It turns out Attorney General Eric Holder
attended the White House Correspondents’ dinner
after all. Stranger still, while there Holder answered a
question from the Huffington Post about President Obama’s
less-than-truthful comment on his supposed inability to stop the
Department of Justice from cracking down on medical marijuana
suppliers.

Maybe the Huffington Post deserved that Pulitzer! (Well, except
for the fact that Holder was their guest for the evening which is
problematic). But here’s the passage from HuffPo on
the Rolling Stone interview which Mike Riggs
delightfully skewered for its general softball quality, last
week. One of the few real questions that the magazine managed
to ask, however, was hey, what’s the deal with this
continued drug war thing? Well:

Speaking with Rolling Stone, the president tried
to explain his original comments, claiming that the recent pressure
on dispensaries and providers was in line with his intent.

“What I specifically said was that we were not going to
prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical
marijuana,” Obama said. “I never made a commitment that somehow we
were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and
operators of marijuana — and the reason is, because it’s against
federal law.”

The president continued: “I can’t nullify congressional law. I
can’t ask the Justice Department to say, ‘Ignore completely a
federal law that’s on the books.’ What I can say is, ‘Use your
prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to
go after things that are really doing folks damage.’ As a
consequence, there haven’t been prosecutions of users of marijuana
for medical purposes.”

Jacob Sullum had some words for the president last week as well,
namely “Obama is full of shit. During his campaign, it is true, he
often referred to medical marijuana users.
But he also promised to leave suppliers alone.”

But here’s Huffpost managing to actually ask about the
president’s evasions on the issue:

[A] HuffPost reporter noted to Holder that Obama’s reference to
“congressional law” was misleading because the executive branch
could simply remove marijuana from its “schedule one” designation,
thereby recognizing its medical use.

“That’s right,” Holder said.

After Kimmel’s speech, a Holder deputy told HuffPost that there
was no coordinated war on medical marijuana, but that some
individual clinics were breaking both state and federal laws.

Just Say Now’s blog at FireDogLake adds:

It is very important that Attorney General Holder himself admits
that Obama’s “can’t nullify Congressional law” statement is
completely misleading, because the relevant section of
the Controlled Substance Actspecifically gives him, the
Attorney General, the power to implement a process to reschedule
cannabis administratively.

Even Obama’s Attorney General admits there is nothing forcing
the administration to wage a war on medical marijuana and nothing
stopping the administration from making medical marijuana legal
under federal law. This is an active choice the administration is
making.

It certainly is. But Holder, it seems, was out that evening
just “to
have fun.” It was nice of him to pause and admit that his
boss is indeed full of shit. Hopefully both of them enjoyed Jimmy
Kimmel’s stand-up.

Mike Riggs on the Obama administration’s same old, same old
plans for fighting the
let’s-not-call-it-war-on-drugs.