State of the Leaf in 🩸

Until recently Obama had not much to say about marijuana or drug war. His latest comments were over a year ago, where he has a comment about its risks but as an attorney had no comment on legality.

“I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol“.

Look to Leafly’s State of the Leaf for consistent attention the issue deserves. Very beautiful graphic website with an overview of the US and other data. You could guess that the green places are good and red places need help. This is what the map looked like in January 2015; I believe it remains unchanged.

I’m living in a red state. :(

This year, marijuana and the war on drugs a hotter topic apparently.

In January: Obama on marijuana legalization

“What you’re seeing now is Colorado, Washington through state referenda, they’re experimenting with legal marijuana.

“The position of my administration has been that we still have federal laws that classify marijuana as an illegal substance, but we’re not going to spend a lot of resources trying to turn back decisions that have been made at the state level on this issue.

“My suspicion is that you’re gonna see other states start looking at this”.

This month: Obama blasts war on drugs: ‘It’s been very unproductive’

President Obama on Thursday said America’s decades-long war on drugs has been “unproductive” and that sending low-level narcotics offenders to prison tears apart families and leads to even more crime.

Speaking at a town-hall meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, the president said U.S. drug policy must be revamped. But he also said it’s unlikely the U.S. will take steps to decriminalize or legalize marijuana anytime in the near future.

“I am a very strong believer that the path we have taken in the United States in the so-called war on drugs has been so heavy in emphasizing incarceration that it has been counterproductive,” he said. “You have young people who did not engage in violence who get very long penalties, who get placed in prison and then are rendered economically unemployable, are almost pushed into the underground economy, learn crime more effectively in prison — families are devastated. So it’s been very unproductive.”

Mr. Obama also praised “unlikely allies” on Capitol Hill — presumably referring to Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, among others — who want to work with the administration on reforming the nation’s drug sentencing practices.

The president also said the federal government will keep a close eye on how marijuana legalization works out in Colorado and Washington, but he does not expect major overhauls in national policy in the next several years.

“We will see how that experiment works its way through the process. Right now it is not federal policy and I do not foresee anytime soon Congress changing the law at a national basis,” he said.

Forgot about this, in March: The President Interviews the Creator of “The Wire” About the War on Drugs

If we can start down this path to a more productive way of thinking about drugs and its intersection with law enforcement, 20 years from now we can say to ourselves, well, maybe we got a little smarter. And we didn’t get here overnight; we’re not going to get out of it overnight. But the fact that we’ve got people talking about it in a smarter way gets me a little encouraged.