For as long as I've been reading Radley Balko's excellent blog, The Agitator, I don't think I've disagreed with him on a single thing. Until today.
He wrote:
Clinton, for example, let the states make their own policies on medical marijuana and assisted suicide. It's likely that a new Democrat administration would do the same with respect to prescription painkillers.
A little while later, Radley amended that statement as follows:
A couple of readers have emailed to say that Clinton did in fact oppose state medical marijuana initiatives, and even actively lobbied against them. That's true. But to my knowledge, once the initiatives passed, he didn't send federal troops in to shut down clinics, or federal SWAT teams to raid peaceful growing operations operating legally under state law. If there are examples to the contrary, let me know.
Well, he asked for it.
The Peter McWilliams affair happened on Clinton's watch — all of it. So did the notorious Todd McCormick case. Those are two I know about off the top of my head. There are hundreds, maybe thousands more, for anyone who cares to tap into Google.
Also, there are some books Radley might want to check for additional facts on how Clinton fought the drug war, including Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years, James Bovard's libertarian cri de coeur. (For the record, Bovard is no partisan hack, considering he subsequently penned The Bush Betrayal.)
At the Media Awareness Project, always a great drug-war resource, they have this to say about Bill Clinton and his drug policies:
Doomed by his politically disastrous "I did not inhale" campaign line, he has cravenly allowed federal, state and local law enforcement to expand all the tools left to him. His record might be worse than those of Reagan or [the elder] Bush.
The following, in particular, should be familiar territory for Radley, who literally wrote the book on paramilitary drug raids:
One of the peculiarities in the Clinton Drug War was the development of special drug task forces that combine the manpower of federal, state and local agencies — but frequently seem to operate without the oversight of any particular agency. These paramilitary police squads have racked up hundreds of assaults on innocent people and killed several alleged low-level dealers.
I'm not a Clinton hater. In fact, I'll confess that I miss the guy. But when it comes to the Drug War, he was a craven opportunist — a callous, hypocritical law-and-order ayatollah who felt no compunction about allowing 400,000-plus marijuana-possession arrests a year, only to eventually tell Rolling Stone, at the end of his second term, that pot possession, in most cases, shouldn't be a crime.
At the time, Reason's Nick Gillespie had this to say about it:
A president of the United States openly endorsing the decriminalization of pot and a fundamental restructuring of criminal penalties for drug offenses! We’re only left to wonder where Clinton was during the past eight years, as state and federal marijuana arrests continued to climb, as did the number of prisoners doing time for nonviolent drug offenses. Or where the president might have been in 1996, when both Attorney General Janet Reno and drug czar Barry McCaffrey threatened doctors in Arizona and California with license removal and jail if they dared prescribe medical marijuana in accordance with new state laws there. Could this be the same guy who canned Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in part because she dared suggest that drug legalization was worth studying?
Examples of this sort, in which Clinton responds to his own actions and policies as a puzzled outsider, can be multiplied endlessly. For instance, in the Rolling Stone interview, he implies that it was the Republican Congress that insisted on only "narrowing," rather than eliminating, "unconscionable" disparities between crack and powdered cocaine. In fact, the administration sought the same goal, even proposing to lower the amount of powdered coke necessary to trigger a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.
Radley is probably right that Clinton, personally, "didn't send federal troops in to shut down clinics or federal SWAT teams to raid peaceful growing operations operating legally under state law," if that's what he meant. But that version of the truth is much too finely parsed for my taste.
Clinton's overall drug policy was an unnecessary, unmitigated disaster, a stain on his presidency many times greater than his consensual hanky-panky with "that woman." His record, for those willing to take an unflinching look at it, reflects that reality in no uncertain terms.
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UPDATE: Spurred in part by an e-mail I sent him (which was substantially similar to this post), Radley just published a clear-eyed follow-up here.
I'll concede that I've probably given the Clinton administration far more credit (or more accurately, less blame) than it deserves, on a lot of issues.
He remains in favor of a Democratic takeover of Congress after the upcoming elections.
I still think GOP control over all branches of government poses a greater threat to civil liberties than what we'd see if the Democrats were to take over Congress next month. An increasingly secretive, detached, unaccountable, and ever more powerful federal government scares me much more than higher taxes, a higher minimum wage, or or more social welfare. In general, I think the Democrats tend to be less militant about the drug war and less callous about civil liberties (though such differences may in the end be negligible). I'm also pretty certain that if the Democrats do take over, they'll give me plenty of reason to regret ever writing most of this, probably within weeks.
Still, the GOP needs to be punished for its abuse of power, its complacence, and its neglect of federalism, limited government, and civil liberties.
On those last counts, no argument here.
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