(MintPress) – Eight former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chiefs have released statements voicing their disapproval over recreational marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington. Their comments come months after voters approved the laws in the two states, but also come before the federal government has announced how it plans to handle state marijuana legalization laws.
As Mint Press News previously reported, at the National Association of Attorneys General annual conference last week, Attorney General Eric Holder said people in states that have legalized marijuana deserve an answer on how the federal government will approach the state legalization laws relatively soon.
“We are, I think, in the last states of that review and are trying to make the determination as to what the policy ramifications are going to be, what our international ramifications are,” he said.
In joint statements released on Tuesday through the Save Our Society From Drugs, a national lobbying group that advocates against legalization of marijuana, the Associated Press (AP), which received an advance copy of their statements, reported that the ex-DEA chiefs planned to blast the Obama administration for reacting too slowly to state’s legalization laws, and want the federal government to sue Washington and Colorado for these laws, thereby forcing them to rescind the legislation.
The DEA’s disapproval of marijuana legalization has some calling foul, since the group collects most of its money from drug operations, specifically marijuana trafficking.
In a campaign video, former Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson reveals that the U.S. spends about $10,400 on arresting one person for a nonviolent marijuana offense, and spends about $853,000,000 each year in the court system for marijuana offenses.
Total money spent on the War on Drugs each year in the United States is $40 billion despite the fact that no one has ever died from consuming or smoking too much marijuana.
Greg Campbell is a journalist and author of a book on medical marijuana called Pot Inc. Campbell says he believes the public won’t tolerate allowing the DEA to reprimand everyday citizens in states where marijuana is legal for medical reasons, or now recreational purposes.
“No one questions their authority to do it,” Campbell said. “It’ll be a question of priority. If the DEA is really going to waste its resources, doing that rather than focusing on bloodshed on the border, you’ll see complete outrage.”
One of the former DEA administrators, Peter Bensinger, said that as time goes by, it will be harder to stop the two states, and warns that unless the federal government steps in, the United States will see a “domino effect” of legalization legislation.
“My fear is that the Justice Department will do what they are doing now: do nothing and say nothing,” said Bensinger. “If they don’t act now, these laws will be fully implemented in a matter of months.”
In a book by drug policy scholars, “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know,” the experts highlight the fact that the Constitution protects the state law enforcement from having to enforce federal criminal laws. The experts also remind readers that the DEA can raid legal pot shops, like they’ve done with medical dispensaries, but with a growing number of shops and users, the DEA and its 5,000 agents have their work cut out for them.
Since the DEA has struggled to keep up with all of the pot shops across the U.S., a marijuana business site writes that the group has thrown a “temper tantrum” of sorts — raiding shops and confiscating all of the money and marijuana in the shop.
The former DEA administrators who released statements include Bensinger, John Bartels, Robert Bonner, Thomas Constantine, Asa Hutchinson, John Lawn, Donnie Marshall and Francis Mullen. They served for both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Though this most-recent disapproval of the federal government’s handling of marijuana legalization laws in the United States has made the most noise, it wasn’t the first time this has happened.
In September 2012, a month before the historic legalization of recreational marijuana, all of the above mentioned DEA administrators, with the addition of former DEA administrator Karen Tandy, sent a letter to Holder, urging him to publicly oppose the various legalization legislation in Colorado, Washington and Oregon.
Their reason was that if the federal government remained silent, it would convey a message to the American public and the world that the government would be supporting “these dangerous initiatives.”
When asked for a comment on the criticism from the former DEA administrators, Holder spokeswoman Allison Price told the AP: “The Department of Justice is in the process of reviewing those initiatives.”