Hopes that Obama would be a more tolerant drug warrior have gone up in smoke. | REUTERS Obama's pot promise a pipe dream?

President Barack Obama has turned out to be a real buzzkill.

Back when he was running in 2008, Obama said he supported the “basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs” and that he was “not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws.” He didn’t go farther. But he also didn’t do anything to dissuade speculation among medical marijuana proponents who took this as a sign that the man headed to the Oval Office was on their side.


Four years later, the raids on drug dispensaries have kept up — despite a Justice Department memo formalizing low-enforcement priority instructions from Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced in a March 2009 press conference that the raids would stop on distributors who were in compliance with state and local law. Obama never said anything about supporting legalization or decriminalization, but his medical marijuana statements were enough to get him heralded by some in the larger pro-pot community as the best hope for chipping away at the decades-long drug war.

But the hopes that Obama would be a kinder, gentler, more tolerant drug warrior have gone up in smoke.

“I’m very disappointed,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a longtime supporter of marijuana legalization and medical marijuana, told POLITICO. “They look more like the Bush administration than the Clinton administration.”

( Also on POLITICO: 4/20: Nine pols who talked pot.)

The dejected medical marijuana supporters are hardly alone. For many in 2008, candidate Obama was like a political Rorschach test: They projected strong progressive positions about everything from legalizing gay marriage to ending all military involvement onto a candidate who never said he agreed with them — but also never explicitly said he didn’t.

Now they’re looking at four years into the Obama administration and wondering where they went wrong.

“I believed in him,” Montana-based activist and medical cannabis user Sarah Combs said about the president. “I don’t believe a word he says now.”

Combs, a native South Carolinian who uses medical marijuana to treat her epilepsy, packed up her life and moved to Montana, where medical marijuana has been legal since 2004.

According to Combs, a sizable Montana community of patients and growers felt empowered by the DOJ memo and the administration’s supportive statements to open up shop, register patients and begin paying taxes on what they thought was now a legitimate business. Then in 2011, federal forces from several agencies raided 26 dispensaries across 13 Montana cities. Other dispensaries have been raided in states like California, Washington, Michigan, and Colorado.

All told, the federal government has raided more than 100 dispensaries — with the most recent busts of a San Francisco Bay area marijuana training center. Obama has vowed more money to hunt down Latin American drug traffickers, promising an extra $200 million in a 2011 press conference with El Salvador President Mauricio Funes. He’s kept in place Bush administration anti-medical marijuana administrators in key administration positions.

Central American leaders at last week’s Summit of the Americas in Colombia urged Obama to consider decriminalization or legalization of drugs as a potential solution to the drug war. The president called the idea “corrupting,” and said the United States would not be moving in that direction.

Those now facing charges believe they were exposed, and then betrayed by Obama and the Justice Department policy.

“Many people who did not feel fully protected from federal law enforcement did feel protected after that memo was released,” said Combs, who says her supply of medical marijuana has suffered because of the raids.

Obama sees his history on medical marijuana enforcement differently. The president was again asked about the Justice Department medical marijuana policy at a high-dollar fundraiser at Washington’s St. Regis Hotel filled with liberal mega-donors who paid $35,800 a plate to attend. According to a source with knowledge of the event, which was closed to reporters, Obama reportedly said that the DOJ was raiding purely on a case-by-case basis.

Frank says he got a frustrating response when he buttonholed Obama to complain that this wasn’t true: Obama told the Massachusetts Democrat that, to the best of his knowledge, the 2009 hands-off policy remained in place.

Frank told POLITICO that he’s preparing to send the president press clippings to demonstrate that raids continue across the country.

The tide has turned on the issue — beyond medical marijuana, there’s growing support for full legalization — Frank said, and there’s no reason the president should be lagging behind.

“Obama now lags Pat Robertson in a sensible approach to marijuana,” said Frank, referring to the conservative evangelical leader’s recent criticism of the drug war.

White House officials and administration insiders say cannabis supporters misunderstood, projecting their hopes for legalization or decriminalization onto an administration facing the fact that marijuana is still in the same legally classification as heroin, LSD and ecstasy.

White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said medical marijuana patients are not being targeted by federal law enforcement — but that it was always the administration’s intention to go after traffickers.

“The administration’s position has been clear and consistent,” Lehrich said. “While the prosecution of drug traffickers is a core priority, targeting individuals with cancer and serious illnesses is not the best allocation of federal law enforcement resources.”

That doesn’t necessarily square with what happened within the Justice Department in the early days of the administration. According to a source familiar with the drafting of the 2009 Justice Department memo, it was definitely the department’s intention to move away from the Bush administration raid policy in a limited, narrow way.

But Kevin Sabet, former senior adviser at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Obama Administration, said he blames people who read between the lines of the memo and read past the actual words that clearly state that federal law supersedes any state drug laws “mainly by legalization advocates, who thought they could market the memo as a green light for marijuana sales and cultivation.”

“They’ve always known that they were violating federal law, and in most cases, state law as well. When you have organizations that want to legalize all drugs as the main backers of these so-called ‘compassionate use’ efforts, the pieces of the puzzle come together quickly,” Sabet said.

Still, even allies of the president find the status-quo unsustainable: with the medical marijuana community dazed and confused over how exactly how tolerant the federal government is willing to be.

“It would certainly be nice for the attorney general and the president to clarify the federal policy,” said Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), another member of Congress critical of marijuana prohibition and the various interpretations of the DOJ memo. “Currently it’s largely at the behest of the regional attorney deputy general.”

That “low enforcement priority” has nevertheless ensnared many prominent marijuana dispensary owners in federal probes — with many facing charges and potentially stiff prison sentences.

“I think that you can always try to split hairs on legal details, but the fact is during the campaign, he said that it sounded like he was supporting it,” said California-based activist Richard Lee, whose Oakland dispensary was raided this month by the Drug Enforcement Agency and Internal Revenue Service.

“He was with us, and then Holder seemed to reiterate that with his press conference remarks. It does seem like he’s reversed,” Lee said about Obama.

But despite all the disappointments there remains hope among some pot advocates that the president himself isn’t to blame, and might still be on their side.

“There is no indication that the recent crackdowns come at the direction of Obama himself. It is more likely that he simply does not care about this issue,” Morgan Fox, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project. Obama “probably does not realize that his positive statements during his campaign no doubt motivated many of the people that voted for him.”

Still, Fox said, that’s no excuse.

“Obama has gone from being the greatest hope for marijuana reform to the greatest disappointment, and is now officially the worst president in terms of interference with state medical marijuana laws,” Fox said.

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed to this report.

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