It is not hard to see how critics of the war on drugs got the
impression that Barack Obama was sympathetic to their cause.
Throughout his public life as an author, law professor, and
politician, Obama has said and done things that suggested he was
not a run-of-the-mill drug warrior. In his 1995
memoir Dreams From My Father, the future president
talked candidly about his own youthful drug use, in sharp contrast
with the Democrat who then occupied the White House and the
Republican who succeeded him. As an Illinois state senator in 2001,
he criticized excessively harsh drug sentences and sponsored a bill
that allowed nonviolent, low-level offenders to enter
court-supervised treatment instead of going to jail, saying “we
can’t continue to incarcerate ourselves out of the drug
crisis.”