President Obama’s drug czar expressed his concerns over the implications of legalizing marijuana and advocating the drug’s medicinal benefits.
“We are certainly not sending a very good message when we call it medicine and legalize it,” R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told The Oregonian in an exclusive interview.
Kerlikowske made a quick stop in Portland last week to meet privately with some community leaders to talk about Oregon’s prescription drug abuse problem. He said the issue about marijuana was also discussed, saying it “always comes up.”
The former Seattle police chief cited the result of a 2012 survey which found that more California drivers tested positive for marijuana use than for alcohol.
Kerlikowske stressed that his concerns about marijuana center on public health, and that efforts to legalize the drug send the wrong message to young people.
Although medical marijuana is legal in some states and recreational marijuana use has been recently approved in Washington state and Colorado, the drug remains illegal under federal law. In 2011, the the Drug Enforcement Administration rejected a petition to reclassify marijuana’s federal status, saying the drug has “no accepted medical use.”
Earlier this month, Kerlikowske slammed medical marijuana during a speaking engagement in San Francisco, the San Francisco Examiner reports. He said: “Medicinal marijuana has never been through the FDA process. We have the world’s most renowned process to decide what is medicine and what should go in peoples’ bodies. And marijuana has never been through that process.”
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