Black News: Barack Obama Administration May Change Drug Policy

Opening Day is still a month away. The Dow is nearly at a 12-year low. The snow is blowing horizontally up and down the eastern seaboard, and Giselle is officially off the market.

It’s time to talk about marijuana.

Under President Bush, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency undertook several raids on marijuana dispensaries in California. The raids cast into sharp relief the gulf between California state law, which has legalized the distribution of marijuana for medicinal purposes, and federal law and enforcement policy under the Bush administration, which was decidedly less tolerant.

But under President Obama, the scenario might well be changing. According to this recent San Francisco Chronicle article, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is sending strong signals that President Obama - who as a candidate said states should be allowed to make their own rules on medical marijuana - will end raids on pot dispensaries in California.

“What the president said during the campaign, you’ll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we’ll be doing here in law enforcement,” said Holder last week. “What he said during the campaign is now American policy.”

So what did Obama say on the campaign trail? He told one interviewer that it was “entirely appropriate” for a state to legalize the medical use of marijuana “with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors.”

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Attny General Says US Is a “nation of cowards” on racial matters

Eric Holder, the nation's first black attorney general, said Wednesday the United States was "a nation of cowards" on matters of race, with most Americans avoiding candid discussions of racial issues. In a speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History Month, Holder said the workplace is largely integrated but Americans still self-segregate on the weekends and in their private lives.

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," Holder said.

Race issues continue to be a topic of political discussion, but "we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race."

Holder's speech echoed President Barack Obama's landmark address last year on race relations during the hotly contested Democratic primaries, when the then-candidate urged the nation to break "a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years" and bemoaned the "chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races." Obama delivered the speech to try to distance himself from the angry rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

 

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