This is the guy who, according to marijuana-legalization activists, has shut down more legal medical marijuana providers in less than four years than former President George W. Bush did in eight years, and ramped up federal attacks on medical marijuana to include not just the Justice Department but also the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He disregarded Latin America’s debate on whether drug legalization can stem narco violence. It is beyond juvenile to participate in what amounts to a video endorsement from America’s most famous stoners.
Even worse, the whole point behind the Obama administration’s digital outreach strategy has been to engage youth in authentic interaction via virtual town hall meetings. But even though questions about marijuana decriminalization or legalization have been at the very top of every web-based “listening” event Obama’s ever participated in, he has been consistent in refusing to address the issue in any meaningful way.
“It’s a pretty slick campaign piece to try to win back this demographic,” Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore narcotics cop and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization advocating for the legalization of certain drugs, told me. “There he is with Harold and Kumar, representatives of the ‘typical’ — even though it’s not true — stoner sucking on soft drinks and eating pizza because they’ve got the munchies from smoking weed, but never really saying it. “That’s just not being honest, especially for someone who has been avoiding answering questions about a legitimate topic of debate that crosses so many age, race, cultural and economic groups. To the elderly, to people with diseases like cancer or glaucoma, and to other people who could get arrested and tagged with criminal records for doing the same thing the president himself did (in high school and college, by his own admission), this issue is not a laughing matter. I resent it.
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