After two major policy announcements by Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice, where can we expect the War on Drugs to go from here?
Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced the Department of Justice’s decision to respect laws set forth by Washington and Colorado to regulate and implement the ballot initiatives that legalized marijuana for recreational used by adults.
Earlier this month, he also announced a new plan to stop prosecuting low-level drug crimes on a federal level in an effort to ease the overcrowding of our prison systems, where 47 percent of inmates are being held on drug convictions. This plan includes removing any reference to quantities of illicit drugs that trigger mandatory minimum sentences, and will apply retroactively to cases pending sentencing.
These are two separate announcements that on the surface look like a huge step towards
ending – or at least lightening – the decades-old War on Drugs, which has cost over $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives since its inception in the early 1970’s.
If you dig a little deeper, though, you can see just how far we need to go to adopt a rational drug policy across the board. Here are some steps we would like to see taken in this retreat on the War of Drugs.
Restrict Department of Justice funding for enforcement in medical marijuana states.
The DOJ continues to spend $100,000 a day on medical marijuana enforcement and the cost of the federal government’s war on medical cannabis to date is nearly $600 million. Deputy Attorney General James Cole testified before the U.S. Senate in early September that the DOJ would not go after individuals in compliance with state medical marijuana laws. However, the department’s policy leaves a lot to interpretation for U.S. Attorneys, three of whom (CA, MT and WA) have publicly stated they would continue to aggressively prosecute medical marijuana providers. Until DOJ funding is restricted, federal prosecutors will almost certainly continue to overstep the boundaries of these new policies.
Reschedule marijuana.
By now we’re all familiar with the fact that marijuana is classified as a Schedule I 
controlled substance – a classification reserved for highly addictive drugs with no medical benefit that are unsafe to use even under physician supervision. With support for marijuana legalization at a historic high of 52 percent, it’s impossible to imagine a rational drug policy without removing marijuana from this restricted category of illicit drugs so it can be taxed and regulated like the majority of Americans now support.
Release control of marijuana for research.
Currently, the National Institute on Drug Abuse approves all research studies for marijuana. Obviously it has been a struggle to find any benefits of marijuana when the majority of the studies are into the harmful effects of the plant. HR 689, the States’ Medical Marijuana Prevention Act that was introduced in February by Congressman Blumenauer, among other things, would require the Attorney General to provide access to enough marijuana for research by “an entity of executive branch that is not focused on researching the addictive properties of substances.”
There is no doubt about the fact that the Justice Department’s recent announcements will have some kind of effect on the War on Drugs. The War is far from over and prohibition rages on. But the beginning of the end is here.
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