Congress Shoots Down Hinchey Amendment

By David Borden, AlterNet. Posted July 9, 2004.

Two pieces of news this week serve to highlight the extraordinary stupidity inherent in aspects of US anti-drug policy:

• On Wednesday, the House of Representatives rejected, for a second time, an amendment originally offered last year by Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) that would have forbidden the Department of Justice (DOJ) from using its resources to undermine state medical marijuana laws.
• On Thursday, the Bush administration announced that Bin Laden is organizing to attack the United States again, this year.

I'm not in a position to evaluate the Bin Laden claim, but it is certainly plausible. So why would Congress vote down the Hinchey amendment? If they're serious about protecting the nation, they should be shifting as many of their agents to that task as they possibly can. As drug reform elder statesman Arnold Trebach pointed out in a recent interview, "It is absolutely obscene to think we are wasting one second of law enforcement time on drugs" while there are dangerous people in the world who are determined to kill Americans on our own soil and who have a track record of doing so.

Tommy Chong Walks Out of Prison Counterculture icon Tommy Chong walked out of federal prison Tuesday after serving a nine-month sentence as part of the Justice Department's crackdown on bongs, known as Operation Pipedream. Chong was released from the federal Bureau of Prisons Taft Correctional Facility in California. Tommy Chong went to prison because his company, Chong Glass, made the mistake of selling bongs to head shops in Western Pennsylvania, home to one of two US Attorneys who build careers on bong busts. (The other is in Des Moines.) But he also went to prison in part because of his history as an actor, along with Cheech Marin, in a series of pro-marijuana films in the 1970s and early 1980s. At his sentencing, prosecutors urged that his prior conduct be taken into account. Attorney General John Ashcroft crowed at the time of Chong's arrest. "Quite simply, the illegal drug paraphernalia industry has invaded the homes of families across the country without their knowledge," he claimed. "This illegal, billion-dollar industry will no longer be ignored by law enforcement." It largely had been before. But for Ashcroft the bong-makers of America apparently were a threat worthy of the Justice Department's limited resources, and Tommy Chong the perfect symbolic victim. So what if the federal prosecutors, in all too familiar fashion, had to threaten his wife and children to get him to accept a plea deal. That's the American prosecutors' way. Welcome back to the land of the living, Tommy Chong. – DRCnet

Not that all conventional law enforcement can be scrapped, of course. But the drug fight was lost before it began. Seventy-three years ago this Tuesday, governments of the world convened the "Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs," purportedly attempting to stop the non-medical use and abuse of drugs through global prohibition. Yet three score and thirteen years later, estimates for the annual flow of money through the illicit global drug trade range from $150-$400 billion per year.

Those who allow themselves to think outside the box on this issue understand that these vast funds fuel the criminal underground because of prohibition, not in spite of it or for lack of enough of it. How much crime and violence, how much disorder, how much corruption flows from this warping of the global economy? Though the government's "drugs fund terrorism" ads are fundamentally flawed, they do point to a scary truth: The unregulated profits generated by drug prohibition provide an easy source of revenue for terrorist organizations, some experts think perhaps as much as a third of their money – another reason that the terrorism problem cries out for a move to some form of legalization of drugs as one part of a strategy to address it.

How much more extremely do these reasons apply to medical marijuana patients and their providers, in states that consider medical marijuana legal under their own laws, no less? And with at least one court just one step under the Supreme Court's level, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, considering federal prohibition of medical marijuana to be unconstitutional and therefore illegal?

Such concerns didn't stop DOJ from sending numerous personnel to raid one of California's well known medical marijuana coops less than two weeks after September 11. Nice timing! Congress did nothing to address that bizarre and offensive misallocation of resources. So it's not surprising, even in the face of overwhelming public support for medical marijuana that they would again opt to allow the feds to waste resources attacking sick people who need to use it and disrupting their supply systems.

Any member of Congress who voted against the Hinchey amendment must not be truly serious about security or public safety – or the Constitution.

David Borden is executive director of DRCnet.