*President Barack Obama is going for the gold in his second term … if re-elected, of course.
According to discussions between the Democratic candidate’s aides and associates, he’s planning to tackle the war on drugs in America.
Don’t expect miracles. There is very little the president can do by himself. And pot-smokers shouldn’t expect the president to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana. But from his days as a state senator in Illinois, Obama has considered the war on drugs to be a failure, a conflict that has exacerbated the problem of drug abuse, devastated entire communities, changed policing practices for the worse, and has led to a generation of young children, disproportionately black and minority, to grow up in dislocated homes, or in none at all.
Besides that, the drug business is huge in America, making everyone involved a lot of money.
Critics say there’s too much at stake for the drug business to go down. Too many people have too much involved with one of America’s most successful industries.
Check out the full GQ commentary about the War on Drugs here.
So Obama is going to wage a war on “the war on drugs.”
It’s about time.
BTW, that would be one thing Ron Paul wouldn’t have on Obama anymore.
The historian Richard Miller, who usually writes about Abraham Lincoln, describes for viewers how drug laws in American history were created almost nakedly to marginalize disfavored groups. When Chinese immigrants began to crowd out jobs for white people in California, opium consumption suddenly became a crime. Hemp was legal and consumed in a variety of forms until it became a way to reduce economic competition from Mexicans. Cocaine, notoriously, was consumed in polite society throughout the century, but was not the subject of police attention until blacks migrated North to escape the Jim Crowified South.
Jarecki wanted to know why black people have had the roughest go of it, and how drugs and the drug war seem to feed off each other in a sort of deadly symbiosis. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is happy to provide his answer. There’s nothing else there. The prejudicial paternalism of the New Deal ensured that blacks migrating North moved into ghettos that were subsequently redlined, making home ownership a near impossibility. Businesses moved out; the American industrial base collapsed. From door to door, from the stoop of his home to the threshold of his school, a young black man sees only the dealer, who offers him a job. Some kids can escape this reality, and a majority don’t become drug dealers, but virtually everyone who lives in an urban black neighborhood is affected by it.