A key Congressional panel has scheduled a hearing for next week that seems intended to embarrass the Obama administration over its response to the legalization of marijuana in a growing number of states.
The Tuesday hearing before the U.S. Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control is titled, “Is the Department of Justice Adequately Protecting the Public from the Impact of State Recreational Marijuana Legalization?”
Its witness list is stacked with ardent prohibitionists, including:
- Doug Peterson, the Nebraska attorney general who oversaw a lawsuit his state and Oklahoma filed together against neighboring Colorado over its legal marijuana law. The U.S. Supreme Court decided last week not to hear the case.
- Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. attorney from California who helped to lead a crackdown against state-legal medical marijuana dispensaries during the first term of the Obama administration.
- Kathryn Wells, a medical doctor from Denver and a board member of leading anti-legalization organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana.
“The one-sided lineup of witnesses suggests this will be more of a prohibitionist pity party than an open and honest discussion about what’s actually happening in states like Colorado and Washington,” Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, told Marijuana.com in an email.
The caucus, which has the status of a Senate standing committee, is chaired by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and its co-chair is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Both lawmakers have have long been among Congress’s most dedicated proponents of the war on drugs, arguing against efforts to reform marijuana laws whenever possible.
Also scheduled to testify at the hearing is Jennifer Grover of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which released a report last month criticizing the Justice Department for not having a clear plan for deciding when to enforce federal drug laws against people who are operating in accordance with state marijuana legalization programs.
That report was requested by Grassley and Feinstein, who aren’t happy with the relative leeway the Obama administration has given states to implement their own marijuana laws without much federal interference.
In a press release sent Tuesday responding to the president’s newly announced plan to combat the opioid overdose crisis, Grassley characterized the president’s approach as having “decided to effectively suspend enforcement of federal law relating to marijuana in states that legalized it for recreational use.”
In August 2013 the Department of Justice issued a memo directing U.S. attorneys to generally respect state marijuana laws and not target people following those policies unless one of eight identified federal enforcement priorities were triggered. The directive describes how federal prosecutors should avoid interfering with state marijuana programs unless there is evidence that the drug is ending up in the hands of children, being distributed across state lines, contributing to increased impaired driving or violence, among other priorities.
Calling that policy “a sham,” Grassley said, “The mixed messages and misplaced priorities are troubling when so many experts find that people who are addicted to marijuana are much more likely to be addicted to heroin.”
Bill Piper, senior director for national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, called the upcoming hearing “a joke” and said that the caucus’s leaders were out of touch.
“The fact that it is so one sided shows that Grassley and Feinstein are afraid to have a real debate, probably because they know they’re on the losing side of history,” he said.
Four states and Washington, D.C. have already legalized marijuana, and as many as six other states could see initiatives to end cannabis prohibition on their ballots this November. Additionally, state legislatures in Vermont and Rhode Island are considering legalization bills that could have enough traction to be enacted this year. National polling now consistently shows that most Americans support legalizing cannabis.
Grassley also chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he has so far refused to grant a hearing or a vote on bipartisan medical cannabis legislation. That bill, the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States (CARERS) Act, would reschedule marijuana, protect banks that provide financial services to state-legal cannabis businesses, lift restrictions on marijuana research, allow for the interstate importation of cannabidiol-rich strains and authorize V.A. doctors to recommend medical cannabis to military veterans, among other changes.
“Surely Sen. Grassley must see the irony in holding a hearing on what he perceives to be the federal government’s inaction on this important issue,” MPP’s Tvert said. “Meanwhile, he is single-handedly blocking the progress of bipartisan medical marijuana legislation that is supported by the vast majority of the American public.”
Mike Liszewski of Americans for Safe Access, which advocates on behalf of medical cannabis patients, said the upcoming hearing is just another indication of Grassley’s hostility to marijuana in the face of growing calls for policy reform.
21 Comments
As if these Senators, and I use the term loosely don’t have anything else better to do with their time than come back and kick us around again. I am a Vietnam vet from Colorado and this state has proved that we can all get along with each other on the road or not, whether we smoke a joint or in my case eat a cannabis edible. I went to battle to fight a foreign war to preserve our rights in this country, and one of those rights is to determine what meds I can use to ease the pain of personally living thru a war on the front lines many years ago… No senator is going to tell me I can’t smoke a joint in my own country that I still suffer from PTSD, Agent Orange and general lack of respect for the people running it. I guess if these senators were really in tune with our nations growth and the vision for a brighter future for all they might have a clue as to whats going on. Peace…Love….and hope!
Billy Bear… Airborne, all the way! I agree with you 100%. 1st Cav 66-67. Welcome home bro!
thank you bro….and thank you for your service…..Be safe out there and be careful on the trail.
These Senators don’t give a rat’s patootie about the people they were elected to represent. They do the bidding of the bottomless pockets that keep them in office. Cannabis prohibition is big bucks for Big Pharma, Big Oil, and will be for Monsanto. This non-toxic plant should be ubiquitous, and EVERYONE should be profiting from it, without penalty.
Thank you for saying whats on your mind and in your heart Lynn. Our generation was going to make this place a better land to live in….have we?
Interestingly, “our generation” is the one that has lived this historically recent experiment in cannabis prohibition (cannabis was first federally prohibited in 1970 with the Controlled Substances Act.) Has drug abuse, public health, environmental health, and economic health subsequently improved or gotten worse?
Senator Grassley is a has been putz…
This is disturbing news, for sure. The constituents of Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and California Senator Dianne Feinstein should be ashamed of themselves. They keep giving these tyrants their votes, along with vast powers to destroy cannabis commerce. Cannabis advocates everywhere, please, a small army of you must stay in D.C. after Sunday’s 4/2 rally to peacefully disrupt this scheduled meeting next week of the U.S. Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. Fill the room with loud condemnations of these heartless career politicians and their petulant invited guests. Grassley should actually be arrested for continuing President Richard Nixon’s unconstitutional war against “marihuana” (all cannabis commerce). Grassley alone is doing that now, as he arrogantly wields his power on the Judiciary Committee and scoffs at the proposed CARERS Act. Put him in cuffs!
If I could triple that statement here
I Keep telling people here in Des Moines Iowa we need to get our Govenor and all Senators that have been there when Apple first launched from a garage and maybe then we can get a fair hearing on medicinal marijuana and getting the medicine to the patients. They approved to some extent but they have sideblinders on and getting kick backs from pharmacutical companies to keep it illeagal. They’ve been dragging their feet on figuring out how they want to go about how to delay hearings more than following through with what they outlined. They figure we`d give up or if they stall long enough we`d forget . That’s my opinion of what I see here in Iowa
t’s the modern day Reefer Madness al over again. WTF is it with these idiots.
People will stand up to these dopes, and they will be job hunting soon. United we stand..
True but we need to vote them out. If we don’t you might as well fart in the wind. They need to get the research tests they keep locked up from the first study and the real results from those studies and compare to present studies they probably would be same or better.
Lazy prohibitionists need to go strait to hell. These lazy people don’t have time to govern the country and they waste time with this kind of shenanigans they all need to be voted out.
It is not about being able to smoke cannabis, it is about freedom from warentless search and seizure.Nixons war on America is still in full force.
This is the worst part we know the law was enacted to disrupt the society,by tricky Dick. Why are these fossils trying to enforce this obsolete and unconstitutional law? They hate America.
If only there was a way to bypass douche bags like Grassley. This is what’s wrong with American politics: assholes like him kick and scream like toddlers when they won’t do their job of representing the people! Seriously, we need to make a quicker system that impeaches people that don’t get shit done when the majority of people agree on an issue and want/need something to happen today!
Vote them out
That takes too long. We need to be able to vote for laws ourselves, not for people that act for themselves and end up writing repressive laws.
As soon as the federal government puts in place a system to profit from pot, it will be legal.
Like the mafia, any vice is OK with the government, as long as they are allowed to wet their beak.
This is true but we must remember what happend when they tried to run a whore house in Nevada
Tell ’em to call Superman.
Obama isn’t keeping us safe from these Senators! They all need to be out of a job, now!