Gertrude Stein once famously said of Oakland: “there’s no there there.” Exactly the same thing could be said about America’s drug policy. When one examines the three criteria for determining what “substances” should be forbidden by its crucial “schedule one,” they are utterly devoid of either science or common sense: “dangerous” and “habit-forming” are not precisely defined and the one most widely relied on by police trying desperately to hang on to their meal ticket: “of no recognized use in American Medicine” is utter nonsense. On what basis did either Richard Nixon or John Mitchell presume to speak for “American Medicine?” Were not both the DEA and NIDA created by Nixon’s Presidential Orders after he persuaded Congress to pass the vacuous CSA? By what right did Nixon and Mitchell– a pair of lawyers– presume to define standards for “American medical practice” in perpetuity?
Ironically, for anyone who has read history, the question of defining “standard” or “usual” medical practice was what preoccupied the Supreme Court when they wrestled with the foolish Harrison act between 1915 and 1920. Thus we have come full circle in legal insanity in the past 100 years. The basic issue is that lawyers should not be practicing medicine any more than physicians should be writing law.
Perhaps that’s what’s troubling Obama. He’s a lawyer who broke the law in his youth by smoking pot and is now apologetic because he hasn’t seen through Nixon’s hoax. This is especially ironic in his case because– as he revealed in “Dreams From my Father,” he’d learned of the death of the father he only vaguely remembered through a phone call from an African aunt he’d never met.
Perhaps Obama would feel less guilty about his youthful pot smoking if he realized that the law he broke was based on Richard Nixon’s need to punish the youth of the Sixties and that his own use of cannabis almost certainly helped him compensate emotionally for the absence of his biological father from his life. Finally: if he’d been arrested in Hawaii or Los Angeles and copped a plea for his use (or “possession”) of cannabis, his entire career might have been foreclosed before it could even start. As he intimated in his comments on Trayvon Martin, that’s the fate of far too many young black men today’s America.
The President should rethink his support for Nixon’s illegitimate law and do the right thing. Over the long haul, he’ll be better remembered for political courage than for going along with an ill-conceived, punitive, and destructive law pushed through Congress by his least respected predecessor. The ideal time to begin speaking out would be right after the November elections.
