After describing the sensible approach by the administration in the first two years, one that hewed to his campaign promises quite well, it lays out what happened to that appoach:

The administration's recognition of medical cannabis reached its high-water mark in July 2010, when the Department of Veterans Affairs validated it as a legitimate course of treatment for soldiers returning from the front lines. But it didn't take long for the fragile federal detente to begin to collapse. The reversal began at the Drug Enforcement Agency with Michele Leonhart, a holdover from the Bush administration who was renominated by Obama to head the DEA. An anti-medical-marijuana hard-liner, Leonhart had been rebuked in 2008 by House Judiciary chairman John Conyers for targeting dispensaries with tactics "typically reserved for the worst drug traffickers and kingpins." Her views on the larger drug war are so perverse, in fact, that last year she cited the slaughter of nearly 1,000 Mexican children by the drug cartels as a counterintuitive "sign of success in the fight against drugs."

In January 2011, weeks after Leonhart was confirmed, her agency updated a paper called "The DEA Position on Marijuana." With subject headings like THE FALLACY OF MARIJUANA FOR MEDICINAL USE and SMOKED MARIJUANA IS NOT MEDICINE, the paper simply regurgitated the Bush administration's ideological stance, in an attempt to walk back the Ogden memo. Sounding like Glenn Beck, the DEA even blamed "George Soros" and "a few billionaires, not broad grassroots support" for sustaining the medical-marijuana movement - even though polls show that 70 percent of Americans approve of medical pot.

This apparently was the signal to prosecutors to have at medical marijuana, and the vengeance with which they did so is just stunning to me.

Really, you have to read the whole article to appreciate what's happened, and why Colorado's - or any state's - efforts to legalize pot is an exercise in futility.

One of my questions: if your desire is to leave alone those dispensaries and providers who are in full compliance with state and local laws, why do you nominate to head the DEA someone who is a known, and rabid, anti-drug zealot?  Why, when prosecutors go on the attack, threatening state employees whose job it is to oversee and regulate these outlets, threatening property owners renting to dispensaries, threatening banks where dispensaries have accounts with money-laundering charges, do you not put a swift and sudden end to it if that's not what you want your agencies, your Justice Department doing?

At a press conference in Mexico City after meeting Mexican Interior Minister Alejandro Poire, Napolitano called the drug policies of both Mexico and the United States "a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs."

What they would witness would be a tourist bonanza.

Hotels, restaurants, transportation, museums  - all would experience a boon.

And then, when the other states see that....

Of course the main issue here is getting the government off of our necks. But appeals to conscience and the Constitution don't carry much weight here. But money --- business --- tax revenue --- now you're talking.