Word: mccaffrey
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When President Clinton's drug czar, General Barry R. McCaffrey, spoke at the Kennedy School last week, he said that the medical use of marijuana "ought to be looked at and will be looked at." Such sane sensibility, however, has been rare of late from both the General and the administration he represents. More in line with government rhetoric and, more importantly, action, has been the General's campaign against ballot initiatives in Arizona and California which legalized the medical prescription of marijuana. Consider these hostile remarks delivered by McCaffrey on Court TV after the passage of both measures...
Beside showing disrespect for voting majorities in two states, McCaffrey's take-prisoners approach to the marijuana initiatives--which he called a "tremendous tragedy" in Rolling Stone--reflects a hypocritical moralism of Reaganesque proportions. Similar to the First Lady of the '80s, who repeated her "Just Say No" mantra like a mentally disturbed parrot, McCaffrey has been pushing no-tolerance policy on drug use. The legitimation? As McCaffrey made clear in his speech, it is the "protection" of our nation's youth which underlies national drug policy, not any political weakness of our pot-smoking (but non-inhaling) President. McCaffrey...
...McCaffrey is right about one thing: the medical marijuana initiatives will complicate the national ban on marijuana because the feds are now left with three self-defeating options. One is to bust caring doctors who prescribe pot to sickly patients in the two states with successful referenda, a move sure to cause a democratic uprising at the polls--and one to be noticed in California. Second is to ignore the medical use of the drug, which in itself helpful in alleviating the legal burden. Third is for the federal government to step in as the only legitimate possessor...
...needle exchange] issue is on the periphery," McCaffrey said. "We only have 50 percent of the funding we need for treatment programs; that's what we need the most...
Concluding remarks to McCaffrey's speech were given by the Kennedy School of Government's Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management Mark H. Moore and Deborah Prothrow-Stith, assistant dean of Government and Community Programs at the School of Public Health...