed War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs?

Next president might be gentler on pot clubs
Ever since California voters became the first in the nation to legalize medical marijuana in 1996, the state has faced unyielding opposition from the federal government, which insists it has the power to prohibit a drug it considers useless and dangerous.

That could all change with the next presidential election.

As the candidates prepare for a May 20 primary in Oregon, one of 12 states with a California-style law, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has become an increasingly firm advocate of ending federal intervention and letting states make their own rules when it comes to medical marijuana.

His Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, is less explicit, recently softening a pledge she made early in the campaign to halt federal raids in states with medical marijuana laws. But she has expressed none of the hostility that marked the response of her husband’s administration to California’s initiative, Proposition 215.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee-in-waiting, has gone back and forth on the issue - promising a medical marijuana patient at one campaign stop that seriously ill patients would never face arrest under a McCain administration, but ultimately endorsing the Bush administration’s policy of federal raids and prosecutions.

Senator Obama seems to understand that there is legitimate medical use for marijuana, comparing doctor-prescribed morphine to doctor-recommended marijuana.  Senator Clinton seems to have waffled a bit, saying first that the DEA raids in medical marijuana states should end, but later saying instead that DEA raids shouldn’t be a “high priority”, which leaves the possibility open that the DEA raids would be a priority to some lesser extent.  She also seems unaware of marijuana’s proven medicinal benefits, calling for more research despite the dozens of studies that have confirmed marijuana as medicine.  And Senator McCain has flip-flopped numerous times on this issue, telling one patient he’d never be arrested for using medical marijuana, but then stating that he would not end DEA raids in medical marijuana states.

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