ECHOES OF PROHIBITION IN NATION'S POT POLICIES

I wonder if Attorney General Eric Holder was able to catch any of Ken
Burns' latest series on PBS, on the rise and fall of Prohibition.
Given Holder's growing zeal for suppressing medical marijuana
commerce, as confirmed by this week's crackdown on dispensaries in
California, he might have found the second episode, "A Nation of
Scofflaws," particularly timely.

As the PBS promotional links explain, Prohibition turned otherwise
"law-abiding citizens into criminals, made a mockery of the justice
system" and "fostered cynicism and hypocrisy that corroded the social
contract all across the country."

Hundreds of cities and towns brazenly defied the 18th Amendment's ban
on booze for more than a decade, just as 16 states and the District
of Columbia today openly defy federal law on marijuana, permitting
its use as medicine. And yet the Justice Department can't quite
decide what to do about today's scofflaws: Should it bow to the will
of the people in the states that embrace medical marijuana or should
it defer to Drug War? enthusiasts on its staff?

The die-hard Drug Warriors view commercial dispensaries as an affront
to the rule of law and the thin wedge of legalization. They want to
show those of us in the defiant regions who's boss.

At first Holder seemed to reflect the views of his own boss,
President Obama, who in March 2008 told an Oregon newspaper, "I'm not
going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent
state laws on this issue." Holder echoed that sentiment two months
into the administration, and his department confirmed the policy in a
memo giving the green light to medical marijuana activity in
compliance with state laws.

Ha. In the latest departure from that policy, four U.S. attorneys in
California announced Friday they were taking action to shut down a
number of dispensaries they described as bad actors, while denouncing
the entire "for-profit industry" as being responsible for
"significant public safety issues and perhaps irreparable harm to our
youth," to quote the breathless words of one of the quartet.

Are Colorado's dispensaries at risk? Of course they are, in the sense
that the Obama administration has proved itself utterly bereft of
principle on the issue of medical marijuana. A perfectly sensible and
understandable policy has been tossed aside and replaced with a
facsimile from the Bush years, when it was often impossible to guess
why the DEA chose to raid one medical marijuana outpost and not
another. Indeed, "medical marijuana raids have been more frequent
under Obama than under Bush, when there were about 200 over eight
years," according to Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum.

Meanwhile, U.S. attorneys have spent recent months trying to bully
jurisdictions such as Rhode Island and Arcata, Calif., into
suspending approval of dispensaries.

Still, Colorado's dispensary owners aren't altogether whistling past
the graveyard when they insist they feel more secure than their
counterparts in some states. Although the California attorney general
authorized dispensaries operating as patient cooperatives, that state
doesn't actually regulate them. By contrast, Colorado has "a
transparent and highly regulated statewide system," Sensible
Colorado's Brian Vicente told The Denver Post. "I think the federal
government is more comfortable knowing the state's in charge."

Our state law includes local opt-out, meaning no community has to
tolerate dispensaries if it doesn't want to. So while voters never
explicitly approved dispensaries when they gave the green light to
medical marijuana in 2000, elected officials indisputably have.

Nearly 80 years ago, Prohibition ended because it had become legally
and morally absurd. Yet how should we describe the spectacle of U.S.
attorneys and federal agents plotting to bankrupt established
businesses while intimidating jurisdictions that dare to consider
medical-marijuana commerce? It seems that turning law-abiding
citizens into criminals while fostering cynicism has yet to go out of style.