About that DEA raid yesterday
In case you missed it, the DEA conducted a raid yesterday on a medical marijuana dispensary in South Lake Tahoe, California. That's right - in the second full day of the new administration that had promised to end the raids.
Keep in mind that Michele Leonhart is still head of the DEA. My gut instinct is that the DEA is acting on its own, ignoring Obama's campaign promises and pretending ignorance and business as usual, without anything concrete in place yet to deter them. It really shows the rank stupidity of the DEA leadership.
To conduct a raid right now does nothing but motivate the medical marijuana community in huge ways at a time when the Obama administration wants to focus on other things. It calls attention to everything that's wrong with the DEA, and puts it up in big glowing neon letters.
I could be wrong, but my guess is that Michele has already gotten a stern call from Rahm.
But just to be sure, it would be great if everyone lit up the switchboard at the White House.
I got an email from Cheryl...
I just called Obama at 202-456-1111. They have no computers and are taking hand-written notes. The VOLUNTEER who answered the phone for me said, I wasn't the only one to call him about this and there are over a dozen volunteers and the phones are ringing off the hook. I told him about the DEA raid yesterday & asked for Obama to keep his promise about ending DEA raids on medical cannabis patients and hoped he would end them for medical cannabis providers as well. He speculated that the DEA may have been trying to get one last raid in before the transition is complete. All the notes will be gathered into "subject" and given to the call-center boss and may be reported to Obama. Please call. Let your voice be heard. If you get a busy signal, try again. Leave a voicemail or speak to a real person.
Excellent advice.
By the way, the no-computers thing is another part of the stupidity of our government.
"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs. [...]
One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.
10:43:59 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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