In his high school days in Hawaii, Barack Obama hung out with a circle of friends nicknamed “the Choom Gang” — “choom” being Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. Almost all the students in this group went on to be entirely productive and successful citizens — writers, lawyers, businessmen and, of course, President of the United States.

This is by way of reminding everybody out there that cannabis is still listed by the DEA as “Schedule 1″, along with meth and heroin, and that Obama could start the descheduling process for marijuana himself instead of passing the buck to Congress. Obama himself is living proof that cannabis should be descheduled; his legacy could only be improved by ending a program of persecution based entirely on the deceptions and racism of Harry Anslinger and Richard Nixon.

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The DEA schedule of narcotics — in which cannabis is classifed alongside heroin — was a product of the Nixon era, when the modern War On Drugs started cranking up. Tricky Dick himself, on a leaked White House tape, was said to have called marijuana “…the drug of choice of Mexicans, hippies and niggers.”

Here’s former White House Domestic Affairs Advisor, the notorious John Ehrlichman, with a slightly more nuanced framing of this policy in a 1994 interview:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
–John Ehrlichman, Nixon Domestic Affairs Advisor, 1994

The DEA schedule is Nixon’s schedule, part of a policy born out of deception and racism. It’s time to DEschedule cannabis.

We’ll be at the White House on May 20, how about yourself?

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This piece was inspired by a blog post by Owen Paine, one of my favorite contributors to one of my favorite Leftie blogs, Stop Me Before I Vote Again. He quotes some interesting passages from President Nixon’s 1971 State Of The Union Address in which he mentions the “expansionary” budget he was about to submit to Congress, a “full employment budget”. Here’s The Tricky One’s own words from back in ‘71:

“By spending as if we were at full employment, we will help to bring about full employment”

Now, mind you, I’ve never been a Nixon revisionist, and I wasn’t one of those bonehead Liberals who spent the entirety of the Dubya Administration wishing they had Nixon back, but, still… full-employment budget? Then, I started thinking back some more… EPA? Detente with the Soviets? Healthcare program compromise with Ted Kennedy? Christalmighty, I thought, was Nixon, on balance, more progressive than Barack Obama?

Yeah, sure, Nixon dragged out a pointless war that hardly anybody wanted, bombed civilians at the drop of a hat, surveilled and harassed dissident activists, and sponsored coups and assassinations all over the world, but hasn’t Obama also done these?

Jeeeeeezus… full-employment budget.

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