Ex-DEA heads, UN panel urge US to nullify pot laws
Mar. 5, 2013 4:20pm

CHICAGO (AP) — Eight former U.S. drug chiefs warned the federal government Tuesday that time is running out to nullify Colorado and Washington's new laws legalizing recreational marijuana use, and a United Nations agency also urged challenges to the measures it says violate international treaties.

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"My fear is that the Justice Department will do what they are doing now: do nothing and say nothing," former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger told The Associated Press in an interview Monday. "If they don't act now, these laws will be fully implemented in a matter of months."

Bensinger, who lives in the Chicago area, said if the federal government doesn't immediately sue the states it'll risk creating "a domino effect" in which other states legalize marijuana too.

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Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, said the eight are destined to share the legacy of agents who enforced alcohol prohibition before that policy was deemed a failure and reversed in 1933.

"The former DEA chiefs' statement can best be seen as a self-interested plea to validate the costly and failed policies they championed but that Americans are now rejecting at the ballot box," Nadelmann said.

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AP Writer P. Solomon Banda in Denver also contributed to this report.

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