When United States Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he was stepping down, he also stated that he was ‘open’ to the idea of rescheduling marijuana. This led to many marijuana media outlets, activists, and organizations to shower Holder with praise, and even sometimes referring to him as ‘cannabis friendly.’ I was not one of those people. Eric Holder does not support marijuana rescheduling, proven by the fact that he has never taken steps to make it happen, and has even gone to court to fight against it.
I got some backlash for being a ‘negative nancy’ as one person told me in an e-mail, but I will stick with my opinion, which has since been backed up by Eric Holder’s own comments. Per an interview with The Marshall Project, Eric Holder stated the following:
I think the question of how these drugs get scheduled and how they are ultimately treated is something for Congress to work on. I think we’ve pushed. We have done an awful lot. You look at what’s going on now in COLORADO AND WASHINGTON and the way we’ve dealt with those initiatives, identifying the EIGHT PRIORITY AREAS that we thought still would warrant federal involvement, and yet if you look at where we are now with those states and with what other states are doing, and the way we view the whole issue of the use of medical marijuana, we’re in a fundamentally different place than we were when Barack Obama became president and I became attorney general.
So I think we’ve made significant progress in looking at that drug in a more realistic way. But I think our society has to ask itself the question of how ultimately we are going to view the use of marijuana.
It’s worth noting that there were recent raids in Colorado, and I’m sure they won’t be the last. As far as rescheduling, Eric Holder and Obama administration can pursue marijuana rescheduling if they really wanted to, but they obviously don’t. Instead, they will continue to punt the idea to Congress, and make it sound like the Congress route is the only way to reschedule, which is not true, and Eric Holder knows it.
