Obama spent nearly $300 million busting Ganja ℞ ops.

❝Narcotics police are an enormous, corrupt international bureaucracy ... and now fund a coterie of researchers who provide them with 'scientific support' ... fanatics who distort the legitimate research of others.❞
~ William F. Buckley, Jr. Requiescat In Pace
Commentary in The National Review, April 29, 1983, p. 495

Obama administration has spent nearly $300 million
busting medical marijuana operations

In less than five years, Barack Obama has spent nearly $290 million to arrest and prosecute medical marijuana caregivers, patients and dispensary owners. It's a huge number, but interestingly only makes up about four percent of the overall Drug Enforcement Administration Budget.

According to Americans for Safe Access, which compiled the report using DEA and other federal statistics, says federal intervention flies in the face of state-legal cannabis patients, which number more than 1 million people nationally.

"This war is being waged on sick and injured citizens, not drug dealers and profiteers. The report profiles some of the individuals and organizations that are being caught in this crosshairs of this war," the report says.

Other interesting points:

☛ Around 34 percent of the population lives in medical marijuana states.
☛ Support for marijuana laws nationwide has hovered in the 70 percent range for nearly 20 years.
☛ In the last 17 years, there have been more than 528 raids. The majority (270) happened under the Obama administration.

The figures fly in the face of early promises to leave medical marijuana patients and caregivers as a low-priority for federal intervention. Many point out that Obama has shut down and raided more medical marijuana dispensary operations than any president before him and has already overspent President George W. Bush's eight-year administration by $100 million.

But as Toke of the Town columnist Box Johnson pointed out: Obama has also allowed more medical marijuana dispensaries to open than all presidents before him combined.

We're not trying to make apologies for the guy - who clearly has no problems being a two-faced hypocrite about it, but could it also imply that those shops that are not being shut down are okay with federal authorities? After all, they'll make more money from taxing the shit out of these places (dispensary owners can't make federal tax deductions) than they would out of fining and jailing the owners and operators.

That's probably little consolation to the shops that have been shut down, especially when they were following their state's laws. Such was the case in Colorado where dispensaries were allowed to remain within 1,000 feet of schools when state laws were passed - but federal agents nevertheless shut down nearly seventy in that state alone for that single violation.

For the entire 56-page report,
click over to Americans for Safe Access.

❝By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments ... The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments ...that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity.❞
~ John Hospers

The Obama Admin's Anti-Marijuana Manifesto
☛ Multiple DEA Raids Target Marijuana in Hawaii
☛Obama: Drug Legalization is "An Entirely Legitimate Debate"
☛ Hil and Gil on the Drug War
☛Obombo's Sublingual Attack on Ganja
☛ One Drug Arrest Every 19 Seconds Oh Gilligan!
☛President Obama takes a dump on California
☛ Obama Doesn’t Need Congress

Why Do YOU Think They Call it DOPE?

"At DEA, our mission is to fight drug trafficking in order to make drug abuse the most expensive, unpleasant, risky, and disreputable form of recreation a person could have."
– Donnie Marshall,
past Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)