October 19, 2009 11:52AM # Drug War Insanity Goes Up in Smoke By [Tim Lynch](https://www.cato.org/people/tim-lynch) --- SHARE As my colleague David Rittgers [notes below](https://www.cato.org/2009/10/19/good-news-on-medical-marijuana/), the [announcement](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/18/AR2009101802756.html) by the Department of Justice that it will no longer seek to arrest medical marijuana users is a breakthrough for common sense in federal drug policy. It is bizarre that it takes a major policy announcement to spell out what a waste of police and court time it is to investigate the ill people who use medical marijuana. Historians will surely look back on this period and ponder how our government could have seriously embraced the opposite policy, in the same way we look back at the strange days of alcohol prohibition. The Obama administration should be taking much [bolder steps](https://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb111/hb111-33.pdf) to stop the criminalization of drug use more generally. More and more people have come to recognize that the drug war has been given a fair chance to work, but it has proved to be a grand failure. ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).