Berkeley pushes back against federal medical marijuana crackdown

[Life Long Dem]

2. It goes deeper than Holder or Obama

In March of 2011, federal agents in hazmat suits — guns brandished and sirens blaring — raided dozens of marijuana greenhouses and dispensaries in Montana, and arrested citizens who were growing pot in accordance with the state’s medical marijuana law.

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The top federal prosecutor in Montana — Mike Cotter, the U.S. attorney appointed by President Obama in 2009

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When Cotter charged these citizens in 2011, he gave no credence to a very basic protest that they all made: they’d been assured in writing, by Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney general, that they could grow medical marijuana and the feds wouldn’t prosecute them.

The defendants pointed to dozens of statements made by Holder and even the president, and specifically the now-infamous Ogden Memo. This was a publicly released document in 2009 document, written by David Ogden, Eric Holder’s deputy, that instructed federal law enforcement officers nationwide to leave medical marijuana growers alone as long as they were abiding by state law. This memo was reported in the national press, and local papers too, as a virtual ceding of jurisdiction by the federal government. “U.S. Won’t Prosecute in States that Have Medical Marijuana,” heralded a New York Times headline.

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/us-attorney-said-montana-medical-pot-growers-wouldnt-be-prosecuted-now-theyre-facing-life?paging=off