False Hope Arises from Obama’s Comments to Rolling Stone

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier

In recent days, president Obama has been getting praise for comments he made during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that was published earlier this week in which he opined that marijuana should be regulated like “cigarettes and alcohol.” Coming from a man who has been completely unrestrained in his use of executive fiat, his mere opinion on the matter is meaningless to me. If he actually cared about the issue, he’d already have a pen in his hand. That he doesn’t care is somewhat obvious from his own words.

“It is untenable over the long term for the Justice Department or the DEA to be enforcing a patchwork of laws, where something that’s legal in one state could get you a 20-year prison sentence in another,” Obama said in the interview.

While some hopeful people among the legalization effort took an optimistic view of the above sentiment, I see the lamentations of a statist whose job was made more complicated by the serfs and their pesky state-level ballot initiatives. The will of the people has just gone and made it unseemly to enforce the will of big booze and big pharma now.

So, if the federal government can’t lock people up, they might as well tax and regulate them, just like they do for alcohol and have done since the end of prohibition. Lamenting the difficulty law enforcement has these days when it comes to marijuana and then suggesting taxation and regulation aren’t the sentiments of a person who actually believes in the individual right of every adult to decide whether or not to use cannabis. If the blanket prohibition of cannabis at the federal level had remained unchallenged by state-level laws that legalized the plant, Obama wouldn’t have said anything about reforming marijuana laws.

I’m quite convinced the federal government will move toward much stricter control of the plant in the future, not away from it. The reason is the same that most often motivates government to do something: money.

Pharmaceutical companies are busily trying to extract and isolate the various cannabinoids found in marijuana and use them to make therapeutic drugs. Once the FDA’s wheels are sufficiently greased, they will reschedule marijuana from schedule I. Schedule I drugs are considered to have no therapeutic properties at all. Scheduling marijuana-based drugs anywhere else, II-V, will have several disastrous effects for all but law enforcement and big pharma. Putting cannabis into any schedule other than I puts it squarely under the jurisdiction of the DEA. This will immediately invalidate all state-level laws that legalized marijuana and allow the federal government to resume aggressive policing actions in the states that have legalized it recently.

In states where cannabis is legal for medical use but not recreational, it will become strictly outlawed again. In those states, doctors currently recommend patients use cannabis to treat an ailment, they do not prescribe it, as prescriptions are tracked by the DEA and it’s not possible to prescribe a Schedule I drug in a legal sense. Doctors will instead be forced to prescribe one of big pharma’s new, cannabis-derived pills to patients, with all the attendant DEA scrutiny that involves. These moves will protect the corporatist oligarchs in pharmaceutical industry as well as allow for a steady government revenue stream from asset forfeiture – the practice whereby the state steals property from people arrested for drug crimes. In 2015, the value of all property stolen by asset forfeiture was greater than the value of all property reported as stolen to police.

Remember, government is about control, money and power. They never give up any of those things. The oligarchs have made a fortune off of locking people up and stealing their stuff for possessing a plant; they will not ever give up that revenue stream peacefully, Obama’s false-hope smoke-blowing notwithstanding.

Of course, I could be totally wrong; it’s been known to happen before (see my Election Day coverage). Maybe I’ll live to see my government stop violently locking people up for possessing a plant. Maybe government and the corporatist oligarchs will leave all those billions of dollars on the table and let adults be free. Maybe. But, I doubt it.