Ethics

Meet the New Boss: Drug War Edition

By Ed Brayton

And in this case, it's meant quite literally, as the holdover boss of the DEA from the Bush administration has now been nominated by Obama to keep the job permanently. And she comes with some serious baggage, like having approved all those DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California despite Obama's pledge to end them:

For those hoping that Barack Obama would wage the war on drugs less aggressively than his predecessor, this is not a good sign: Yesterday he announced that the new head of the Drug Enforcement Administration will be Michele Leonhart, a career DEA agent who has been the agency's deputy administrator since March 2004 and its acting administrator since November 2007. That means she oversaw all those gratuitous raids on medical marijuana providers in California, continuing well into the Obama administration despite his promised change of course.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on February 04, 2010 (boomark / email).