Drug enforcement nomination gets back on track

After a seven-month wait, the Senate Judiciary Committee has set a November 17 hearing on the nomination of Michele Leonhart as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Groups advocating for medicinal marijuana have waged a spirited campaign to derail Leonhart's confirmation. In a July letter to President Obama, several pro-marijuana groups and liberal organizations, such as FireDogLake and the 10th Amendment Center, accused Leonhart, a Bush administration holdover who is serving as DEA's acting administrator, of ignoring an October 2009 Justice Department directive urging federal authorities not to waste government time and resources "on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws."

President Obama offered a similar view while campaigning in 2008.

Though the number of DEA raids on medicinal marijuana growers has dropped, the agency has carried out dozens since the directive was issued. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and other groups accuse Leonhart of continuing a policy she helped oversee while a top DEA deputy under Bush.

Leonhart has also irked marijuana advocates by overruling a DEA law judge's ruling giving a University of Massachusetts professor, Lyle Craker, a license to grow marijuana for FDA-approved research. Critics noted that the ruling leaves intact a decades-old monopoly by the University of Mississippi as the country's only legal producer of marijuana for medical research. Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Thad Cochran, R-Miss., has funneled millions of dollars in earmarks to the center, housed in a building that bears his name.

Citing such concerns, groups opposed to Leonhart's confirmation have launched letter-writing campaigns and online petitions calling for her nomination to be withdrawn or rejected, and they have won support in a series of sympathetic editorials this year.

What the groups have not been able to do, however, is get the attention of the White House or the Senate.

"The federal government ignoring the concerns of people in the marijuana-reform community is nothing new," said Mike Meno, a spokesman for the Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project.

Public-opinion polls show growing support for marijuana legalization, and a small medicinal-marijuana industry is taking leaf in California. But Leonhart's likely confirmation, and the defeat of a California's Proposition 19, a ballot measure that would have weakened anti-marijuana California's laws, show that the political clout of legalization advocates remains well short of their numbers, particularly when it comes to the Senate.

California's liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., for example, opposed Proposition 19 during her successful reelection bid.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., this fall said he did not yet have a position on Leonhart; other committee members, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said the same. Committee aides said that criticism of her over marijuana policy had not registered much with staffers, let alone members.

While Leonhart's nomination has awaited a Judiciary Committee hearing since April, committee aides said that the delay reflected the workload of reviewing judicial nominations and preparing for confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.