Marijuana

The New Yorker has just dropped an extensive profile of President Obama by David Remnick, who wrote a major book on the president published in 2011.

It’s nuanced and touches on issues like gay marriage and Israel and Palestine. But Obama also drops this bombshell about marijuana: “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Obama goes on to add more nuance to the statement. Here’s the context for the statement:

“When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. ‘As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.’

“Is it less dangerous? I asked.

“Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, ‘Scratch that,’ or, ‘I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.’

“Less dangerous, he said, ‘in terms of its impact on the individual consumer. It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.’ What clearly does trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations for marijuana among minorities. ‘Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,’ he said. ‘And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.’ But, he said, ‘we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.’ Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that ‘it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.'”

We’ll let you click over to read the whole piece. We’ll also note that Obama’s statement about how pot use is policed differently depending on class and race, is in line with his policy.

It was Obama, remember, who signed into the law the Fair Sentencing Act, which dealt with the disparity with which the justice system dealt with powder cocaine and crack cocaine. Obama also issued commutations to eight people who were convicted of drug crimes, saying their terms were unusually harsh in the pre-Fair Sentencing Act days.

In August, Obama’s Justice Department also issued guidance to federal prosecutors, telling them to “focus on cartels, criminal enterprises and those who sell the drug to children, not on casual marijuana users.”

As Toronto’s Globe and Mail explains, a transition phase began today that will allow more price fluctuation and phase out home and small-scale production.

“In its place, large indoor marijuana farms certified by the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and health inspectors will produce, package and distribute a range of standardized weed, all of it sold for whatever price the market will bear,” the newspaper reports. “The first sales are expected in the next few weeks, delivered directly by secure courier.”

Large-scale growers have begun applying for licenses to produce marijuana — including one Ontario company that hopes to grow cannabis in an old Hershey chocolate plant, as Reuters reported last week. At least two large growers have already received their licenses.

The free market will likely establish a price of around $7.60 per gram of dried marijuana bud, according to “Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations” posted by Canada’s health department. [And if you’re wondering about that spelling, it follows a precedent set in Canada’s controlled substances law.]

The health agency projects that the legal marijuana supply industry “could grow to more than $1.3 billion per year in annual sales” within 10 years. Officials say the illegal cannabis market “represents a multibillion dollar per year industry.”

The Canadian government says the new plan will also reduce its own costs, on a website explaining some of the changes.

“The current program costs Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars each year because the $5/gram charged to program participants who choose to purchase from Health Canada is heavily subsidized,” Health Canada says.

Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy has asked Attorney General Eric Holder or his deputy to appear at a Sept. 10 hearing on Capitol Hill — and to be prepared to state the Obama administration’s policy on the issue. Leahy’s been asking questions ever since Washington and Colorado voters approved marijuana for recreational use in last year’s elections.

Holder has said for months that the Justice Department is studying how it will handle the state initiatives. And the Office of National Drug Control Policy hasn’t responded to Leahy’s now months-old letter asking about the issue, the chairman said.

“There’s only so many resources,” Leahy told NPR in a telephone interview. “And to waste time on going after simple marijuana cases in states where it’s either been legalized, or legalized for medical uses, seems like a bad use of our limited law enforcement dollars.”

Leahy says federal authorities should devote time to cracking down on violent crime and deadly drug cartels — and he says he wants assurances that state officials will not face criminal jeopardy for carrying out their duties to license marijuana exchanges in the 20-odd states where marijuana is legal for medical purposes.

“The federal government ought to respect” these decisions by states, Leahy says.

The conflict stems from the 1970 federal law known as the Controlled Substances Act, which continues to include marijuana among its Schedule I drugs — the most tightly regulated substances, considered to have a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use.

In recent years, coalitions of drug reformers, including some former law enforcement officers, have called for a looser approach to regulating marijuana. But that stance has been unpopular, especially within the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Leahy says he’ll use the hearing next month to explore whether the change can be accomplished through executive branch action or whether Congress needs to legislate on the issue. At first blush, “this would require a national decision but it could be all taken care of by prosecutorial discretion,” he says. “It is a state and federal conflict and it’s one we don’t need.”