White House Responses to We the People Petitions

A short while ago the White House spent a fuck-ton of taxpayer money setting up the We the People Petition site. It was marketed as a website people could submit and sign petitions for government action. While the government promised to look at any petitions with an arbitrarily selected number of signatures I suspected they would simply issue easily predictable statements against taking action related to the petitions. Well, my suspicions were right. The White House responded to a handful of the petitions with the most signatures, including the petition to legalize marijuana, and the responses were exactly as expected. For instance here is part of their response to the petition asking the federal government to legalize marijuana:

When the President took office, he directed all of his policymakers to develop policies based on science and research, not ideology or politics. So our concern about marijuana is based on what the science tells us about the drug’s effects.

According to scientists at the National Institutes of Health– the world’s largest source of drug abuse research – marijuana use is associated with addiction, respiratory disease, and cognitive impairment. We know from an array of treatment admission information and Federal data that marijuana use is a significant source for voluntary drug treatment admissions and visits to emergency rooms. Studies also reveal that marijuana potency has almost tripled over the past 20 years, raising serious concerns about what this means for public health – especially among young people who use the drug because research shows their brains continue to develop well into their 20’s. Simply put, it is not a benign drug.

Basically the response to the petition was to link a bunch of previous studies that were performed to justify the prohibition against marijuana. While most of those studies have been proven wrong by third-party research that’s irrelevant because the government wants marijuana illegal and by Thor in Valhalla it will remain illegal!

When people kept linking to pet petitions I ignored them because I knew the federal government wasn’t going to take any of the petitions seriously. Those in office don’t give two shits what you and I think, we’re just uneducated peons who need every detail of our lives planned, managed, and controlled for our own good.