"Obama the Buzzkill": Nick Gillespie in Daily Beast on the President's Terrible Drug Policy
I've got a piece up at The Daily Beast about how President Barack Obama, whose visit to Mexico included talk about drug policy, has been a hard-hearted and hard-headed drug warrior. Here's the start of the piece:
While a high school student at Honolulu's elite Punahou School, Barack Obama was a high-flying member of a pot-smoking, party-hearty crew that called itself "the Choom Gang." As biographer David Maraniss revealed in last year's Barack Obama: The Story the future president "had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted!,' and took an extra hit."
In his current trip to meet with Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto, Obama will once again be talking about illegal drugs and interceptions—and he will almost certainly continue his long habit of bogarting other people's joints. As CNN summarizes it, one of the "key issues" of the trip is to strengthen efforts to stop the flow of pot, cocaine, methamphetamines, and other drugs from Mexico into the United States.
Despite thinly sourced stories by Obama boosters that the president in his second term "will pivot to the drug war" that he privately considers a "failure," there's every reason to believe any new initiatives coming out of this Mexico trip will disappoint the liberals, libertarians, and smattering of conservatives who took Barack Obama seriously when he questioned longstanding drug policies.
Read the whole thing at The Daily Beast here.