Government Shuts Down DEA and ONDCP

OK, not quite. But this is magnificent.

Supporters of programs to provide legal marijuana to patients with painful medical conditions are celebrating Attorney General Eric Holder's statement this week that the Drug Enforcement Administration would end its raids on state-approved marijuana dispensaries. ...

"What the president said during the campaign ... will be consistent with what we will be doing here in law enforcement," [Attorney General Eric Holder] said. "What (Obama) said during the campaign ... is now American policy."

Obama indicated during the presidential campaign that he supported the controlled use of marijuana for medical purposes, saying he saw no difference between medical marijuana and other pain-control drugs.

"My attitude is if the science and the doctors suggest that the best palliative care and the way to relieve pain and suffering is medical marijuana, then that's something I'm open to," Obama said in November 2007 at a campaign stop in Audubon, Iowa. "There's no difference between that and morphine when it comes to just giving people relief from pain."

The lying sacks of shit at the ONDCP will be scrambling to redefine their mission, and they're hardly off to an auspicious start:

The Web site of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy had yet to catch up to the policy shift as of Friday afternoon, and was still prominently featuring a "Medical Marijuana Reality Check" declaring that "marijuana is not considered modern medicine” and arguing that “no animal or human data support the safety or efficacy of smoked marijuana for general medical use."

The federal drug warriors' decades-long campaign of cruelty and mendacity has been reined in, from the top, for the first time ever. No matter what else you may think of Obama and his campaign pledges, this is inspiring, even moving — a big point of light, a North Star, in these inky-black times.

I imagine John P. Walters and Barry McCaffrey are drowning their unhappiness in boilermakers right about now. Don't you wish you could have been a fly on the wall when they received the news?

Comments

[Phelps]

This all assumes that BHO actually intends to follow through on this campaign promise (which would be a story in and of itself.) I'll believe that there has been a shift when the raids on dispensaries ACTUALLY stop.

Everything BHO says has an expiration date on it. I will not be shocked in a few weeks when he admits, oh, wait, it turns out that I was wrong, and this really is a terrible problem that we have to kill sick people over.

[Paul]

I think it is looking pretty good. Nobody in the Justice department can now say they didn't get the memo. We shall see.

If it holds, this is really, really good news and a major victory for drug policy reformers.

[Phelps]

I think you are making a lot of assumptions about what is ACTUALLY in the memo. If the pattern holds, they will continue doing the exact same things in CA, only they won't call them "raids" anymore (maybe "Dynamic Acquisistion of Unsafe Medication") and BHO will claim that the campaign promise is filled.

[hermesten]

I have to admit, Phelp's assertion that it's only a re branding of past action seems more likely than substantive change. The ruling elites and their media whores lie about everything.