Tell President-elect Obama about the CHANGE we seek!
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 3:02 pm | By: Radical Russ
President-elect Obama’s Change.gov website is asking Americans to submit their vision for the future of the country. I encourage everyone to visit the site and tell the Obama Administration that the change we want to see is the end of adult marijuana prohibition!
This is what I submitted to the site:
To the Honorable President-elect Obama
My vision for the country is one where America finally changes its 71-year failed policy of treating drug use as a criminal justice problem. Where we finally embrace science and reason and treat drug abuse as a public health issue and drug use as a personal privacy issue.
In my vision, an incoming president who used cannabis (and cocaine) in his youth — taking over for an outgoing president who used cannabis (and cocaine) in his youth, who defeated first a sitting Vice President who used cannabis in his youth, then a sitting Senator who used cannabis in his youth, following two terms of a President who used cannabis in his youth (but didn’t inhale) — that new president would enact a change that has been recommended since Mayor LaGuardia’s 1942 study, President Nixon’s 1972 Shafer Commission Report, President Carter’s 1978 Address to Congress, DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis Young’s 1988 decision, and the 1999 report of the Institute of Medicine, and that is to end federal penalties for the personal possession and use of cannabis and leave the states to regulate cannabis as they see fit. Why should we be arresting 872,721 Americans every year and ruining their chances to become president?
In my vision, an incoming administration serious about addressing global climate catastrophes would change the idiocy of banning industrial hemp production in America. The irony of every other industrialized nation in the world producing hemp, which we then import to make perfectly legal products, must be causing hemp farmers Thomas Jefferson and George Washington spin in their graves. We send our money and troops to the Middle East for oil to put gas in our cars when we could grow hemp biodiesel to put in our cars. We cut down trees and use more Middle Eastern oil to make products that could be made with American hemp crops that also don’t need pesticides and soak up greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
In my vision, an administration that believes in science and wishes to help Americans with their health care will change the confrontational policy toward the states that have enacted medical cannabis laws and will encourage more research into the vast potential of cannabis as a medicine. It would champion a change of the scheduling of cannabis to Schedule III alongside synthetic THC (dronabinol) and allow doctors in all fifty states to prescribe cannabis as they do any other Schedule III drug.
In my vision, the president would change the Office of National Drug Control Policy and recast it as a drug policy arm of the Surgeon General’s office, rather than a criminal justice policy arm of the Drug Enforcement Agency. The president would appoint to the office of “Drug Czar” a medical professional rather than a law enforcement or military figure. In my vision, resources are directed more toward treatment and rehabilitation of drug addicts with regulation and control of drugs (reducing and controlling demand) rather than interdiction and incarceration (attempting to control supply), which has been proven time and again to inflame rather than address the problems with drugs in America.
In my vision, the incoming vice president, who championed more criminal justice solutions and tougher drug law enforcement while in the Senate, and the incoming White House Chief of Staff, who unconstitutionally tried to muzzle doctors’ free speech rights with respect to medical cannabis recommendations during the Clinton administration, have seen the light and have changed their mindset regarding America’s War on (Some) Drugs and will truly come to represent the “change” we all voted for.
In my vision, we get truly revolutionary change that no administration before – Democrat or Republican – has ever found the courage to attempt. Change that could instantly move us toward solving the problems of overcrowded prisons, busted state budgets, over-worked police departments, reliance on foreign oil, hunger and nutrition, creating new farming and manufacturing jobs, and cleaning up the environment. I never thought my vision could come true in my lifetime… but I never thought I’d live to see an African-American president, either.
Russ Belville
Portland, Oregon
You don’t have to ramble on as long as I have. Just tell President-elect Obama you want him to stick to his word and end the DEA raids in medical marijuana states and to consider the federal decriminalization (a la Barney Frank’s HR5843) of cannabis.
