desert dude
Well-Known Member
Cheesy trumpeted Holder's sudden backing away on mandatory minimums. Here is the reason it happened.
http://harpers.org/blog/2013/08/on-rand-pauls-war-on-the-war-on-drugs/
Twice now this year, Rand Paul has flanked the Obama Administration from the left. The first time, when Paul staged a dramatic thirteen-hour talking filibuster to protest the government’s secretive drone-assassination program, the episode could have been written off as an opportunistic stunt. But with his latest move as the tacit leader of the disorganized libertarian-populist movement, Paul staked out less impeachable ground: America’s cruel, racially biased, and generally nonsensical drug-sentencing laws.
I discussed Holder’s move with Neill Franklin, a thirty-four-year veteran of the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore Police Department who serves as the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of current and former officers and officials working to end the war on drugs. “Too little, too late,” he told me. Franklin appreciates that the government’s highest-ranking criminal-justice official admitted to a failure of the system, but he is wary of being fooled twice. In October 2009, Holder’s Ogden Memo vowed to respect states’ rights where medical-marijuana laws were concerned. But by the end of Obama’s first term, the Drug Enforcement Agency had raided and closed more than four times as many state-approved marijuana shops than were shut down during George W. Bush’s eight years in office. From Montana to California, the DOJ, DEA, and IRS worked in concert to do precisely what the administration had vowed not to do.
http://harpers.org/blog/2013/08/on-rand-pauls-war-on-the-war-on-drugs/
Twice now this year, Rand Paul has flanked the Obama Administration from the left. The first time, when Paul staged a dramatic thirteen-hour talking filibuster to protest the government’s secretive drone-assassination program, the episode could have been written off as an opportunistic stunt. But with his latest move as the tacit leader of the disorganized libertarian-populist movement, Paul staked out less impeachable ground: America’s cruel, racially biased, and generally nonsensical drug-sentencing laws.
I discussed Holder’s move with Neill Franklin, a thirty-four-year veteran of the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore Police Department who serves as the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of current and former officers and officials working to end the war on drugs. “Too little, too late,” he told me. Franklin appreciates that the government’s highest-ranking criminal-justice official admitted to a failure of the system, but he is wary of being fooled twice. In October 2009, Holder’s Ogden Memo vowed to respect states’ rights where medical-marijuana laws were concerned. But by the end of Obama’s first term, the Drug Enforcement Agency had raided and closed more than four times as many state-approved marijuana shops than were shut down during George W. Bush’s eight years in office. From Montana to California, the DOJ, DEA, and IRS worked in concert to do precisely what the administration had vowed not to do.
