On Friday I
noted that, contrary to what President Obama said in his recent
CNN interview, the executive branch does have the power to
reclassify marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). For
some reason, that observation irked UCLA drug policy expert Mark
Kleiman, who
claims I am 1) ignorant of the facts, 2) willfully blind to the
facts because they clash with my libertarian ideology, and 3) eager
to criticize Democrats because it is in my financial interest to do
so:
The discussion of “rescheduling” marijuana is confused because
most of the people engaged in it don’t know how the law works.Jacob Sullum, always willing to let his ignorance be the measure
of other people’s knowledge, utterly unwilling to let mere facts
get in the way of libertarian ideology, and eager to please his
paymasters by slagging a Democratic President, illustrates my
point in his response to the latest CNN Obama
interview.
A few paragraphs down, Kleiman concedes that “yes, authority to
reschedule cannabis lies with the Administration.” So what I said
was correct yet somehow also ignorant and unfactual.
Even if I had misrepresented the administration’s authority
under the Controlled Substances Act (which Kleiman admits I did
not), in what sense would that illustrate my libertarian bias? No
matter who is charged with saying which drugs people are not
allowed to have, the CSA is not a libertarian statute by any
stretch of the imagination.
But Kleiman says I am not really motivated by libertarianism
anyway. Rather, I am in it for the money, “eager to please [my]
paymasters by slagging a Democratic President.” Exactly who are
these “paymasters,” and why do they hate Democrats in particular?
Kleiman does not say, possibly because this is a generic ad hominem
attack he uses against people he perceives as political opponents,
whether or not he has any facts to back it up.
In any case, anyone who is even vaguely familar with my work
knows it is absurd to suggest that I criticize Democrats while
giving Republicans a pass. Two days before I criticized Obama for
speaking as if he were powerless to reschedule marijuana, I
defended him against an attack by a Republican senator who
objected to his statement that marijuana is safer than alcohol. A
couple of weeks before that, I
took issue with another Republican senator who criticized Obama
for allowing legalization to proceed in Colorado and Washington by
refraining from arresting and prosecuting state-licensed marijuana
suppliers.
More generally, while Obama is the president I have been
“slagging” most since January 2009, I was never shy about slagging
his Republican predecessor. Last week I linked to some of that
criticism while
arguing that Republicans who fault Obama for abusing executive
power, if they want to be taken seriously, should not downplay
similar sins committed by Republican presidents. In case it still
is not clear, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the
Republican Party. But in Kleiman’s mind, I am a partisan interested
only in picking apart members of the other team.
Kleiman also suggests that if I really understood how the law
works, I would have criticized the administration for impeding
research by maintaining a monopoly on production of marijuana used
in studies. Yeah, why have I never talked about
that?
The one valid point Kleiman makes is that placing marijuana on a
lower schedule would not automatically make it available by
precription, since any cannabis preparation would still have to be
approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But the practical
result of reclassifying marijuana is distinct from the question of
whether it meets the criteria for Schedule I and whether the Obama
administration has the power to move it, which is what I was
talking about in the post that set Kleiman off, as people who
actually read it may be surprised to learn.
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