WHY OBAMA REALLY MIGHT DECRIMINALIZE MARIJUANA

The stoner community is clamoring to say it: "Yes we cannabis!" Turns
out, with several drug-war veterans close to the president-elect's
ear, insiders think reform could come in Obama's second term -- or sooner.

Famously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the United States banking
system during the first seven days of his first term.

And what did he do on the eighth day? "I think this would be a good
time for beer," he said.

Congress had already repealed Prohibition, pending ratification from
the states. But the people needed a lift, and legalizing beer would
create a million jobs. And lo, booze was back. Two days after the
bill passed, Milwaukee brewers hired six hundred people and paid
their first $10 million in taxes. Soon the auto industry was tooling
up the first $12 million worth of delivery trucks, and brewers were
pouring tens of millions into new plants.

"Roosevelt's move to legalize beer had the effect he intended," says
Adam Cohen, author of Nothing To Fear, a thrilling new history of
FDR's first hundred days. "It was, one journalist observed, 'like a
stick of dynamite into a log jam.'"

Many in the marijuana world are now hoping for something similar from
Barack Obama. After all, the president-elect said in 2004 that the
war on drugs had been "an utter failure" and that America should
decriminalize pot:

In July, Obama told Rolling Stone that he believed in "shifting the
paradigm" to a public-health approach: "I would start with
nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are
imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are
getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about
ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives
- -- it's expensive, it's counterproductive, and it doesn't make sense."

Meanwhile, economists have been making the beer argument. In a paper
titled "Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," Dr. Jeffrey
Miron of Harvard argues that legalized marijuana would generate
between $10 and $14 billion in savings and taxes every year --
conclusions endorsed by 300 top economists, including Milton "Free
Market" Friedman himself.

And two weeks ago, when the Obama team asked the public to vote on
the top problems facing America, this was the public's No. 1
question: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the
government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create
millions of new jobs and a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

But alas, the answer from Camp Obama was -- as it has been for years
- -- a flat one-liner: "President-elect Obama is not in favor of the
legalization of marijuana." And at least two of Obama's top people
are drug-war supporters: Rahm Emanuel has been a long-time enemy of
reform, and Joe Biden is a drug-war mainstay who helped create the
position of "drug czar."

Meanwhile, in 2007, the last year for which statistics are available,
782,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana-related crimes (90
percent of them for possession), with approximately 60,000 to 85,000
of them serving sentences in jail or prison. It's the continuation of
an unnecessary stream of suffering that now has taught generations of
Americans just how capricious their government can be. The irony is
that the preference for "decriminalization" over legalization
actually supports the continued existence of criminal drug mafias.

Nevertheless, the marijuana community is guardedly optimistic.
"Reformers will probably be disappointed that Obama is not going to
go as far as they want, but we're probably not going to continue this
mindless path of prohibition," NORML executive director Allen St.
Pierre tells me.

Some of Obama's biggest financial donors are friends of the
legalization movement, St. Pierre notes. "Frankly, George Soros,
Peter Lewis, and John Sperling -- this triumvirate of billionaires --
if those three men, who put up $50 to $60 million to get Democrats
and Obama elected, can't pick up the phone and actually get a
one-to-one meeting on where this drug policy is going, then maybe
it's true that when you give money, you don't expect favors."

Another member of that moneyed group: Marsha Rosenbaum, the former
head of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, who
quit last year to become a fundraiser for Obama and "bundled" an
impressive $204,000 for his campaign. She said that based on what she
hears from inside the transition team, she expects Obama to play it
very safe. "He said at one point that he's not going to use any
political capital with this -- that's a concern," Rosenbaum tells me.
And the Path to Change will probably have to pass through the Valley
of Studies and Reports. "I'm hoping that what the administration will
do," she says, "is something this country hasn't done since 1971,
which is to undertake a presidential commission to look at drug
policy, convene a group of blue-ribbon experts to look at the issue,
and make recommendations."

But ultimately, Rosenbaum remains confident that those
recommendations would call for an end to the drug war. "Once
everything settles down in the second term, we have a shot at seeing
some real reform."

Still, a certain paranoia prevails. Rumors about Obama's choice for
drug czar have lingered on Republican Congressman Jim Ramstad. "He's
been a standard anti-drug warrior for the whole time he's been in
Congress," says St. Pierre. Another possibility is Atlanta police
chief Richard Pennington, who raises fears in the legalization
community of more of the same law-enforcement model. Another prospect
stirring the bong waters is Dr. Don Vereen, the chief drug policy
thinker on the transition team. "He's really a believer in
prohibition and he can excite an audience," says Rosenbaum, who says
a friend on the transition team refused to hint at final contenders
for the drug czar pick. "I'm joking with him, 'I'm going to have to
open up the New York Times for this, aren't I?'" His answer: "We're
going to send out smoke signals."