Another slice of President Obama’s liberal base has become frustrated and disappointed with him: a growing number of leaders in California’s $1.5 billion medical cannabis community. Supporters of the state’s network of medical pot businesses, like some members in the gay and environmentalist voting blocs, think Obama has not lived up to his campaign promises, Joe Garofoli reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2007, then-candidate Obama said in New Hampshire that he “would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It’s not a good use of our resources.” A 2009 [...]
Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, offers this insightful opinion piece in The Huffington Post calling for President Obama to ease restrictions on marijuana research. Bandow writes: “The War on Drugs continues, four decades after President Richard Nixon commenced hostilities. President Barack Obama — the third president in a row to have used illicit substances in his youth — is no drug warrior. However, he seems unlikely to challenge the disastrous new prohibition. “The president has, however, ended the federal campaign against medical marijuana, ordering administration officials to respect state laws [...]
Nov 302009
“There’s no doubt the Obama administration has been – as promised – less eager than its predecessor to flout state laws and insist on the primacy of federal drug regulations. “But if you’re a cancer patient who legitimately needs relief, if you’re the grower supplying that patient and others with aches and pains for which doctors recommend pot as the safest palliative, the uncertainty that still remains is unsettling, at best.” So writes Thomas D. Elias in his weekly syndicated column, which is carried by newspapers statewide. This one is posted by the Torrance Daily [...]
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