It is not always a glamorous position working for DEA. After a record breakage losing streak on Capitol Hill, the once untouchable DEA suffered this past week what be looked at as the ultimate indignity: A Senate panel, for the first time, voted in support of legal, recreational marijuana.
This past Thursday, the Appropriations Committee voted 16-14 on an amendment to allow marijuana business to have access to federal banking services, a monumental occurrence that will help states such as Colorado, where marijuana is legal fully integrate cannabis into their economies. As crucial as the vote was, it is just the most current vote in a stunning run of success marijuana supporters have had this year on Capitol Hill.
“The amendment was a necessary response to an absurd regulatory morass,” Montana Sen. Steve Daines, one of three Republicans to back Thursday’s amendment, tells POLITICO, referencing the versatile and complex system of laws that have been achieved over the past 40 years to prosecute a war on cannabis. it is a battle that started nor close to May 26, 1971, when President Richard Nixon said to his chief of staff Bob Haldeman, “I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana …I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.”
However, that war looks on the battlefield looks to be subsiding. The summer of 2015 could be looked at as a historical time as the tipping point against Noxon’s war on marijuana, the time when the DEA, a federal drug fighting agency developed by Nixon in 1973, found itself in unfamiliar territory as a target of congressional scrutiny, budget cuts and scorn. I a conference call this week, the new acting DEA administrator consistently downplayed cannabis enforcement efforts, stating that while he is not exactly sharing words with other agents to not pursue marijuana cases, stating that while he is not something anyone focus their attention. “Typically it’s heroin, opioids, meth and cocaine in roughly that order and marijuana tends to come in at the back of the pack.”
Such a difference a year can make.
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