“How can a person lose the right to his body? By being deprived of the freedom to care for it and control it as he sees fit. ….until 1914, The American people had the freedom as well as the obligation, the right as well as the duty, to care for and control their own bodies, manifested by legally unrestricted access to the medical care and the medicines of their choice. During all those years, the government did not control the market in drugs or the people’s use of drugs” -Thomas Szasz *
You don’t have to be a user or provider of medical cannabis to understand the implications of the Obama administration’s dismal behavior towards medical cannabis patients and the industry that provides for their needs. Obama has gone back on his word so many times now, that even his “working class” posturing, just in time for the election, lacks credibility. If he somehow manages to get reelected, we can expect more of the same. “Oh but the alternative is so much worse!” cry the liberal pragmatists. Is it? At least with George W. Bush, we knew where we stood. It is better to have an enemy in plain sight than a false friend with a dagger hidden behind his back.
Barack Obama promised a change in federal policy during his 2008 campaign. Upon taking office he declared his opposition to the use of federal resources against medical cannabis providers and patients in compliance with state law. On 2-4-2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Department of Justice was adopting this policy, and on October 9th of 2009, he put in in writing, in the form of a memo to the Justice Department. The wording of this memo did not specifically prohibit any type of prosecutorial conduct toward medical cannabis, but stated that prosecution of medical users and providers was not an efficient use of federal resources, and should not be regarded as a high priority.
Even during the brief period when this memorandum was in effect, the actions of the DEA did not reflect this policy; the DEA raids on dispensaries, patients and caregivers continued, and to date, the DEA’s behavior towards the medical cannabis industry has been as bad as or worse under Obama than under George W. Bush.
California’s medical cannabis industry provided a working model for safe and community conscious distribution of cannabis. Now federal prosecutors have given notice to California’s dispensaries to close down, or face criminal charges. Eric Holder’s reversal of the policy outlined in the February ’09 memo in June of 2011 began this latest escalation of America’s disastrous drug war, and display of betrayal and blatant hypocrisy by Obama.
At a time when America is in desperate need of new industries, the Obama administration has moved to destroy a source of tax revenue for the State of California, numerous municipalities within the state, and the jobs of dispensary workers. Through its betrayal of the medical cannabis industry, the Obama administration has done more to define the Democratic Party as the party of Big Government, loss of personal freedom, and restrictions upon free enterprise than a barrel of Karl Rove clones spun-out on high grade Chinese Methamphetamine could have hoped to in their wildest dreams.
US Attorneys are using weird authoritarian-leftist reasoning to attack one of the few growth industries left in America, complaining about “people making a ton of money,” and “large scale operations.” No one I know is making “a ton of money,” not when compared with the Wall Street blood suckers and defense industry death merchants. When “Big Pharma” makes outrageous profits, no one gets shut down. No one faces criminal charges and imprisonment.
Production, quality control, processing, packaging, and retailing, are capital-intensive and labor intensive aspects of any industry. In the case of Harborside Health Center, now facing a 2.5 million dollar back-tax bill, whatever revenue was not put immediately back into the community in the form of tax revenue, free services for patients, and living wages and health benefits for employees went primarily to ensuring that the products and quality of services provided by HHC were the best possible in the industry. (I know because I spent the better part of the last year working there)**
Perhaps California’s “Cannabusiness” community should have seen this coming; the weakness of medical-use argument is that it still gives the unholy AMA-FDA-DEA alliance legitimacy. The history of intrusion of these institutions into the personal lives, and self-care options of Americans is a long and ugly one. This struggle will not end until, as Republican Party presidential hopeful Gary Johnson recently suggested, the Feds just admit that they are in the wrong this time.
* “Our Right to Drugs” Syracuse University Press, 1996, Thomas Szasz
** I terminated my employment at HHC on 7-17-2011 and have no commercial affiliation with HHC at this time. This article represents my opinions alone, and I in no way represent Harborside Health Center.