GW Discourse

Although news networks will probably remain transfixed on the already tiresome Balloon Boy boondoggle, the New York Times highlighted a breakthrough in drug policy yesterday- the Obama Administration’s decision to cease active prosecutions of state-sanctioned medical marijuana users and providers. Marijuana legalization advocates are poring over the Justice Department’s new directives, and paying particular attention to this quote by Attorney General Eric H. Holder:

It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana, but we will not tolerate drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law to mask activities that are clearly illegal,” Holder said. “This balanced policy formalizes a sensible approach that the Department has been following since January: effectively focus our resources on serious drug traffickers while taking into account state and local laws.

This is a laudable decision, and appears to constitute a decisive step toward decriminalization and the arrival of a long-awaited intelligent drug policy that concentrates on actual criminals rather than providers of aid to ill patients. But does the policy change suggest full-on legalization is coming?

Public support for legalization of marijuana is rising

While the public opinion is trending that way, I don’t think that President Obama or his Justice Department is interested in following this trend for now. What they are amicable to doing, as this decision indicates, is allowing the 14 states in which medicinal use of cannabis is legalized to serve as closely-watched laboratories of policy.

If the powers that be find that uninhibited state medical marijuana laws are problematic, the federal government will certainly reassert itself. If these case studies bear positive results, then the United States could see national medical marijuana laws on the books, and possible decriminalization later on.