Obama’s transition team responded to the second round of Change.gov questions on Friday, proving yet again that they’d sooner defeat the purpose of the site than actually discuss drug policy.

Last time, a question about marijuana legalization got the most votes from the public, resulting in a one sentence "no" response. This time, the questions were broken into categories, and this question came in first in the "national security" section:

"Our current war on drugs is failing America. Billions of dollars are spent on a losing campaign. Our prisons are overflowing with people that don't deserve to be there. What is the government going to do in an effort to fix this major problem?"

But it wasn’t answered. It was the only leading question to receive no acknowledgement, thus the national security category was ignored entirely. Obama’s team claimed that some leading questions were put aside to make room for new ones:

Since there were so many popular questions in so many categories, we tried to pull out some of them that had been addressed previously by the President-elect or Vice President-elect in order to focus the video portion on questions that haven’t been as specifically addressed during the Transition.

The questions that fall into this category appear at the bottom of the post, except when you scroll down, you find the marijuana question from the first round, but not the new drug war question that won in the second installment. It’s sort of a bait and switch, the idea being that by referencing the old marijuana question, we’ll forget that a totally different drug policy question won in the second round and Obama refused to touch it.

All of this is perfectly predictable, and I won’t meet with much success trying to make a controversy out of it. Still, it serves as yet another obnoxious reminder of the desperate avoidance of any meaningful discussion of our drug policy in mainstream politics.

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