The Huffington Post led today's brief with a piece by Arianna herself, one that urged the Obama Administration to end America's futile, decades-long War On Drugs and replace it with a system that provided treatment for, rather than criminalization of, non-violent drug users. Huffington noted that it was - cough - high time to halt the epidemic of incarceration (which disproportionately affects visible minorities) and other collateral damage resulting from the government's law-and-order approach.
Huffington praised the Obama camp for some of the promising statements it's made in this direction, including an announcement that medical marijuana grow houses would no longer be raided and new drug czar Gil Kerlikowske's proposal to stop using the term "war." She also called the Administration out for its hypocrisy, pointing out that a medical pot dispensary in California had been raided just days after Obama's anti-raid statement and that the Obama budget leaned even more in favour of enforcement - as opposed to prevention - than its predecessors.
Huffington is right to hold the Democrats' feet to the fire, but it's not surprising that Obama has taken tentative steps forward, then retreated. The main enemy in the establishment of a sensible drug policy in the U.S. has always been the lack of political will - it's simply bad politics to talk too loudly of relaxing drug laws, lest a politician be tarred as soft on crime. And there has never been any shortage of politicians to shriek their moral outrage from the opposite side of the issue. It feels to me like Obama's just testing the waters here - floating a few cautiously radical ideas out there like wet fingers into the wind. If these notions are met with a collective shrug from the American populace, look for him to get more aggressive on this issue. If they're rebuked, he's still got a toehold in the status quo and can retreat there without suffering too much political damage.
In this corner, we're hoping for the shrug.
No comments:
Post a Comment