As a follow-up to our post Wednesday on the pending bill to allow the Drug Control Office to spend huge advertising dollars fighting legislative intitiatives that would legalize marijuana, this just came in from Kris Krane at NORML:

Today we are writing with more good news. Thanks in large part to the thousands of e-mails and letters generated by drug law reform supporters over the past week, Congress has decided to postpone voting on HR 2086, the
ONDCP Reauthorization Act, while they debate changing some of the more nsulting provisions.

In the past week, we two legislative alerts regarding provisions of this bill. One alerted you to the fact that the bill authorized reallocating $60.5 million from High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas to target medical marijuana users. The second dealt with the ONDCP allocation of over $1 billion to fund the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, despite the government¹s own studies proving it has been a massive failure.

It appears that your letters had a tremendous impact. During yesterday¹s
hearing, several members of the committee, including Diane Watson (D-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), directly challenged key aspects of these provisions. In addition, writers form the Associated Press have also published a pair of national news stories alerting readers to these controversial amendments.