Did Attorney General Holder Raid Medical Marijuana Dispensaries To Distract From ‘Operation Fast and Furious’?
A new book is coming out tomorrow, which suggests United States Attorney General Eric Holder raided medical marijuana dispensaries last year to distract from the investigation in Congress about ‘Operation Fast and Furious.’ For those of you that have been living on the moon this last year, Operation Fast and Furious was an ATF sting that allowed thousands of weapons to go to cartels – Google it, it’s important!
In Martin A. Lee’s new book ‘Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana – Medical, Recreational, and Scientific‘, the author explains “that when calls for special investigations into Fast and Furious and for Holder’s resignation intensified in October 2011, Holder played what Lee calls the “ace up his sleeve.” according to The Daily Caller.
“Ever since California voters approved Proposition 215, which legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996, law enforcement lobbyists had been urging the federal government to enforce prohibition and choke off the burgeoning industry,” Lee writes in Smoke Signals. “On October 7, the same day Holder wrote a detailed letter to Rep. Issa, defending his handling of the Fast and Furious affair, four federal prosecutors in California held a hastily organized press conference in which they threw down the gauntlet and announced the start of a far-ranging crackdown that would nearly decimate the Golden State’s medical marijuana industry.”
As SF Weekly was quick to point out, “Lee’s offering, which was widely circulated and read within the marijuana movement over the weekend, contains no “smoking gun”: no unearthed documents, no new testimony or other sources, not even an unnamed administration official (which was the basis upon which a July GQ article promising a rollback of the Drug War in Obama’s second term rested).”
I agree that the medical marijuana crackdown wasn’t the only thing that Holder was doing to distract from his inability to do his job, but I think it’s naive to completely disregard it. It was a policy flip flop of massive proportions, and I think some correlation is logical. With charges looming against Eric Holder, I’m sure we will at the very least get a new AG, if not some answers.