Despite the best public relations efforts of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy,
the Center for American Progress, and Rolling Stone
magazine, there’s simply no way for President Barack Obama to cast
his drug war record as anything other than what it is: A string of
broken promises punctuated by condescension and mistruth.

In the course of three years, Obama has graduated from
breaking his promise to end medical marijuana raids, to

claiming he didn’t promise to end medical marijuana raids, to

claiming that he’s upheld the promise that he didn’t make. The
only thing he’s done
consistently is give the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Internal
Revenue Service, and the U.S. Attorneys Office carte blanche to
continue George W. Bush-era crackdowns on local medical marijuana
dispensaries. 

With election day nearing, Obama is facing more heat than ever
before. The drug law reformers who hesitantly supported him in 2008
are furious. Coverage of his broken promise has spread from the
alternative press to TIME
magazine and the
financial reporting agency Reuters. His own party is
“disappointed.” If those aren’t enough reasons for Obama to make
good on one of the promises that got him elected, here are three
more. 

3.) Obama has the authority to redirect federal law
enforcement priorities.

The Obama administration’s favorite excuse for cracking down on
the medical marijuana industry is that it has no choice but to keep
cracking down. “I can’t nullify congressional law,” Obama told
Rolling Stone. “Federal law is federal law,” Drug Czar Gil
Kerlikowske told the Center for American Progress’ Neera
Tanden.

And yet, as Chris Weigant recently pointed out,
Obama has plenty of discretion when it comes to enforcing
federal law. The Department of Justice isn’t defending the Defense
of Marriage Act, didn’t prosecute the New Black Panthers in
Philadelphia, and is not going after former Bush administration
officials for torture.

But an even better example is Obama’s use of executive
discretion on immigration policy. In June 2011, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton
issued a memorandum titled, “Exercising Prosecutorial
Discretion Consistent with the Civil Immigration Enforcement
Priorities of the Agency for the Apprehension, Detention, and
Removal of Aliens.”

Here’s anti-immigration lawmaker Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)

describing that ICE memo at National Review Online:
“The memos tell agency officials when to exercise ‘prosecutorial
discretion,’ such as when to defer the removal of immigrants; when
not to stop, question, arrest, or detain an immigrant; and when to
dismiss a removal proceeding. The directives also tell officials
not to seek to remove illegal immigrants who have been present
illegally for many years.”

While ICE hasn’t followed that memo to the letter—and in fact

still rips families apart on a
regular basis—it has made extra-legal efforts to reduce
deportation numbers, which is a testament to Obama’s ability to
ignore federal law when he feels like it.