The Little Brown Reader

War on Drugs Assailed in Congress

An e-mail from the rockin'-then-rockin'-some-more Marijuana Policy Project:

Dear Friend:

This is a busy time in the nation's capital. Congress is currently
considering a number of bills and a nomination related to marijuana
policy. As a result, the Marijuana Policy Project has sent many
requests for action to its e-mail subscribers. You will be pleased to
know that in this alert you will not be asked to do anything.

The purpose of this alert is to describe a very encouraging event that
occurred in Congress this week. On Wednesday, the U.S. House Judiciary
Committee considered the Office of National Drug Control Policy
(ONDCP) Reauthorization Act of 2003. The Democrats on the committee
did not rubberstamp this bill; instead, they used the hearing as an
opportunity to attack not only the Bush administration's medical
marijuana policy, but also the war on drugs in its entirety.

U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) pressed the medical marijuana issue.
First, he proposed an amendment that would have ended the drug czar's
practice of interfering in state efforts to pass medical marijuana
legislation. Then, he proposed another amendment that would have
prevented the drug czar from approving the budget of any agency that
used funds to arrest medical marijuana patients. All Democrats in
attendance supported the latter amendment. (There was not a roll call
vote on the first amendment.)

More surprising was the vehemence with which the Democrats denounced
the war on drugs. The spark that lit the fuse for this explosion was
an amendment proposed by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), which would
have deleted the entire reauthorization bill. Saying that the bill was
"not worth the paper it is printed on," Rep. Waters declared that
ONDCP is "wasteful, ineffective and unworthy." U.S. Rep. Melvin Watt
(D-NC) called the war on drugs a "dismal failure" and said that there
is nothing he is more embarrassed about than the federal government's
drug policy.

Nadler and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) also had harsh words
for the war on drugs, while the committee's ranking member, U.S. Rep.
John Conyers (D-MI), decried the growing number of prisoners in this
country serving time for nonviolent drug offenses. In the end, 10 of
11 Democrats in attendance voted in favor of deleting the entire bill.

The momentum for marijuana policy reform is clearly building. You can
almost feel the once-seemingly impenetrable wall of the war on drugs
starting to crumble. MPP is excited to be involved in this fight and
looks forward to keeping you posted about future developments.

Sincerely,

Steve Fox
Director of Government Relations
Marijuana Policy Project
Washington, D.C.

P.S. Please visit http://www.mpp.org/USA/donate.html or write to
MPP, P.O. Box 77492, Washington, D.C. 20013 to donate to our
lobbying work on Capitol Hill.