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Once again the issue of marijuana reform has dominated President Obama’s attempt to have the public submit questions for an online question and answer event.
This afternoon President Obama will be taking part in a live chat on Google+ called “Your Interview with the President”. Individuals were encouraged to submit and vote for questions. Not surprisingly, the issues of marijuana legalization and medical marijuana overwhelmed all others.
According to the Whitehouse Youtube page, with voting currently closed, 18 of the top 20 most popular question are about marijuana/drug policy. Seven of the top 20 question are directly related to questions created by NORML and its unusual removal from the page. NORML’s original question was:
“With over 850,000 Americans arrested in 2010, on marijuana charges alone, and tens of billions of tax dollars being spent locking up marijuana users, isn’t it time to regulate and tax marijuana?”
The second most popular question on the page is from LEAP’s Stephen Downing, a former LAPD deputy police chief. His question is:
Mr. President, my name is Stephen Downing, and I’m a retired deputy chief of police from the Los Angeles Police Department. From my 20 years of experience I have come to see our country’s drug policies as a failure and a complete waste of criminal justice resources. According to the Gallup Poll, the number of Americans who support legalizing and regulating marijuana now outnumbers those who support continuing prohibition. What do you say to this growing voter constituency that wants more changes to drug policy than you have delivered in your first term?
So far every attempt by Obama to directly reach out to young voters through some form of online question and answer system has resulted in young adults overwhelming voting to confront the President with questions about our government’s marijuana policies. It happened with his transitional website Change.gov, his first Youtube townhall and with the White House’s new “we the people” petition site.
Marijuana reform is an issue young voters across the ideological spectrum care deeply about. While marijuana legalization is rarely talked about in our mainstream political discourse, at every opportunity regular Americans use the internet to try to make legalization an issue Obama can’t ignore.
36 Comments
The elites will sooner turn in Dick Cheney for blowing up the World Trade Center before they give in on weed.
His corporate owners won’t allow him to talk about it, it puts the total in totalitarianism .
My bible claims God is the manufacturer of this “drug” .
I am probably an unusual being. I have never seen, smelled nor smoked marijuana. In my youthful days—with limited educational resources—I bought into the media demonization of marijuana and its consumers. Now, with no immediate desire to consume the product, I find myself on the other side of the argument. As a gardener, I am allowed to grow castorbean, amanita mushrooms, and foxglove. But should a bird (or the wind) deposit a marijuana seed in my garden, and it germinates and flourishes—I can be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated as a marijuana grower/distributor???? WTF!!!!!
A further thought: even though I do not wish to be a consumer at this time, with an aging body I find it wrong to say I can buy BigPharma concoctions (even with proven, harmful side-effects) to treat hypertension, mood disorders, and/or pain because they have the FDA stamp of approval. But I do not have access to a natural product; growing my own medicine is ILLEGAL! Again, I say: WTF!!
Agree with both above comments. How’s O gonna tell f’g idiot know nothing upstart younguns that he is bought & paid for by PhRMA, PIC, etc. Rahm’s never around to swear at ‘got no alternative’ supporters when you need him.
These questioners are asking him to lie. What else can he do? His position is clear on this.
If you wouldn’t sit on a jury and vote to imprison a medical marijuana patient, then you have no business voting for Barack Obama. Because it is the exact same thing.
Story a couple of weeks ago about how some one was arrested for transporting an illegal liquid across a state line.
It was raw milk that a farmer was delivering to a customer in the neighboring state.
Ya see, big corps can do whatever they want. Rest of us, not so much.
This government CANNOT (and will not) legalize marijuana, as that would signal an end to the Endless War on Drugs and place the “forfeiture laws” under very unwelcome scrutiny.
As an aside; I have often wondered at the roaring silence of the legal profession when those laws were first promulgated.
But then, “acceptable” scapegoating must start somewhere, and where better to start than assaulting the Rule of Law?
“Due process” is SO inconvenient.
There is no appeal to reason when violent arbitrary power, especially when it may fall back upon claims of “National Security” and hide behind secret decisions which “the people” cannot be privy to, holds sway.
Nonetheless, I wish the petitioners well.
DW
Wouldn’t it be fun to watch President Asshole run against Ron Paul?
Yeah, but just think of how pissed O is that he keeps getting the same Qs.
It seems apparent that Obama is saving up his pro-pot actions for closer to the election, if in fact they are coming. If they aren’t, he’s a jerk; if they do, he’s a opportunistic panderer. It’s not like he doesn’t know it’s a pressing issue or anything.
—I can be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated as a marijuana grower/distributor???? Don’t forget you can lose your house for that one seed that grows.
He’ll appoint a commission to study the issue.
Nixon’s war on drugs provided the training wheels for Bush’s war on terror. It demonstrated that Americans would not defend the bill of rights and would believe anything they are told.
My question:
“Mister President, the science supports the medical use of marijuanna. Why doesn’t your administration follow the science and move it from Schedule I to Schedule II under the Controlled Substances Act?”
When I asked that question, I got a response full of junk science. Obama’s obsessed with avoiding this issue.
Raising elitist blood-pressure is always worthwhile, eCAHN.
Yet, Obama is a vindictive man, little given to empathy and less to introspection … such beings are liable to lash out or instruct their willing minions to do so.
Expect to be sternly scolded for wasting the Great One’s precious time in his heart-felt, bare-knuckled fight for the down-trodden little people against the Awful, Evil, Big Bad Meanies …
Bots against BOtheration!!!
;~DW
The endless War on Drugs was, indeed, the beginning, workingclass, of all the endless wars that have followed.
It tested the waters for easy scapegoating and launched many a political career, and as well, led to the incarceration of many.
Afterall, a single, solitary pot-seed is much more dangerous and destructive to society than ALL the too-big-to-jail Banksters piled up (high) on top of one another.
Dare we say that money is the most dangerous “drug” of all?
Or merely the “love” of it?
Could a “saying” be derived from such wee thoughts as that?
DW
Marijuana can KILL.
My brother has been busted for 18 6″ pot plants, because he’s allergic to most pain medicine, over 22 months ago. He’s on medical disability and medicare and the state has invested in stents and a pacemaker/defibrillator. He has had two incidences where that went off in the last couple of months from the stress of dealing with the narcos/police and being denied the drug that comforts him. i expect him to die before the trial.
Oh yea before , when he was arrested, while under arrest they denied him his heart medication until his angina was so severe they transferred him to county hospital and where they handcuffed him to the bed and placed an officer outside his door over less than an ounce of MJ.
o doesn’t care .
PS I know someone who’s under arrest for kiting checks same MO they denied this heart medication in jail until he had a heart attack in there now he’s in a hospital for treatment. This countyr is sick.
Glad to see my tax dollars being so wisely spent./s
Bernie Sanders(I-Vt) for President!!!
Bernie Sanders is just allowed in congress as a costermonger’s interlude, i.e., a comic act in front of the curtain while the next scene of the tragedy is set up behind the curtain.
There are no (or very few) Democrats, and obviously no Republicans who oppose the War on Drugs.
Time to support the Greens (Jill Stein and local folks), or the Socialists (Stewart Alexander/Alejandro Mendoza and local folks) or the Justice Party (Rocky Anderson) or whoever.
Next week the DFL in Minnesota is having a caucus. I don’t know whether to go there and make a pointless ruckus or just try to help a new party. And if so, which one? Arggh!
~
Q: “how would you describe a country that witholds life saving medications from its sick citizens and do you want to be president of a country that witholds medicine from sick patients?”
Corporate.
Let me mention it one more time, as FDL refuses to. Libertarian candidate for Pres., Gary Johnson, is FAR MORE Progressive on social issues than “Clarence Thomas” Obama. For instance, Gary Johnson advocates legalizing marijuana. (Truth is, he’s every bit as Progressive as Obama on fiscal issues as well, because instead of throwing money at our mega-banks, he would hold them accountable.)
Uwwwww! I knew it! Damn you Vermont!
~
wa ballot initiative I502 acheived ballot status last week!
~
ha ! dont know to laugh or cry…
(but that’s OK, pharma has meds to sell to you if you are either laughing or crying)
Why would elites want to change drug law enforcement if it doesn’t make more money that building prisons, making fancy cop equipment, lawyering fees,distribution of product (oh they wouldn’t do that!)and banking. The War on Drugs started as Nixon law and order propaganda, before he knew he would be facing McGovern in 1972. Over time the War on Drugs evolved into price support. Higher the price, bigger the profits, just like any other commodity. BigPharma’s resistence to grow your own medicine is minor in comparison.
Banks have survived by laundering illegal drug money for DECADES. They won’t let that practice stop.
The CIA has acquired a huge national budget to allow it to continue to import and “fight” drugs
Big Pharma makes money from treating, but not curing disease. Cannabis is #1 enemy of big pharma because it does so much that their overpriced pills don’t at all or don’t as well. Big pharma will never allow marijuana to be legal.
The cotton industry will never allow hemp cloth to compete — hemp is 100% sturdier, stronger and longer lasting.
People who are ill and need medicine? Fuck them.
Agreed. Completely.
Also, a greed, marblex, a complete and continuing greed …
DW
Ending the drug war would put thousands of people out of work. These are people who have made lots of money on the war and they have lots of high powered connections and lots of money to hire lobbyists. There is a whole infrastructure that would have to be dismantled.
Ending the drug war would take courage and commitment so you can cross the Democrats off right now. Maybe Ron Paul could get it done.
I think this will have to come from the states first.
The states can’t end it due to the Controlled Substances Act. The Feds continue to fight it even when the states legalize it.
People shouldn’t get so worked up about this.
It is strictly a business decision.
Just like dope dealers sometimes dime out their competition to the cops, Barack Obama is doing the same thing on behalf of Big Pharma.
Taking down the marijuana market makes the pharmaceutical business stronger. Crony capitalism at its best. And it costs big business nothing, total externalization of costs.
Also, it serves to maintain the police state.
Win-Win as far as Obama is concerned.
Don’t forget that the whole current network of importers and distributors also have a vested interest in keeping it illegal. And they are making even more money off of it than law enforcement.
Their profits are entirely based on prohibition.
(Hey, great way to counter a prohibition supporter; Why do you support the profits of Drug Lords?)
I read someone’s observation that no prohibition in history has ever made anything unavailable, but immediately and without fail creates a black market.
With the intermingling of enforcement agencies and state, interstate and int’l boundaries there’s just to much gravytrain at stake for our Law Enforcement Agencies to allow national legalization. The budget money lost, the graft not collected, the prison unions’ lost political contributions, etc are just tips of the criminal enterprise iceberg. Big Pharma is the umbrella payola scheme for pols not to do anything on this issue. Obama is the Happy Face Hammer for the Police State corruption that knows no bounds in America, The Beautiful! Beautiful if you’re a narco-lawyer, narco-politician or narco-law enforcement official!