Obama Administration Sought to Decriminalize Cannabis
According to officials from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) under former President Obama, the agency wanted to decriminalize cannabis on a federal level. The ONDCP, commonly called the drug czar’s office, never went public with their support of decriminalization because of a 30-year-old law which bars the organization from using funding and ideas that surrender to the “War on Drugs.”
“ONDCP was in favor of decriminalizing but not legalizing,” former deputy director A. Thomas McLellan said. McLellan once lead the ONDCP in the White House under the Obama administration. He also lost his son to addiction, and left his position with the ONDCP in 2011 because he resolved that health reform is a better way to tackle drug addiction.
1988’s House Resolution 5210 created the drug czar’s office during the peak of the “Just Say No” era and reinforced the White House’s hardline approach to drugs. When the drug czar’s office was later reauthorized, the measure included a provision banning federal funds from being used to study or legalize cannabis and other drugs. Michael Botticelli, the former director of the ONDCP, told 60 Minutes in 2015 that judging by statistics, the “War on Drugs” has been an utter failure.
The Trump administration is planning on slashing funding for the ONDCP by as much as 96 percent. But even cannabis advocates aren’t happy about the cuts, given that during the Obama administration, the ONDCP leadership shifted focus away from cannabis and geared up to battle the nation’s opioid epidemic. “It seems like we are moving backwards instead of forward,” Botticelli said. “And to a position that I think doesn’t have a lot of science and evidence. We’ve tried that approach for a very long time, and it doesn’t seem to really have made a significant difference.”
