Obama Says Treating Drug Use As a Criminal Problem Is "Counterproductive"

President Barack Obama continues to speak out against mass incarceration, the devastating impact of our drug policies on communities of color and his expectation that marijuana legalization will continue to spread.

Obama's comments came today during his YouTube interviews with YouTube bloggers, Bethany Mota, GloZell Green and Hank Green.

"What you're seeing now is Colorado, Washington through state referenda, they're experimenting with legal marijuana," the president said in response to a question from host Hank Green.

"The position of my administration has been that we still have federal laws that classify marijuana as an illegal substance, but we're not going to spend a lot of resources trying to turn back decisions that have been made at the state level on this issue. My suspicion is that you're gonna see other states start looking at this."

Obama also addressed how we should treat people who are not violent drug offenders.

"What I am doing at the federal level," Obama responded, "is asking my Department of Justice just to examine generally how we are treating nonviolent drug offenders, because I think you're right."

"What we have done is instead of focusing on treatment -- the same way we focused, say, with tobacco or drunk driving or other problems where we treat it as public health problem -- we've treated this exclusively as a criminal problem," the president said. "I think that it's been counterproductive, and it's been devastating in a lot of minority communities. It presents the possibility at least of unequal application of the law, and that has to be changed."

The issue is that all the problems you cite and more are happening now.

Having MORE of them will not be an improvement.

How much longer do you want to support failed laws and expenditures in the billions for the same bad results?

They are not "failed." You call them "failed" because of unrealistic expectations given the constraints. As I have pointed out before, asserting that 2% usage by the population is a "failure" ignores the fact that 98% of the population isn't using drugs. Usage has been held down to 2% for a hundred years. Without opposition, drug usage would have continued to rise year after year.

Holding it down to a low number is a success given the tools they have to work with. Now the costs are getting out of control, but that has little to do with the mission and a *LOT* to do with the fact that all government costs are getting out of control. If you think Drug interdiction costs have gone crazy, you should look at entitlement costs.

Here’s a hint. Prohibition does not stop people from using drugs, it makes gangsters rich, and it wastes law enforcement time and money.

Prohibition does indeed stop people from using drugs. China demonstrated that conclusively by doing the converse. Gangsters are only getting rich because we tolerate this level of activity. If we made it a point to kill drug dealers, they wouldn't be getting rich because they wouldn't stay in such a risky business.

While your sad stories about people being hurt by drugs are compelling, it is illogical to say that those stories justify the war on drugs.

Individually they don't. Taken collectively they do. We have real historical examples of the alternative. That world is worse than this one.

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