Clueless

Congress shreds the DEA’s credibility—and shows the agency is out of touch about the true nature of marijuana

It was a watershed moment in the sordid annals of cannabis prohibition:

The head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was repeatedly asked by members of Congress to explain why the federal government considers marijuana such a dangerous and addictive drug, and the agency’s chief—for the life of her—could not come up with a reasonable answer.

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart was clearly unprepared for the grilling she received, suggesting she had expected nothing but business as usual during her June 20 testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. That was a mistake, considering congressional Democrats have made no secret of their outrage over the federal government’s ongoing war on medical marijuana.

Moreover, Leonhart, who last year signed her name to a DEA position paper bearing such headlines as “The fallacy of medical marijuana,” is second perhaps only to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder as the personification of the Obama administration’s hard-line pot policies. Her appearance before the subcommittee provided the Democrats with a perfect opportunity to vent their frustrations.

And they seized it.

A Very Straightforward Question

“Would you agree that marijuana causes less harm to individuals than meth, crack, cocaine and heroin?” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) asked the DEA chief.

It was a straightforward question, and one Leonhart tried to dodge by citing her many years in law enforcement and describing marijuana as “an insidious drug.” But Cohen wasn’t having it.

“That’s not the question I asked you, ma’am,” he pressed. “Does it cause less damage to American society and individuals than meth, crack, cocaine and heroin? Does it make people have to kill to get their fix?”

Again, a fairly straightforward question and, again, Leonhart tried to sidestep it by referring to teen marijuana addicts. This is the oft-repeated line that cites the number of teens admitted to rehab for cannabis addiction, but ignores that most were ordered there by the courts after being caught with pot. Again, Cohen wasn’t falling for it.

“Does meth and heroin cause more deaths than marijuana?” he asked.

The question could not have been put more simply, and the answer could not have been more obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with drug statistics: Yes, meth and heroin use kills thousands of Americans every year, while the medical community is hard-pressed to find even one death directly attributed to marijuana use. Unbelievably, the question seemed to confound the DEA chief, who, after a stammering pause, said, “All drug trafficking causes deaths,” and then claimed to not have a breakdown of which illegal drugs killed how many people.

By this point in the grilling, Leonhart was visibly shaken and Cohen was clearly angry that he couldn’t get a single candid answer to his questions. But if Leonhart felt mistreated by the interrogation, it was nothing compared to questions put to her by Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colorado).

Polis began by asking Leonhart several of the same questions as had Cohen: “Is crack worse for a person than marijuana?” “Is methamphetamine worse for somebody’s health than marijuana?” “Is heroin worse for someone’s health than marijuana?”

To each question, Leonhart tried to give the same evasive answer she gave Cohen. Polis was unsatisfied.

“You can say, ’yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘I don’t know,’” he said. “If you don’t know, you can look this up. You should know this as the chief administrator for the Drug Enforcement Agency [sic]. I’m asking you a very straightforward question: Is heroin worse for someone’s health than marijuana?”

“All illegal drugs are bad,” she replied. “Heroin causes an addiction. It causes many problems and is hard to kick.”

“So does that mean the health impact of heroin is worse than that of marijuana?” Polis asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I think you’re asking me a subjective question.”

“No, it’s objective,” Polis said. “Just looking at the science—this is your area of expertise. I’m a layperson, but I’ve read some of the studies. I’m just asking you in this subject area, ‘Is heroin worse for someone’s health than marijuana?’”

Finally, Polis managed to force Leonhart to admit “the properties of heroin” were more addictive than marijuana. But she refused to budge on whether meth or even some prescription drugs were more addictive, repeating over and over that all illegal drugs were addictive.

Ready For A Fight

It was only natural that Polis would come into this meeting with Leonhart ready for a fight. Representing the city of Colorado Springs, Polis is a longtime supporter of medical cannabis freedoms and a ferocious critic of his marijuana constituents’ rough treatment at the hands of the DEA. He isn’t alone.

“The Congress voted a few weeks ago on the Hinchey Amendment, which, if it had passed, would have defunded the federal government so it could no longer conduct raids in medical marijuana states,” says Brian Vicente, director of the drug-policy reform group, Sensible Colorado. “All the Colorado Democrats said, ‘Yes, it should pass.’ We had the entire congressional delegation from Colorado saying, ‘Stop these raids.’”

Polis did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did Leonhart nor anyone else at the DEA.

“It was an important moment, and also very telling, to have a congressman from Colorado really push the head of the DEA on her factual knowledge of marijuana versus other drugs, and just to see her founder,” he continued. “Clearly, she had no clue about the science behind marijuana as a medicine.”

Indeed, the spectacle of Leonhart repeatedly dodging the most basic questions by a member of Congress on the true nature of marijuana was so astonishing that news outlets across the country reported the June 20 encounter as their top story. The Huffington Post ran a close-up photo of a visibly shaken Leonhart across all three of its front-page columns, under the monster headline “IS SHE HIGH?”

Gaining Serious Momentum

Tom Angell, media director for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, says his organization had a different take on the episode than those registered by cannabis legalization groups. LEAP advocates legalization of all drugs, not just marijuana, and so some members of the group were a bit put off by Polis’ and Cohen’s line of questioning.

“On the one hand, the episode was instructive in that it showed how out of touch Michele is,” Angell says. “But on the other hand, I don’t really think the relative harm of one drug compared to another is all that important in determining whether drugs should be illegal. We don’t really focus on which drugs should be illegal—we focus on how prohibiting the drugs makes those drugs that much more dangerous. Yes, heroin is dangerous, but it would be less dangerous if it were legal.”

That said, Angell added, he thought Polis effectively annihilated the DEA’s credibility on marijuana’s classification as a Schedule I narcotic.

“He did do a good job in demonstrating the arbitrary nature of which drugs are scheduled in different categories,” he says. “This clip [of Polis’s grilling of Leonhart] is getting a lot of play on the Internet and in social media. He definitely succeeded in starting a conversation about this.”

In fact, that conversation has been gaining serious momentum for some time, at least with regard to marijuana. In recent months, prominent elected officials—most notably New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg—have openly questioned government attitudes toward cannabis. Previously, open calls by elected leaders for legalization or at least decriminalization was something usually reserved for the most radical politicians—and even then, usually only the ones with no further designs on offices higher than what they already held, and increasing number of mainstream up-and-comers are seeing the light.

“Within the past couple of years, it seems more prominent people and organizations are starting to talk about this issue in public,” Angell says. “For a long time, we’d get support from these people only behind the scenes. I think savvy operators are realizing a lot of people want these changes, and that they don’t need to talk about it only behind closed doors, and they’re seeing they’re getting nothing but benefits for doing so. Take [New York Governor] Andrew Cuomo—everyone knows he’s already running for the Democratic position in 2016. That he supports legalization just shows how far this issue has come in just a short period of time.”