Obama skirts the legalization question

cross-posted on Workhorse Politics

About 26 minutes into the YouTube interview with President Obama, the top-voted question about legalizing (or at least decriminalizing) drugs was played.

Obama answers the public's video questions in
an interview with Steve Grove of YouTube.

The main point of legalization is to pull the rug out from under the foreign cartels and local gangs who control the illegal trade. The most common reason children get killed by stray bullets in the crossfire on our urban street corners is because of turf wars revolving around drugs. And the thrust of Officer Mackenzie Allen’s question was to do away with the violent market and international terrorism, but Obama did a quick two-step, describing drug use as a public health problem and the need to curtail demand. He did not actually answer the question.

Here’s my transcription of Obama’s answer to Allen:

Well, I think this is an entirely legitimate topic for debate. I am not in favor of legalization. I am a strong believer that we have to think more about drugs as a public health problem. When you think about other damaging activities in our society — smoking, drunk driving, making sure you’re wearing seat belts — typically we’ve made huge strides over the past 20 or 30 years by changing people’s attitudes. And on drugs, I think that a lot of times we’ve been so focused on arrests, incarceration, interdiction, that we don’t spend as much time thinking about how do we shrink demand. And this is something that, within the White House, we are looking at very carefully.

Some of this requires shifting resources, being strategic, where does it make sense for us to really focus on interdiction? We have to go after drug cartels that not only are selling drugs but also creating havoc … for example, along the U.S.-Mexican border. But are there ways that we can also shrink demand and … in some cities, for example, it may take six months for you to get into a drug treatment program. Well, if you’re trying to kick a habit and somebody says to you, Well, come back in six months, that’s pretty discouraging. So we’ve gotta do more in figuring  out how we can get some more resources on that end of it, and also look at what we’re doing when we have first-time nonviolent drug offenders — are there ways that we can make sure that we’re steering them into the straight-and-narrow without automatically resorting to incareceration, drug courts, mechanisms like that. These are issues that are worth exploring and worth a serious debate.