Obama: Rescheduling Medical Marijuana Not My Call

CNN reports that — despite the increasing calls from activists, the public, and even Dr. Sanjay Gupta (who was Obama’s original pick for Surgeon General) to reschedule marijuana for medical uses — President Obama has absolutely no plans to do anything about it. Hell, even Dr. Manny Alvarez, Fox News’s medical correspondent, supports medical marijuana.

It’s the same tired old nonsense we’ve heard over and over again from the administration. The claim that only Congress can do something about it — when in reality, the President, as Chief Executive, can order the DEA to reschedule cannabis. The claim that “only drug traffickers, and not medical marijuana patients will be targeted” — when in reality, the Obama administration has been raiding and closing down fully state-legal dispensaries in many medical states for years.

The exact quote is that Obama “does not, at this point, advocate a change”, so the federal government will continue to ignorantly tell itself and anyone who will listen that cannabis is dangerous, has no medical benefit, and belongs in the same category as heroin. This puts the Obama administration on approximately the same intellectual level as the Catholic Church vs. Galileo 400 years ago.

But there is some good news in all of this, although we have to dig for it. The qualifying phrase “at this point”, and the fact that the mid-term elections are still a year in the future, give us some hope. Perhaps Obama will finally be persuaded by the vast amount of scientific knowledge proving that the government’s position is, in the words of Frederick Frankenstein, “doodoo”.