EDITOR’S COLUMN: C’mon Barry, pardon an old, old friend

When President Obama visited Alaska last year, about all he managed to do was rename a mountain, point and weep at a melting glacier and dine with Alice Rogoff, passionate environmentalist, newspaper ingénue and aspiring Arianna Huffington of the Arctic.

And as he winds down his last term in office, Obama is chopping Alaska at the knees every chance he can get. Using executive powers to deny drilling opportunities offshore and further frustrate opportunities in the ANWR, the president is showing that all he believes and knows about Alaska he learned on that 2015 trip: 1) That no one lives here and those that do shouldn’t, and, 2) that it should be the role of the federal government to protect The Last Frontier from we imperialist scavengers who inhabit her and seek booty most foul from her virginal treasures.

On the one hand, he’s probably right.

With the abundance of fracking technology making oil extraction readily available in eyesores like North Dakota, Texas and Oklahoma, where the ease and cost of production and transportation is quite preferable to drilling off-shore at the top of the globe, there is no good reason to continue investing in oil production in the Arctic.

Ideally, Alaskans in 2017 would say to themselves, ‘We had a good run with oil, and we’ve got $58 billion in the bank to show for it. Let’s invest that in other ways to make a buck, like agriculture or solar power, or selling water to the lower 48.’

But you get the sense nobody here is feeling that warm bath of acceptance. Much more, Alaskans seem to be investing all their hope that the incoming president will roll back all of the restrictions of the Obama era and carry us back to the good ol’ days of the pre-fracking oil boom, as utterly impossible and backwards as such a dream is.

Still, Obama’s parting shots at Alaska feel kind of personal and petty.

You’d think he could at least throw us one measly bone before dropping the mic and leaving us up here to freeze.

This is the period in a lame duck presidency when pardons generally come flowing out of the Oval Office with impunity. But I guess having commuted the sentences of tens of thousands of low-level prisoners along the way, and not nearly so beholden to fat cats in country club prisons as his predecessors, Obama is finding his dance card is a little light and lonely in these final days of power.

So, Barry, why not go way, way back and pardon an old, old, old friend, eh? You know, that guy who helped you get through high school, that guy you said is ‘less of a danger than alcohol’?

In 2014, Alaska legalized marijuana for commercial distribution, and since then, a number of states have done the same, including California last November.

But making the product readily available to customers, and putting residual tax revenues in the coffers of local governments, has proven frustrating, to say the least.

Though there’s no shortage, here or anywhere, of would-be customers desiring legal product, the process has been cumbersome because the federal government refuses to declassify marijuana as a Class 1 narcotic, leaving it in the same category as heroin and cocaine. This brings with it all the banking laws and travel restrictions associated with Class 1 contraband, regardless of how many states legalize it. In Alaska, it’s especially and unfairly punishing because so much of the state is only navigable by air.

But so far, Obama has been unwilling to be an agent of change on this issue where autocratic action is desperately needed and the power so effortlessly applied.

“What is and isn’t a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress,” Obama said on Jake Tapper’s CNN show in 2014. “It’s not something by ourselves that we start changing.”

So this king of executive orders based on general principle is all of a sudden a checks-and-balances dogmatist when it comes to smoking grass? Really?

Four out of five dentists agree the president does, indeed, have the power to roll back the Class 1 scheduling of marijuana by fiat, and among those experts in the majority is none other than former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, whom I had the chance to interview back in September.

Taking a break from a campaign stop in Boston, the vice-presidential pick of Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson told me, “If we win, Gary will deschedule marijuana as a Class 1 narcotic as soon as we get there. That will immediately solve the banking issues, and that would be a big help in Alaska. They’ve had a little struggle in Washington State, too. Massachusetts, two years ago, legalized (medical) marijuana but the dispensaries have had a hell of a time with the rollout. We have to let states do it their way. Some get it right sooner than others, but that’s the American way, to let the states figure it out.”

Is that what this is about, Barry? A state’s rights issue? Is it that you don’t want states having their way, even when their way in this regard agrees with your personally held beliefs? Do you really despise the ‘deplorables’ in rural states so strongly that you would do an old friend like that?

Given the surprising outcome of the presidential election, Obama’s actions are needed. Trump’s pick for Attorney General once infamously said he was ‘OK with the KKK’ until he ‘learned they smoked marijuana.’

Jeff Sessions’ gaffe is nearly 30 years old, but it’s not the kind of gaffe time can live down. It’s one that will be repeated over and over again during Sessions’ confirmation hearing, but it’s not enough to warrant a filibuster, and the retail pot business in every state that’s legalized it, will continue to be frustrated by archaic and stupid laws.

C’mon, Barry, you’ve got two weeks left; throw us Alaskans a bone here. God knows you haven’t left us with much.