Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project sends along video of ONDCP chief John Walters openly boasting about using federal tax dollars to defeat Question 7, a Nevada ballot initiative that would effectively legalize up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. Walter’s mere presence in the state to speak against the initiative alone seems to be a violation of the Hatch Act, much less his use of federal dollars to organize aginst it. Unfortunately, the Office of Special Counsel seems to have made a gaping “drug war exception,” to the Act, desipte the fact that what Walters is doing seems to be in direct defiance of the plain language of the law.

Violation or no, Walters’ and ONDCP’s interference in a state election is yet another example of the Bush administration’s utter contempt for federalism. This administration’s definition of the term seems to be, “the states should be able to set their own policy, except when we disagree with them.”

Note too that even if we were to accept that the social maladies Walters says “correlate” with marijuana use (a relationship that has zero scientific value, and thus oughtn’t even enter into policy discussions) are indeed connected to the drug, they’re caused by the drug’s prohibition, not it’s use.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 10:05 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.