Everyone's talking about this DEA report from the summer that failed to make the rounds until now, probably because they didn't exactly send us our own autographed copies. It's called DEA Position on Marijuana, and as you'd guess from the title, it's as heavy a dose of hysterical anti-pot propaganda as anyone could ever cram into 50 pages.
This thing is a real page-turner if, like me, you actually sort of enjoy the hideous spectacle of desperate drug warriors defending their agenda. They spend 4 pages listing the various accomplishments of the "legalization lobby," and if it was even a page shorter, I might blockquote the whole section. It's that awesome. Otherwise, the report basically consists of cherry-picked data and a jumbo-size portion of anecdotal evidence that marijuana turns the world into a sewer.
One thing that jumped out at me, though, was this curiously contradictory description of federal policy on medical marijuana enforcement:
On October 19, 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder announced formal guidelines for federal prosecutors in states that have enacted laws authorizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes. The guidelines, as set forth in a memorandum from Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden, makes clear that the focus of federal resources should not be on individuals whose actions are in compliance with existing state laws, and underscores that the Department will continue to prosecute people whose claims of compliance with state and local law conceal operations inconsistent with the terms, conditions, or purposes of the law. He also reiterated that the Department of Justice is committed to the enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act in all states and that this guidance does not "legalize" marijuana or provide for legal defense to a violation of federal law.2 While some people have interpreted these guidelines to mean that the federal government has relaxed its policy on "medical" marijuana, this in fact is not the case. Investigations and prosecutions of violations of state and federal law will continue. These are the guidelines DEA has and will continue to follow.
Rather obviously, a policy of targeting operators who violate state law is implicitly acknowledging and upholding those very laws. It's a subtle, but significant, departure from the policy under Bush, and it has the effect of tacitly legitimizing state medical marijuana laws for the first time in the history of federal posturing on this issue. I'm not surprised to find DEA maneuvering to mitigate the perception that they've been ordered to stand down, but that's exactly what happened and everyone knows it. Federal raids on patients and providers haven't entirely vanished, but they're less of a concern in the industry than ever before and rightly so. Anyone who doesn't believe "the federal government has relaxed its policy" should check out what's happening in Denver, or Ann Arbor for that matter.
The great irony of all this is that the federal drug war army spends 50 pages explaining everything it hates about marijuana, but fails to address why or how it came to be the case that we've got dispensaries operating in a half dozen states despite their insistence that this isn't allowed. DEA makes it abundantly clear that they oppose marijuana and possess limitless legal authority to crush anyone who touches it, so why is the industrialization of the American cannabis industry able to make national headlines? Try as they might to frame the legalization movement as a fringe network of cynical stoners and sociopath philanthropists, the truth is that they'd have shut us out long ago if that's all we were. Marijuana policies are changing because public attitudes are changing and politics, unlike drug laws, can't be enforced at gunpoint.
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