Medical marijuana advocates have been fairly perplexed at the raids on marijuana outlets and users in Montana. Especially after US Attorney General Eric Holder had assured law students at The University of Montana that his office would not target “legitimate” users of medical marijuana. Now, a new book suggests that Holder launched the raids on medical marijuana establishments specifically as a cover for the growing “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal that involved the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
The Daily Caller has this:
“Eric Holder, Obama’s embattled Attorney General, was under mounting pressure from Congress to explain the botched Fast and Furious sting operation, whereby two thousand assault rifles and other firearms were sold to suspected traffickers for the Mexican drug cartels,” Martin A. Lee writes in “Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana – Medical, Recreational and Scientific.”
“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.”
Here’s what Holder had to say at The University of Montana back in February 2011, according to The Missoulian.
In the first five years the law (Montana’s medical marijuana law) was in effect, some 7,300 people signed up for medical marijuana cards. But in October 2009, Holder issued a memo that deemed prosecution of people legitimately using medical marijuana “unlikely to be an efficient use of limited federal resources.”
The number of medical marijuana cardholders in Montana nearly quadrupled within the next 16 months.
“I made it clear that I’m not going to allow those laws (legalizing the medical use of marijuana) to be used in a way to allow actions illegal in nature,” Holder said.