Hat tip (Ugh) Huffington Post
It seems DEA administrator Michelle Leonhart got that long-awaited summons to Eric Holder's office for a closed door sit-down over her resistance to marijuana legalization and shorter sentences for drug TRAFFICKERS. (Emphasis mine)
There are several reports out there about this, but I chose the Huffington Post to draw attention to their liberal slant on the story. Note the use of the term "bluster" in the title.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/16/michele-leonhart-dea-sentencing-reform_n_5319085.html
"For Holder and for President Barack Obama, sentencing reform has become a critical, second-term legacy item, as they aim to bend the arc of incarceration policy away from a federal system well practiced at imprisoning drug offenders for as long as possible. But those efforts are colliding with institutional resistance from law enforcement officials with a single-minded focus and, perhaps, turf to defend."
Comment: Note the use of the term, "drug offenders" as if to imply that federal prisons are overflowing with prisoners whose only offense is drug use. That is not the case. Those in prison for drug offenses are those convicted of commercial trafficking in drugs. Not even street level dealers are targeted by the feds.
"She publicly distanced herself from Obama's remarks about marijuana's relative harmlessness. She griped about the Justice Department's failure to try to block marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington state. She clings to a comically outdated view of drugs, refusing to acknowledge a difference between pot and crack cocaine."
Relative harmlessness as opposed to what? Marijuana is not harmless as current studies continue to show. As for Colorado and Washington, those two states are in contravention to federal law. The Obama administration simply does not want to hold them accountable. As for Leonhart not seeing a difference between marijuana and crack cocaine, I would love to see where that came from. Every DEA agent (and she was a street agent herself) knows that crack is one of the most insidious drugs out there, much worse than powder cocaine. I would bet the farm and two mules that Huffpo is taking whatever she may have said out of context. (Marijuana is still a Schedule I drug partly due to the fact that it has no medically recognized therapeutic use.)
"Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, applauded Leonhart for what appeared to be shift in tone, and said the Smarter Sentencing Act would help make sure sentences were administered appropriately."
"Smarter Sentencing Act" Don't you just love the language?
"Leonhart, who has been a part of the DEA bureaucracy since 1980,....."
Leonhart began her career as a street agent. She has worked undercover as did most DEA agents of her generation. I would challenge the writers of this piece to try that "bureaucratic" work out for a couple of days. It would be an education for them.
"(Holder, on the other hand, has called the federal position on state marijuana laws a "law enforcement decision.")
No, it is a political decision.
"Any DEA administrator feels an organizational imperative to support the existing drug laws and sentencing structure, even when doing so means opposing the purposes of the attorney general and the president, as we see currently," Kleiman said. "So I'd be inclined to reconsider my former opposition to merging the DEA" and perhaps the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, into the FBI. "That would allow the combined agency to turn the skills and aggression of today's DEA agents against gun traffickers, cigarette smugglers, and purveyors of political violence."
Again? Twice in my career with DEA, we escaped a move to merge DEA into the FBI. It was a bad idea then, and it is a bad idea now. Drug enforcement is a unique culture quite distinct from that of the FBI. Furthermore, the addition of more responsibilities for the FBI given the terror problem they have to deal with now doesn't make sense.
Final point: Letting drug traffickers in federal prison out early is not what I call "reform".
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5 comments:
Marijuana is not harmless as current studies continue to show.
Neither are alcohol or tobacco. They just happened to be more respectable among the classes that wrote the drug laws.
Siarlys,
As bad as tobacco is, it does not make you high or cause deaths due to bad judgement (except to the smoker). It's a matter of free choice while society has a right to regulate the age limit and where you can smoke in public.
Alcohol (my drug of choice) can be used responsibly and is so much a part of culture, it can never be taken away.
Marijuana's sole use is to get high.
Who are these people that set themselves up like some Micro Gods demanding absolute blind obedience and total subjugation, deciding what is good for everyone. I object. The D.E.A.are a group of evil authoritarian sociopaths., Completely out of control and way over the top.I will never give my free will nor my self disciplined choice to make my own decisions as to whatever I desire. It is time for this group’s evil grip to be released from of every free thinking person on this planet. At the very least, America’s asinine drug policy’s should be held in check at the U.S. border. The world is fed up with these equally asinine drug laws and especially the enforcement methods used to criminalize and subjugate everyone.This evil group of authoritarian sociopaths are not content with enforcing law they are using puppet judges and politicions in making theirn own, I stand in objection. Please help to resist these evil people who have used law and order to seize power and make a mockery of our justice system..No longer content with enforcing laws, they have crossed the line and begun making their own, and expect other government departments to support them. Not just the D.E.A. but other state law enforcement agency’s. Please urge our elected officials to cut this asinine drug funding. They are also demanding the lions share of grant funding to further their own evil plans. This grant funding was meant for the benefit of the citizens. These greedy thieves are trying to take it all We all had enough of these sociopaths when the S.S. goosestepped onto the world stage during the last world war. Their arbitrary banning of drugs show them not to be competent wit the responsibility they demand.
Eichard,
You sound like a nice, well-adjusted young man. If I may ask- setting aside the idea of keeping people from using drugs-assuming you are a libertarian- because DEA doesn't arrest people for using drugs-
What is your opinion of people who manufacture, traffic and sell heroin and cocaine for massive profits-and kill people who get in their way or cross them? Maybe we can stimulate a discussion about who is evil.
Alcohol does produce a high of sorts, although is is chemically classed as a depressant. Marijuana can be used responsibly, or as responsibly as alcohol. Excess is of course hazardous.
Carrie Nation was not wrong about the evils of "demon rum." She was merely misguided about the possibilities of driving those evils out of the world by Prohibition. That produced more evils than it dampened.
So has the set of drug laws that eventually gave rise to the DEA. Richard, the did not "set themselves up," they were commissioned by, inter alia, President Nixon and Governor Rockefeller, with the complicity of the NY legislature and the U.S. congress, including Tip O'Neil.
It is not entirely irrelevant that if the drug laws need to be changed, if it would be beneficial to change them, there is a powerful institution committed to NOT changing them for the same reason ALL bureaucracies oppose change: 'That would make my agency, my budget, my job, irrelevant.'
There is, of course, also the fact that many agents have sincerely put their lives on the line with decades of dedicated service, and have been battling some of the most ruthless criminals in the world. We owe them as least as much respect as the soldiers who served honorably in Iraq, or Vietnam, albeit it was a terrible mistake to send them there in the first place.
The cartels already have enough financial resources that (like the Mafia in past decades] they will find ways to continue and insinuate themselves into all kinds of niches, but we could cut down their cash flow and influence by undercutting the artificially inflated price of these drugs for those who will not do without them.
We will of course need the same panoply of laws and programs to deal with drug addiction that we do for alcoholism and drunk driving. It won't be entirely effective either. But life will be a bit more peaceful and less hazardous, net, which is the point.
If there were a walled compound where people could go get their fix, but it was ruthlessly banned from the streets where people live and children walk to school, we'd be a lot better off than having dealers hide out in civilian homes in residential areas.
If people could buy inspected marijuana legally from open storefronts (probably in restricted zones similar to porno shops), that would get the traffic out of the neighborhoods. One hundred twenty years ago, heroin could be bought over the counter in any pharmacy. Did that produce worse results than we have now?
(Besides, we will still need a DEA, but it will have a different culture, just like we need a bureau of ATF, only it too needs a different culture.)
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