Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment, and I want to share a slightly different perspective on it. I served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles for 6 years. In 1987, when I started in the office, the office had a guideline where we wouldn't take a case for prosecution involving less than a kilo of cocaine. Now, that didn't mean that it didn't get prosecuted. It did mean that it was referred to the district attorney's office, but we just didn't have the resources to go after every cocaine case involving less than a kilogram. A couple of years later into my tenure in that office, we had to raise the guideline to 5 kilograms because we had so many 1 kilogram cases, and we couldn't even handle those prosecutions. I don't know what the policy is now, whether it's 10 kilograms or 20 kilograms, but the reality is we have very finite resources within the Justice Department to prosecute drug cases. Then, of course, the funds for drug prosecutions have to compete with the funds for terrorism cases and carjacking cases and bank robberies and T-Chek thefts or whatnot. We are in a limited resource world, and I don't think it's a good use of our Federal law enforcement resources to be prosecuting medical marijuana cases in States that have legalized medical marijuana. On the priority list of Federal law enforcement priorities, that ought to be near the very bottom.…”