Before Obama swore in as America’s 44th president, he labeled the war on drugs as “The war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws. We need to rethink how we’re operating the drug war.”
But with the signing of a reform bill in favor of crack sentencing in 2010, the first term of Obama’s president run turned out to be an utter disappointment as the people expected him to incapacitate the war on drugs.
The world still hoped that once Obama is re-elected again, he would finally play his part to rectify the drug problems and would act on his asserted belief that the war on drugs is ineffective and unfair. During this term, he came forward and frankly spoke about the perils of marijuana and alcohol, permitted legalized marijuana in state-level, removed hurdles to medical marijuana, spoke about strict drug abuse penalties, and reduced the drug offenders’ sentences for more than 1,000 of them.
He further subverted drug prohibition by publicly acknowledging that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, though he wasn’t ready to change marijuana’s legitimacy at the federal level by any means. Marijuana stands in Schedule I, the most deterring category under their Controlled Substances Act; even then, Obama’s team facilitated further studies of marijuana plants by removing an extra level of administrative evaluation and allowing exclusive production of marijuana for research purpose.
After issuing a total of one commutation in his first term and 20 during his tenure in the year 2013-14, to make up for the last time, in his last two years of tenure Obama went on to reduce a total of 1,024 sentences of non-violent drug abusers. Among this, there were many who were subjected to life sentences. He also said that the Congress had the power to reduce life sentences of 1,000 more, but this agreement ultimately couldn’t be passed in 2016.
Obama’s bureaucratic reforms on painkiller prescription even for genuine patients nurtured the demand for heroin. When it goes with marijuana legalization, what Obama didn’t do counted the most!
