Facing calls at a regional summit to consider decriminalization, Obama said he is open to a debate about drug policy, but he believes that legalization could lead to greater problems in countries hardest hit by drug-fueled violence.

“Legalization is not the answer,” Obama told other hemispheric leaders at the two-day Summit of the Americas.

“The capacity of a large-scale drug trade to dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint could be just as corrupting, if not more corrupting, than the status quo,” he said.

This is simply an absurd defense of prohibition. If drugs were legalized and regulated like any other product, the business running them would be operate like any other legal business such as beer breweries, pharmaceutical makers, car manufacturers, alcohol distillers, dairies, etc. While corporations can and sometimes do have a corrupting influence over a nation’s politics, the idea that the level of corruption and violence from a legal business would ever be on the scale that we see with the cartels in the illicit drug trade doesn’t pass the laugh test.

I’ve never seen stories about Grupo Medelo, the brewer of Corona, offering local politicians the choice of the “silver or the lead.” Legal breweries simply don’t assassinate dozens of local politicians, police officers and reporters to get their way. Rival Tequila distillers compete with each other for market share using advertising and sometimes lobbying to get a tax or regulatory advantage, but they don’t use armed gangs to fight for market control in a bloody war that cost 50,000 Mexicans their lives. Legal car manufacturers don’t employ criminals to dissolve hundreds of their enemies in acid.

Just as the end of alcohol prohibition in America caused legal and law abiding businesses to replace the deeply corrupt and violent mafia in the American alcohol trade, ending the prohibition against other drugs, like marijuana, would result in law abiding businesses replacing the cartels.

If this pathetic defense is the best President Obama can offer to justify the continuation of a policy that is literally killing thousand of people a year, that is truly sad.

The one positive note is that the growing push for ending the failed “war on . . .” approach, both domestically and internationally, is forcing the federal government to continue to confront and address calls for reform.

Our next reaction is to ask ourselves, “How did we get to this place?” And we find that the genesis of the War on Drugs was in corruption and racism. Two corporatists made their competitor’s product illegal and wrapped that in racial hysteria. By stoking fears of Mexican laborers and black jazz musicians, William Randolph Hearst insured forests would be leveled for newsprint and DuPont insured that BP would ruin the Gulf for plastic bags.

Cannabis prohibition entered a new phase when President Richard Nixon ignored his own commissioned report advocating for legalization and used his War on Drugs as vindictive political retribution against the hippies harshing his Vietnam war.

Our current phase in cannabis prohibition is from President Ronald Reagan’s privatization of prisons – prisons for profit. Halliburton makes prisons and profits from full prisons. And cannabis smokers are an easy bust. One expects that the next phase of the War on Drugs will be the privatization of enforcement duties over to Blackwater.

Further examination of cannabis prohibition enforcement patterns reveals more corruption. Minority communities bear the brunt of the War on Drug’s activities. A greater percentage of the poor and people of color are labeled felons than well-to-do whites. This has cascading repercussions in social mobility when an entire class of people are prohibited from student loans, housing vouchers, and other aides to upward mobility. Creating a permanent underclass guarantees prison profits, and thus the downward vicious cycle. This is the logical consequence of cannabis prohibition. One cannot deny history.

The truly inspirational action we can take in the face of this is to come together as caring human beings and determine that we, together, will change this state of affairs by turning our backs on the present paradigm, that of ‘Escalating Violence and Punishment’, taking cannabis out of the realm of law enforcement, and putting cannabis into the realms of health, with the new paradigm of ‘Least Harm.’

If all of us declare cannabis to be a medical herb, due all the respect and responsibilities of an aide to human well-being, immense benefits will immediately be manifest. Wrongs will be righted – those imprisoned will be released, and more blessings will flow – those in pain will find relief. Other things, like industrial applications and medical research, will generate jobs and paychecks – not trivial benefits, at all. And law enforcement will be able to pay more attention to more grevous crimes.

As voters are asked whether they would vote to end prohibition, many rightly complain that they do not know enough about the issue, realizing that everything they have heard, the racist Reefer Madness campaigns, may be wrong, but what is the truth? How do we know, if we relegalize cannabis, that hell won’t break loose?

I propose that we call for a moratorium on the War on Drugs, a cease fire, a stand down. Effective immediately. In the span of time from now until election day, we will see with our own eyes what changes take place or not. We all must stand up and insist that our community leaders stand up. Each of us act – print out letters, articles, anything persuasive, and meet face-to-face with our religious leaders and encourage our law enforcement departments to join LEAP – Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Let’s start the discussion. End the War on Drugs, starting with a cease fire.

And in the duration, allow cannabis in places like hospice, where the medical and spiritual sides of cannabis will shine, giving those starting their last journey respite from pain, and a boost of energy for their inspirational, creative, and spiritual needs.