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It has been almost four months since voters in Colorado and Washington State decided to legalize marijuana for adults and there has still been no indication how the federal government will respond, but it is possible we won’t wait much longer. At the National Association of Attorneys General annual conference, US Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department was reviewing the issue and will make a decision soon.
One of the few question Holder took at the meeting was from Colorado’s AG John Suthers (R) who asked, “when are Colorado and Washington going to hear on the federal governments position on marijuana legalization.”
Holder indicated the federal government is still reviewing the initiatives but the states will hear soon. “We are, I think, in the last states of that review and are trying to make the determination as to what the policy ramifications are going to be, what our international ramifications are,” he said. Holder concluded by saying the people in the states deserve an answer and they will have one “relatively soon.”
The Obama administration has incredibly wide latitude when it comes to dealing with this particular conflict between state and federal law. The administration can choose anything from an aggressive crackdown, selective harassment of only larger business, basically leaving the states alone, or even unilaterally “downscheduling” marijuana under federal law.
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FDL needs to hire a new writer or I suppose it may have been just a bad day. There’s a lot of grammatical errors in this post.
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that medical marijuana can be therapeutic. Marijuana should be reclassified so that people can do rigorous research on its medical applications. Unilateral rescheduling is the way to go, AG Holder!
Like “health care”, you will only be allowed to have marijuana if you buy it from a big corporate cartel, staffed by Obama’s friends.
It’s long overdue for this ridiculous drug war to be eased for cannabis. And don’t forget to make a recommendation that Congress legalize AND subsidize hemp cultivation for the wide range of useful products including biofuel.
Only one question around this story: everyone else from the first Obama Administration is leaving or has left; when is Holder out?
Holder is holding for the duration. The perfect intermediary between the permanent government establishment and the administration. He served his apprenticeship in the white shoes Beltway firms doing exactly the same thing and there is no better place to do it than where he is now.
Don’t hold your breath anybody. This administration is under the control of big pharma and the booze industry. If medical marijuana is legalized, then what’s next? Hemp? Big cotton, lumber, and DuPont will say no that.
Sounds like he is going to use the ol’ international treaty nonsense to keep busting people. Since when did America care about treaties it has signed? Geneva conventions anyone? He’ll come out and say, we would really, really like to let you smoke weed, but we can’t because the UN would get mad at us. So sorry. Maybe if the world says you can, then we’ll think about it. Get ready for the excuses.
I wish more Democrats would call out the lying from the Administration on this. The drug war is explicitly one that Congress puts in the hand of the President because it’s obvious that Congress has no Constitutional authority to criminalize private consensual behavior.
But I wish you would say it in more plain language. I don’t know why you add qualifiers like ‘even unilaterally’ that make it sound like changing the schedule of a drug is some radical or rare act. Rather, it’s exactly what Congress has instructed the Executive branch to do.
Americans: Gee, can we just treat the legalization of marijuana like we we treated the big banksters that broke the law and crashed the world economy?
DOJ: Well, no, we gave the banksters trillions of dollars and we’re sure not going to do that!
Americans: How about just treating them like laws passed by the people in a popular vote?
DOJ: Well, that would be actually listening to Americans rather than just the rich that fuck up the whole world, we’re not sure that’s what America is about anymore…