Despite the president’s dismissal, legalization advocates said they saw a flood of public response in the hours and days after his remarks.
“It’s a bittersweet thing when the president dabbles in your subject matter,” said Allen F. St. Pierre, executive director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
“In [Obama’s] mind marijuana legalization is not a serious concern and he’s got to confront it, so at least he did, and at least the audience chuckled,” he said. “I’ve been here long enough that, had [President George H.W. Bush] been in that same situation, in a hand-picked audience, they would have hissed in 1991. So this is all moving largely in a very positive direction.”
St. Pierre, who has been an outspoken advocate of marijuana for 18 years, said the baby boomer generation is largely responsible for the shift in discussions on marijuana laws.
“That generation is coming to age now,” he said. “They run our institutions, they run our media, academics, businesses and, frankly, our politics. So as that baby boom generation takes over, their proclivities toward reforming laws are much greater than the prior generation.”
While passage of a federal law legalizing marijuana may be years off, momentum toward decriminalizing the drug — relaxing criminal penalties for violators — is generally viewed by advocates as a positive sign.
Remember, folks, it took from 1906 to 1937 to get marijuana criminalized (31 years) and it’s been 72 years of prohibition since then, with the last 37 being referred to as a “war”. There are very few living Americans who can even remember what it’s like for marijuana to not be illegal. We’re asking thousands of bureaucrats and politicians to admit to not only being wrong but openly lying over the past three generations. We’re asking millions of cops and parents to disregard all those sincerely-held beliefs about gateways and addiction and crime and violence.
Legalization will never happen so long as we wait for them to realize how beneficial it would be someday. It will only happen when we force them to admit how harmful prohibition is now.
