The Washington Times reports:
The campaign went on to say that, as president, Mr. Obama “will review drug sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive sentencing of non-violent offenders, and revisit instances where drug rehabilitation may be more appropriate.” His campaign later stated that Mr. Obama “always” has supported decriminalizing marijuana.
Mr. Obama’s differing answers on marijuana are among a half-dozen conflicts between positions he took while running for Senate in 2004 and those he now articulates while running for president, a review of debate tapes shows. Other conflicts range from ending the embargo against Cuba to providing health care for illegal immigrants.
I wonder if, and how much, this story will hurt Obama in the election. It’s too bad that decriminalizing marijuana — a sensible policy favored by a huge number of Americans — is still a shocking position for a mainstream politician to take.
Curtsy: Shakesville.
Do you think the problem is the position or the inherent complexity of explaining it? I agree that many people, including me, would support some changes in drug laws. But there’s no simple 15 second sound bite to explain the cost/benefit analysis and there’s no way in hell that people will listen to the real explanation before they make up their minds. I think that’s a lot of the problem.
Well – even a stopped clock is right twice a day (except in the military). You know, it’s funny. You can make the case that decriminalizing marijuana is as much a conservative position as it is a liberal one. I don’t see where the degree of public interest/public benefits in suppressing the use of marijuana outweighs the invasion of individual rights that it represents. I think that tobacco is a more damaging drug/delivery system combination than marijuana is.
Do you think the problem is the position or the inherent complexity of explaining it?
Both. These days, if you ask people to think they don’t think, they get pissed off.
I doubt it will hurt him; I’m hoping it will help.
For reference, I’m fairly conservative, live in a very conservative area, and have friends from “crazy” all the way over to “crazy”. I’m thinking that maybe 10% of the people I know oppose legalizing pot.
“You can make the case that decriminalizing marijuana is as much a conservative position as it is a liberal one. ”
Very true, esp. for “small-government” conservatives.
I probably know more conservatives than anyone here, and in my circles, support for pot decriminalization or legalization is also around 80-90%, with those who demur having fairly reasonable reasons (“I worry about the schizophrenia connection”).
This won’t hurt Obama, unless he’s in a political race against some unscrupulous person trying to boost their law-and-order credentials, or bolster their standing with older Americans in order to mask the fact that the challenger is dominating the ranks of young American voters and seizing the future. Whoops.
BananaDanna said:
Very true, esp. for “small-government” conservatives.
People who claim to be conservatives but favor keeping the government the size it is or expanding it/it’s powers are lying – they’re not conservatives. It is likely, though, that they vote Republican.
Conservatives are stuck with/taken advantage of by the Republican party in a relationship similar to that between liberals and the Democratic party.
The way I see it, there’s no good reason for tobacco being legal and marijuana being banned. Either legalize one, or ban the other.
I would not put it past a Tim Russert or a Wolf Blitzer to raise the issue in a debate, should Obama win the Democratic nom. These are the same people who asked Kucinich about Shirley McLaine’s story that they had witnessed a UFO. There’s a war going on, people are without jobs and health care and losing their homes, our government tortures and spies on people, but let’s ask a presidential candidate about UFOs. In fact, in a Obama-vs-McCain context, such a question would give McCain the opportunity to use his morbid (and funny) joke about being “tied up at the time” of Woodstock.
So, yeah, expect it to come up.
Because the best treatment for schizophrenia is jail.
Because the best treatment for schizophrenia is jail.
No, because the best legal status for “things that cause schizophrenia” may be “banned”. I don’t advocate this position – hell, I’d theoretically allow heroin vending machines in the elementary schools – but it’s not intrinsically stupid, the way most other anti-cannabis justifications are. “This might make people seriously and permanently mentally ill” and “this makes white girls dance with negroes!” are not equivalent arguments.
“this makes white girls dance with negroes!”
I remember when they showed Reefer Madness in the Sala de Puerto Rico in the Student Center at MIT. I made the mistake of sitting in the back. Let’s just say that it was hard to see the screen through the … haze.
RonF, I have no memory of anything like that ever happening to me.
I probably know more conservatives than anyone here, and in my circles, support for pot decriminalization or legalization is also around 80-90%, with those who demur having fairly reasonable reasons (”I worry about the schizophrenia connection”).
Last I heard that connection was pretty flaky and it wasn’t at all clear which way the causation went (that is, whether marijuana promoted schizophrenia or if people developing schizophrenia were more likely to use marijuana, possibly to self-medicate). Alcohol is definitively connected to a number of nasty diseases, as is tobacco, but few people advocate banning either of those.
The most common reason I’ve heard for not wanting to decriminalize marijuana is something on the lines of “my kid/parent/spouse used it and went crazy/became disinterested in life/etc.” Hard to argue with people whose lives are messed up by a drug, but the same argument could be made for alcohol.
Robert, they tell me it interferes with memory ….
As far as “why don’t politicians vote for this if 80% to 90% of the American population favor it” – the 80%+ won’t vote against a candidate if he or she condemns marijuana legalization, but the 10% to 20% are likely to vote against the candidate if they favor it.
Robert, they tell me it interferes with memory ….
What does?
Can we have the 2004 version of Obama run for office instead of the current milquetoast Hillary-lite version?
“People who claim to be conservatives but favor keeping the government the size it is or expanding it/it’s powers are lying – they’re not conservatives. It is likely, though, that they vote Republican.
Conservatives are stuck with/taken advantage of by the Republican party in a relationship similar to that between liberals and the Democratic party.”
True… I was using the colloquial definition of conservative, which has come to mean a large umbrella under which there are “social conservatives” (who often endorse expanding government or maintaining the status quo to achieve their aims) and “fiscal conservatives” (who are usually for low levels of government interference in both public and private life). Ever since the “umbrella” was created, a growing number of people choose to identify as a conflation of the two seemingly directly competing brands of conservatism and the terms conservative and republican have become interchangeable, which further confuses both “things” in general and “me” in particular.
What does?
So the argument against legalizing marijuana is that if it is legalized more people might use it and end up like Robert?
The good news is that when people explain why they think Ron Paul is a loon, they typically don’t mention his opposition to the war on drugs.
Weed does not cause schizophrenia. The study that said that it did was “debunked.” (Well there was nothing wrong with the study per se, but the media certainly twisted it.) What they’d done was used synthetic (man made) THC, which is known to cause paranoia in some circumstances. Then they gave them an MRI and said “OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE THE BRAIN SCAN SHOWED AFFECTED AREAS RELATED TO PARANOIA?!?!” The author of the study that found this supposed “link” said (DIRECT QUOTE!), “Cannabis psychosis is a very vague term. If we ever use the phrase, it is only to describe very short-term effects immediately following smoking, and it certainly doesn’t refer to users having a psychotic disorder. People may feel frightened or paranoid, but these feelings pass in a matter of hours or, more rarely, days, and practically never require treatment.”
There is no such thing as a fatal dose of marijuana; it does not contribute to any health problems and is even an anti-cancer agent. Regular smokers of marijuana are at a decreased risk of both lung cancer and brain cancer than the average non-weed smoker. It does not create dependency and does not cause amotivational syndrome; that is a myth. Sure, if you’re kind of despondent and unambitious it’s not gonna HELP you in any way at all, but it is rarely if ever the CAUSE of such people’s problems. And the Lancet recently published a study saying that drivers high on marijuana were actually LESS likely to get in an accident than sober drivers (probably because they were paranoid).
Compare this to alcohol. My boyfriend’s family was torn apart by alcoholism; my best friend’s life until high school graduation was constant hell because of her alcoholic mother. My boyfriend’s best friend was abused for a very large & formative part of his childhood by–you guessed it–his alcoholic parents. Alcohol is the CAUSE of some 85,000 deaths PER YEAR here in the USA; tobacco is responsible for 440,000 deaths per year. Weed? Has not killed a soul worldwide, and actually has health benefits.
So I guess all this means that yeah, I’m leaning towards voting for Obama on Tuesday rather than standing by Edwards…
Paige, I think there’s a bit of misinformation in your post. It’s true that pot smokers show less lung cancer than OTHER smokers. It’s not true that pot smokers show less cancer than NON-smokers. Smoking *anything* is bad for your lungs; cannabis is less bad than tobacco, maybe. (Actually it’s probably considerably worse, but the normal pot smoker smokes way less material daily than the normal tobacco smoker – I can’t imagine smoking 40 joints a day. So it balances out as being not so bad.) Shorter and simpler version of a lot of biology: putting tiny particles in your soft tissues causes cancers. Smoking anything puts lots of tiny particles in some of your most vulnerable tissues. Caveat smoker.
I’m not familiar with the study you say has been debunked. The studies I have seen have not been related to pictures-on-an-MRI kind of thing, they have been epidemiological work that has shown a markedly increased incidence of schizophrenia (on the order of two-fold) among the population of pot smokers. Dianne’s point that it may well simply be that schizophrenics smoke pot because they’re self-medicating for their mental problems rings true to me, but I’m not quite ready to throw away the association as valueless yet. We need to figure it out, because there are a lot of us smoking the doob (cough, but not me of course, because that would be wrong, cough) and we should know the consequences.
Oh–you’re right! I read a book called Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, of which half the volume of the book is its sources. And I could have sworn it said that the incidence of cancer is actually less, and I remember I found it awfully shocking. Maybe I’m just remembering wrong; I know there are several studies now that have shown it to be an anti-cancer agent. And I at least have this in my defense: “There have been no reports of lung cancer related solely to marijuana, and in a large study presented to the American Thoracic Society in 2006, even heavy users of smoked marijuana were found not to have any increased risk of lung cancer.” So yeah, it was probably me who bungled that part.
I was mostly pulling my information from these pages: one, two, three. I have actually read about the studies you’re describing, and I would be totally interested in learning more about that, because yeah, we should know the consequences. I just know that they’re not nearly as bad as with legal drugs :P
(Sorry if this was a duplicate, my computer’s been psycho for the last couple weeks.)
What Sam said. I live in conservative South Carolina, and many conservatives want to free the weed. But it is notable that in particular fundamentalist conservatives always want marijuana to remain illegal.
So the USA’s puritan roots dominate political discourse once again.
Inhaling smoke probably isn’t so good for your lungs no matter what herb is being burned. Brownies on the other hand, rarely cause lung cancer. Like Robert, I’m not ready to dismiss the possibility that marijuana use might carry some increased risk of development of a psychotic disorder, but the risk, even if causal, doesn’t seem to warrant the level of hysteria about the drug. If you take enough alcohol you’ll probably develop a permanent dementia, but that doesn’t mean that your brain will die if you take one drink.
Personally, I don’t care what people imbibe, as long as they know the risks and don’t use in a situation that would put others at risk. So no using on the job, while driving, or while caring for small children, but on your own time in a safe situation with risks that you know and accept, whose business but yours should it be?
Kevin Moore said:
Well of course. What would you expect? How is a reporter to meet his or her objectives if they just stick to asking substantive questions about important issues?
Ah – oh, wait. Are you operating under the illusion that the objective of the media is to inform the public? No, sorry. The objective of the media is to sell advertising space and thereby make money. It’s also to elevate themselves from beat reporter to such rarified (and much better paying) states such as columnist, pundit, anchor, author, etc. After all, Americans don’t actually pay attention to something that takes longer than reading a cartoon (no slight intended, BTW, I like cartoons) (even yours). And how are people to recognize your name as readily as Wolf Blitzer’s or Dan Rather’s if you only ask questions that take more than 10 seconds to ask or answer and that don’t immediately raise controversy?
I was all in favor of Watergate at the time it happened, and I’m still in favor of it. But the Law of Unintended Consequences certainly has had it’s way with the media and it’s audience subsequently.
they typically don’t mention his opposition to the war on drugs.
Actually, Nancy, there is no War on Drugs. There is a War on Some Drugs.
I do not believe marijuana causes a schizophrenic state. I smoke on a daily basis and it has no affect on my lifestyle with school or work. I believe marijuana should be decriminalized but not legalized because I do see potential problems in the over use. I, however, would n0t vote for Obama just because he is ok with decriminalizing it. I hope fellow pot heads can see that it’s not just about one issue, but about the issues for the entire country and not just an individual.
More to the point, we don’t know his position on the subject. If you want to take an ‘unselfish’ view and look at positions that would affect strangers abroad, he looks pretty good.
Also, I’m not sure how one gets from ‘problems with over-use’ to ‘every cop should have the right to fine you arbitrarily unless you behave dishonestly’.