DEA Even More Reliant on Fear in the Age of Legalization

DEA Director, Michele Leonhart, is back at it again, spreading fear and incomplete stories in an attempt to bring back the DEA’s Golden Goose: Cannabis Prohibition!

While many states are starting to watch Colorado and Washington and thinking, “Hmm, they are making a ton of tax revenue off cannabis and not really experiencing all these boogeymen that the DEA predicted,” the DEA is suffering. I don’t feel one tiny iota of compassion for the DEA, they have been playing the jackboot thugs for far too long for me to feel bad for them. On an intellectual level, however, I can see that they actually are the biggest victim of legalization. Without their revenue from seizure auctions, they probably aren’t able to buy enough mustache wax and dick-cop sunglasses to supply their ranks.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, DEA Director Leonhart said agency fears are being confirmed in the new, pot-friendly zeitgeist of America. “The trends are what us in law enforcement had expected would happen,” she said. “In 2012, 438,000 Americans were addicted to heroin. And 10 times that number were dependent on marijuana.” I have been sitting with this article for a while now and I still have yet to discern why Leonhart dropped that lovely heroin use stat on us. I might as well say, “Guns killed 4235 in 2013, and ten times that number cut themselves while shaving.”

See, it’s all part of their campaign of misdirection and deceit. They pepper in a little scare-fact about heroin in the same breath as marijuana and hope that people will conflate the details. It is no mistake that they want heroin and marijuana mentioned in the same sentence. It’s an association, however false, that they are all too happy to support. Think of it in terms of search engine logic, if nothing else. Marijuana and heroin got one more fiber of strength between them.

It gets worse. In January, James L. Capra, the DEA’s chief of operations, called marijuana legalization at the state level “reckless and irresponsible,” and warned that the decriminalization movement would have dire consequences. “It scares us,” he said during a Senate hearing. “Every part of the world where this has been tried, it has failed time and time again.”

I don’t know how those words don’t just turn to ash in his mouth. I am remiss to think of any place that has honestly tried marijuana legalization and experienced failure. And why is it reckless and irresponsible? We are never told. Nor are we ever told what these “dire consequences” so long feared by the DEA might be.

Leonhart, who is maligned with AG Holder’s stance and is strongly in favor of mandatory minimums, did attempt to explain why marijuana is so evil: “On Wednesday, Leonhart spoke about why she thinks marijuana is dangerous. She said that marijuana-related emergency-room visits increased by 28 percent between 2007 and 2011 and that one in 15 high school seniors is a near-daily marijuana user. Since 2009, she said, more high school seniors have been smoking pot than smoking cigarettes.”

I’m not going to debate the validity of those numbers, I have written before about how inaccurate they can be. I will, however, point out that Leonhart only stated statistics and failed to really explain why any of those things were bad. The emergency room tidbit seems alarming, but they fail to mention that those cases almost always include cannabis in addition to something actually dangerous (mostly booze). By saying that more teens are smoking pot than cigarettes, you are overlooking the positive that cigarette smoking has declined. Cigarettes are legal, regulated and pretty hard for teens to get on their own. Legalize weed, regulate it, and I bet those numbers drop. Even still, teens are going to dabble in illicit substances. Our own president is evidence of that. Can’t we just smile that their youthful indiscretions will be much more likely to land them on a couch with a bag of Doritos than in a hospital or grave?

The DEA reminds me of a line that David Duchovny as Fox Mulder said on the X-Files when Scully accuses him of lying: “I would never lie. I willfully participated in a campaign of misinformation.”

Until the DEA starts using science, data and, you know, the truth, to support their bullshit, it will remain bullshit. We need to make something else illegal for them to seize and sell, maybe mayonnaise? Or we could just let them gut-kick some pregnant panda bears to get their jollies.