

President Says We Need To Shift To Public Health Focus, But His Budgets Haven’t Done That

​President Barack Obama on Thursday called drug legalization “an entirely legitimate topic for debate,” but quickly added “I am not in favor of legalization.”

The President then went on to say that he sees “drug abuse” as a public health issue and that a shifting of resources is required, away from the traditional approach of incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders.

Obama’s remarks are the first time in history that a U.S. president has called drug legalization a topic “worthy of debate.”

The president made the remarks during the YouTube-hosted “ Your Interview With the President ,” for which at least the top 100 vote-getting questions dealt with marijuana laws or drug policy.

It was evident that Obama had heard the chorus of protest which greeted his last response to YouTube viewers on marijuana legalization, in which he had laughed off the issue and dismissively said “I don’t know what that says about our online audience.”

Many activists had expected the president would continue his practice of blithely ignoring the marijuana policy questions, despite their overwhelming and enduring popularity with the very demographic which voted him into office.

“The President talks a good game about shifting resources and having a balanced, public health-oriented approach, but it doesn’t square with the budgets he’s submitted to Congress,” said Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore narcotics cop and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition ( LEAP ), a group of cops, judges, and prosecutors who support legalizing and regulating drugs.





Obama responded to the question of retired former deputy sheriff MacKenzie Allen , who is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).

Allen’s question was the number one vote getter among the tens of thousands of questions submitted for consideration, getting more than twice as many votes as the second most popular question.

According to YouTube , 196,032 people submitted 142,756 questions and cast 1,382,692 votes.

​”The so-called War On Drugs has been waged for 40 years at a cost of a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, with nothing to show for it but increased supplies of cheaper drugs and a dramatic increase in violence associated with the underworld drug market,” Officer Allen says in his video. “Do you think there will or should come a time to discuss the possibility of legalization, regulation and control of all drugs, thereby doing away with the violent criminal market as well as a major source of funding for international terrorism?”