OBummer: Prez Turns Out To Be Just Another Drug Warrior
Flashback.
---
Reason Magazine
It is not hard to see how critics of the war on drugs got the impression that Barack Obama was sympathetic to their cause. Throughout his public life as an author, law professor, and politician, Obama has said and done things that suggested he was not a run-of-the-mill drug warrior. In his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father, the future president talked candidly about his own youthful drug use, in sharp contrast with the Democrat who then occupied the White House and the Republican who succeeded him. As an Illinois state senator in 2001, he criticized excessively harsh drug sentences and sponsored a bill that allowed nonviolent, low-level offenders to enter court-supervised treatment instead of going to jail, saying “we can’t continue to incarcerate ourselves out of the drug crisis.”
As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama called the war on drugs “an utter failure” and advocated marijuana decriminalization. As a U.S. senator, he cosponsored legislation aimed at reducing the federal government’s draconian crack cocaine sentences. Unlike Bill Clinton, who notoriously admitted smoking pot while claiming he “didn’t inhale,” Sen. Obama forthrightly told a 2006 meeting of magazine editors, “When I was a kid, I inhaled, frequently. That was the point.”
Obama stood apart from hard-line prohibitionists even when he began running for president. In 2007 and 2008, he bemoaned America’s high incarceration rate, warned that the racially disproportionate impact of drug prohibition undermines legal equality, advocated a “public health” approach to drugs emphasizing treatment and training instead of prison, repeatedly indicated that he would take a more tolerant position regarding medical marijuana than George W. Bush, and criticized the Bush administration for twisting science to support policy—a tendency that is nowhere more blatant than in the government’s arbitrary distinctions among psychoactive substances.
***
Related links:
- A User's Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama
- 'The Choom Gang': 9 juiciest details from Barack Obama's days as a pothead
- Bipartisan Hemp, Medical Marijuana Bills Introduced in Congress (List of Co-Sponsors)
- Is America Ready to Legalize Marijuana?
- Why Republicans should support marijuana reform
- Rep. Jared Polis Hosts Reddit AMA Thread, Talks Federal Marijuana Legalization: 'The Drug War Has Failed, Time To Try A New Approach'
Feb 20, 2013 at 5:25 PM
Reader Comments (2)
Perhaps his lips are just swollen in this photo from tokin with the Choom gang.