by Doctor Tom
Over the past weekend, I listened carefully to the parsing and analysis of President Obama’s inauguration rhetoric without hearing any clear mention of my favorite subject: his take on America’s drug war. My own ten year study of Californians seeking to use cannabis as Medicine convinced me long ago that President Nixon’s “war” on drugs has been a classic government folly of the type lucidly analyzed by historian Barbara Tuchman in 1984. Indeed, given its shabby provenance and unbroken record of failure, the drug war’s survival as UN policy is a disheartening comment on our entire species. That it compounds the costly error of domestic alcohol “Prohibition” is bad enough, but its exacerbation of the racist residuals of America’s tragic embrace of chattel slavery is even worse.
Until his second inauguration, I was hopeful that President Obama’s own biracial background, his having been raised by a single mother, and his adolescent cannabis use might combine to encourage him to use the expanded powers enjoyed by a second-term President to begin rolling back our drug war; but so far, there’s been no evidence of an epiphany.
Quite the contrary, as Norman Solomon’s bitter quip implies, and our summary executions of suspected civilian “terrorists” from the air suggests. Perhaps further questions will be raised; even leading some to question an American drug policy that has encouraged thousands of poor Mexicans to slaughter each other for the privilege of smuggling drugs over our border.
What history tells us is that we are a mistake-prone species inclined to adhere to false beliefs long after they should have been discarded for a variety of reasons.
Although varied, those reasons most often boil down to the ones exposed in Tuchman’s historical examples and should be easily recognizable within the contrived “logic” aired every evening on TV news broadcasts.
We Americans now seem to have decided which former heresies can be aired in public. Homosexuality and gay marriage are now more respectable, but legal cannabis is still in the federal waiting Waiting Room.
Of the reasons you cite for being hopeful the president would roll back the drug war, I am clueless as to why you thought his racial background or the fact that he was raised by a single mother would have an impact on his policies as the U.S. President. If for example you had written about the number of young people sitting in prison for what could be described as minor offenses of the drug law, I could agree with that .
Isn’t it remarkable how many of us have problems with what administrations do and don’t to given the incredibly large number of issues any presidential administration has to deal with and prioritize. I’d think, for example, getting federal judges appointed would be very high on his list, but not because he was trained as a lawyer or for any other seemingly irrelevant reason, but because we sorely need level headed judges to be seated.
EDITOR: Tom O’Connel, MD, has interviewed thousands of California applicants for for medical marijuana access. His findings of patterns have been published in a professional journal.