Is Obama winding down the war on drugs?

The U.S. Department of Justice announced new drug prosecution guidelines today, instructing prosecutors not to arrest medical marijuana users or distributors in states where medical marijuana is legal. Glenn Greenwald puts the announcement in the context of an international developments — particularly Mexico’s recent decision to decriminalize pot for personal use:

[A]lmost every country in the region is now actively re-considering its criminalization approach to drug policy.  Even a modest willingness on the part of the U.S. government to pursue or even tolerate alternative approaches could play a major role in accelerating that process, as countries in virtually every region of the world have long been coerced by Washington to maintain strict criminalization approaches and to embrace the destructive Drug War model.

In a column last May, FP Editor in Chief Moisés Naím called the United States “both the world’s largest importer of illicit drugs and the world’s largest exporter of bad drug policy,” despite the fact that most Americans acknowledge that the current approach isn’t working:

First, 76 percent of Americans think the war on drugs launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon has failed. Yet only 19 percent believe the central focus of antidrug efforts should be shifted from interdiction and incarceration to treatment and education. A full 73 percent of Americans are against legalizing any kind of drugs, and 60 percent oppose legalizing marijuana.

This “it doesn’t work, but don’t change it” incongruity is not just a quirk of the U.S. public. It is a manifestation of how the prohibition on drugs has led to a prohibition on rational thought. “Most of my colleagues know that the war on drugs is bankrupt,” a U.S. senator told me, “but for many of us, supporting any form of decriminalization of drugs has long been politically suicidal.”

In other words, don’t expect to see Obama signing federal drug law reform legislation any time soon. At this point, Obama advocating any form of decriminalization at a federal level would be about as politically prudent as pushing shariah law or collective farming. But that doesn’t mean the administration can’t subtly change the tone of the debate.

In contrast to the Bush adminsitration’s explicit condemnations, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske said the U.S. would take a “wait and see” attitude toward Mexico’s decriminalization. As far as I’ve seen, the administration has also been quiet on Gov. David Patterson’s recent revision of New York’s draconian Rockefeller drug laws. Today’s announcement, as the Atlantic’s Chris Good noted, was actually a traditionally federalist measure, rooted in the right of states to set their own drug laws. 

Officially, Kerlikowske maintains that “legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary, and it’s not in mine,” but the adminsitration also seems to be signaling that while they shouldn’t be expected to take the lead on this issue, they’re perfectly content to sit back and let the zeitgeist shift on its own.

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