Monday Links
- Under new policy guidelines from the Obama administration, federal drug agents won’t pursue medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they follow state laws. Cato scholars have long called for drug policy reform, and have examined other drug decriminalization program that have shown tangible, positive results.
- Ignored by the media: Antarctic ice melt lowest ever measured.
- Obama visiting China in November to discuss expanding military agreements. Here’s what’s at stake.
- Video: Why American health care kills.
- Podcast: “Coerced into Medicare“
Drug War Insanity Goes Up in Smoke
As my colleague David Rittgers notes below, the announcement by the Department of Justice that it will no longer seek to arrest medical marijuana users is a breakthrough for common sense in federal drug policy.
It is bizarre that it takes a major policy announcement to spell out what a waste of police and court time it is to investigate the ill people who use medical marijuana. Historians will surely look back on this period and ponder how our government could have seriously embraced the opposite policy, in the same way we look back at the strange days of alcohol prohibition.
The Obama administration should be taking much bolder steps to stop the criminalization of drug use more generally. More and more people have come to recognize that the drug war has been given a fair chance to work, but it has proved to be a grand failure.
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