DEA petition delivered

DEA Boss Clings On Amid Campaign for His Ouster

Chuck Rosenberg was supposed to be a different kind of Drug Enforcement Agency leader, someone who could serve as acting administrator for the remainder of President Barack Obama’s time in office without rocking the boat like his embattled predecessor.

Instead, Rosenberg is under siege from activists and lawmakers after calling the use of raw marijuana to treat medical conditions “a joke” earlier this month, and he’s facing a campaign by reformers unseen even by the famously anti-reform Michele Leonhart, who stepped down in May after a sex party scandal.

[…]

On Thursday, seven members of Congress – Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., Sam Farr, D-Calif., Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Jim McDermott, D-Wash. – wrote to Obama asking that he fire Rosenberg.

And on Friday, a group of nearly two dozen patients, caregivers and policy advocates visited the DEA’s headquarters in northern Virginia to present boxes stuffed with printouts of an online petition calling for Rosenberg’s ouster. The petition has been signed by more than 100,000 people and was spearheaded by Marijuana Majority leader Tom Angell.

Again, I reiterate, petitions are generally worthless. But what Tom has done here is really quite excellent. He started a petition, and, because he keeps really good relationships with a variety of media folks, he gets articles written about there being a petition, which gets more people to sign it. And because he has also developed relationships with political leaders, they write their own letters, which generates more press. Then he gets the press to cover the deliverance of the petitions, along with sick people who signed them.

And, because I’m on Tom’s press list, I get regular updates from him on the status of the petition, which makes me more likely to write about it. Good organization. Good activism.

Will Rosenberg be fired? Of course not. But that’s not the important thing – what we’ve got is major news outlets treating the DEA as under siege, putting them on the defensive, and giving medical marijuana patients sympathy for being treated “as a joke” by the bad government bureaucrats.

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17 Responses to DEA petition delivered

  1. jean valjean says:

    I’m not so sure petitions are ineffective. The speed with which this one has gathered 100,000 signatures suggests that Washington pols will have to start paying attention to voters or get thrown out.
    “The petition, which was started only two weeks ago, has more than doubled the number of signatures on an earlier petition that helped prompt the ouster of Rosenberg’s predecessor, former DEA head Michele Leonhart”.

    http://www.alternet.org/drugs/pressure-mounts-dea-head-step-down-medical-marijuana-remarks

  2. allan says:

    this petition IS effective. Tom Angell is an effective guy. I laugh when I think “shit, I watched him grow up” (which many here have, Tom has been at this for nearly 2 decades if memory serves me correctly).

    1 Tom Angell beats any number of K Liemans or Seabats.

  3. Chris says:

    Well, if we have the media’s attention, what’s to stop us from questioning _every_ action they take or statement they make in this way? It’s not like printouts are all that expensive.

  4. DdC says:

    Maybe we need a petition to remove cannabis as a controlled substance…

  5. Mr_Alex says:

    Cannabis in my opinion should never be a controlled substance, take New Zealand for example, we have a Autism Advocacy group that has tried to make Cannabis as a viable treatment for Autism as a taboo subject, I find this kind of attitude as highly disappointing, many parents who have children with Autism and other Autism sufferers do not agree with Cannabis as a treatment for Autism being a taboo subject

  6. Servetus says:

    If a German 20-year-old, let’s call him Maximillian S., operating from his mom’s apartment, can achieve so much in so little time, with such limited resources, the DEA and other law enforcement must question what this situation says about their own resources and abilities when it comes to achieving anything like stopping access to illicit drugs.

    Where there’s a will, there’s a way:

    The defendant had since late 2013 engaged in “highly criminal activity” and “flogged almost a tonne of narcotics”, said Norbert Goebel, presiding judge at the Saxony state high court in Leipzig.

    Among the drugs the young man had offered on the encrypted so-called dark net and then the open Internet and sold via mail delivery were hashish, ecstasy tablets, cocaine, LSD and prescription pills.

    Police said S. had sold 914 kilos of drugs worth some €4 million, and that they found around 300 kilos when they arrested him in February this year.[…]

    The judge said the suspect’s full confession had counted in his favour, although he had shown no true regret to the court, having often smiled broadly during his trial.

  7. “Let us move to a point where marijuana is treated as agriculture” http://tinyurl.com/puqblw8

    Removing DEA bosses is uplifting and sends a good message. Its also an exercise in futility as long as the Justice Department and the DEA are tasked with running an agency dedicated to the prohibition of drugs and the prosecution of those individuals who ignore that prohibition.

    That is called “Drug War”.

    Can we petition to disband the DEA? Does the DEA or the Justice Department care about the endocannabinoid system?

    I venture to say they know nothing about it and don’t really care. Schedule one exists to prohibit not control. I say petition to get rid of schedule one or the DEA, or both. Pinching heads off of the DEA may be fun, but we need to do more than that to end the war on drugs.

    • primus says:

      That is true however finding a replacement is going to be more and more difficult as more and more of these fools are removed

  8. Servetus says:

    Wikipedia has posted a brief profile of DEA man Chuck Rosenberg, given what is known of him so far, and so far it looks like Chuck is off to a bad start: Wiki here.

    And then there’s this, “White House rebuffs DEA chief on ‘Ferguson effect’”:

    http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/259419-white-house-rebuffs-dea-chief-on-ferguson-effect

    • primus says:

      Wow the comments are awful

    • allan says:

      and Rosenberg uses anecdotes as his “proof”

      “I rely on the chiefs and the sheriffs who are saying that they have seen or heard behavioral changes among the men and women of their forces,”

      C’mon Chuckie… if patient testimony is “anecdotal” then yours is no more than LE butt bubbles.

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