One year ago, President Obama, responding to front page stories in The Washington Post by Dafna Linzer, said he would review the petition for commutation of sentence from Clarence Aaron. This was the petition that President George W. Bush's White House counsel was interested in granting, except that the Pardon Attorney misrepresented what was told to him by the federal judge and the U.S. Attorney.
The Pardon Attorney was subsequently condemned by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice, but still has the job!
So far, crickets! In the Obama Administration the wheels of justice grind slooooowly.
Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts
Thursday, July 18, 2013
One year ago, Obama said he was going to look at Clarence Aaron's petition for commutation of sentence
Friday, May 03, 2013
Medical marijuana can treat infantile seizures -- the tragic price of federal delay of medical use of marijuana
The Washington Post produced an excellent 10 minute video on the use of specially bred strains of medical marijuana to treat infantile seizures
that, untreated, lead to catastrophic developmental delays and
disabilities. It features an Indiana family bankrupted by the costs of
the conventional and ineffective treatments choosing to move to Colorado
where legal, regulated medical marijuana is available for pediatric
care.
A mother wonders, if the heavy stigma that
surrounds the medical use of marijuana had been removed years ago
(California passed its medical marijuana law in 1996. DEA's Chief
Administrative Law Judge ruled in favor of medical marijuana in 1988!) would she have sought treatment for her boy at a much earlier age,
sparing him the disability he suffers from? Her 10 year-old boy, after a
decade of the "conventional," FDA-approved medications, now functions
at the level of a 4 year-old, still not toilet trained nor able to
recognize colors or letters.
Everyone laments that the
FDA is not involved in the research and development of these treatments.
That FDA involvement is not the fault of the babies, their parents,
their doctors, or the medical marijuana researchers. The
non-involvement of the FDA is fundamentally the fault of President
Barack Obama, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Attorney General Eric
Holder (whose wife is a widely respected physician).
The Obama Administration has disregarded the political advantages
of endorsing a scientific embrace of medical marijuana in order to
appease law enforcement bureaucracies and lobbyists from numerous law
enforcement officer organizations such as the Fraternal Order of Police.
I think it is plausible that the Administration has also been
influenced by the politically powerful pharmaceutical industries which
are likely to lose market share for numerous product lines if medical
marijuana is legal at the federal level, but I have not seen evidence
that documents this hypothesis.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Canada is repeating U.S. mistakes on drug sentencing
The Ottawa Citizen has published my op-ed this morning (Feb. 29, 2012) that warns, "Canada is repeating U.S. mistakes on drug sentencing." This prestigious newspaper is Canada's equivalent to The Washington Post.
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