Obama Opposes Drug Legalization, But Hasn't Explained Why

Having already commented on what I liked about Obama's comments on Thursday, I think it's equally important to take a look at what was missing. By acknowledging legalization as an "entirely legitimate topic for debate," the President has elevated the conversation still further into the realm of mainstream political acceptance, but with that comes a heightened obligation for our political leaders to clearly articulate and defend their positions. Obama's polite, predictable response leaves unanswered most of the defining questions in the drug policy debate and ultimately fails to address the concerns that make this issue a top priority for a large segment of the American public.

I can't imagine anyone was surprised to learn that the President is "not in favor of legalization," but his very next words certainly fall far short of defending the drug war:

I am a strong believer that we need to think more about drugs as a public health problem. When you think about other damaging activities in our society, smoking, drunk driving, making sure you’re wearing seat belts, typically we’ve made huge strides over the last twenty to thirty years by changing people’s attitudes. On drugs, we have been so focused on arrests and incarceration and interdiction that we don’t spend as much time thinking about how we can shrink demand. This is something that within the White House, we are looking at very carefully.

For all the very careful looking that's apparently being done, it strikes me as odd that we had to win a series of high-profile online votes for two straight years before Obama felt a need to even attempt a straight-forward response. When it comes to things a sitting President might be expected to say about drug policy, some of this borders on awesome, but observations like these won't get us very far so long as they're prefaced on the condition that drugs have to remain illegal. The arrests will continue as long as police have something to charge people with, incarceration rates will climb as long as sentences remain harsh, and blood will spill as long as killers are the self-appointed CEOs of the international drug trade.

The brilliantly subtle incoherence of Obama's comments is that he basically pledges allegiance to prohibition, while simultaneously admitting that mass arrests and incarceration are a significant obstacle to the most effective approaches at our disposal. Though correct in one respect, such talk serves only to confuse anyone endeavoring to understand why failed strategies still enjoy the bulk of our drug control budget. Aggressive law enforcement either works or it doesn't, and once you admit that it's made the problem worse, you can't turn around and defend it as part of a balanced approach. If you're baking a cake, you're not going to put poop in it, regardless of the quantity. Yet, here we have a cake recipe that consists of mostly poop, and they're telling us it might turn out ok if we carefully arrange slices of pineapple and kiwi on top.

This debate can't continue much longer without our drug war allies around the world becoming hopelessly disillusioned by an exported American ideology of drug prohibition that can't even be confidently defended by the nation that designed and disseminated it.