“Is crack worse for a person than marijuana?” -Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.)
“I believe all illegal drugs are bad,” Former DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart
“Is Methamphetamine worse for someone’s health than marijuana? Is Heroine worse for a person’s health than marijuana?”
“I believe all illegal drugs are bad,” -Leonhart
This was the hard line stance the head of the DEA had taken during a Congressional hearing only a few years ago.
With the tremendous success Colorado had with outright legalization of marijuana, the support for the DEA’s war on drugs is quickly eroding away. The DEA released a memo earlier this week announcing they will consider rescheduling marijuana “in the first half of 2016”. This is HUGE!
Under the Controlled Substances Act marijuana is currently set as a schedule 1 substance. Schedule 1 substances include heroin and LSD. Schedule 1 means a substance has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” The federal government considers Schedule 1 drugs the most dangerous drugs.
What Happens If Marijuana Gets Rescheduled?
Should the DEA decide to reschedule marijuana to Schedule 2 it would allow researchers the ability to start researching marijuana. As it stands now the federal government provides an average of 9 researchers with marijuana for research purposes per year (2010-2015).
Why Was Marijuana Classified Schedule 1?
A recent report revealed that John Ehrlichman (Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief) admitted that the war on drugs was a designed to undermine Nixon’s political opposition. -meaning, black people and those vocal on the Vietnam War:
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The fact that the very people in charge of enforcing these laws are the ones that schedule them is a clear conflict of interest. The reason the DEA has been so unwilling to budge on the subject of marijuana is because the cash cow would come screeching to a halt!
People around the world are sick and tired of seeing their brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers be locked up in jail for selling a plant! A plant that’s never killed anyone before. A plant that has for millennia provided medicinal benefits. We’re fortunate to be living in a time where the people are realizing the government works for us, not the other way around.
