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?