At least, that’s the highly charitable conclusion reached by some supportive media folks. Jacob Sullum explains how they came up with this revelation:
One-upping GQ‘s Marc Ambinder, who recently predicted that Barack Obama “will pivot to the drug war” in his second term if he is re-elected, The Daily Beast‘s James Higdon claims the president already has scaled back the crusade to stop Americans from altering their consciousness in politically disfavored ways. Higdon’s evidence: less money in the administration’s fiscal year 2013 budget for marijuana-spotting helicopters. Seriously:
Until now, the DEA and state law enforcement could count on the National Guard to fly hundreds of helicopter hours over national forests and other public land, where growers became active following the passage of property-seizure laws in the Reagan years—but the FY13 budget changes that.
The 50-percent cut is not being apportioned evenly across the states — it’s a two-thirds cut in Oregon and a 70-percent cut in Kentucky, while the Southern border states are receiving less severe reductions in funding. It’s essentially a diversion of Defense Department assets away from the interior American marijuana fields to where the national-security risk is greatest: along our Southern border.
Higdon sees this budgetary rejiggering, which by his own admission will have no impact on the amount of marijuana supplied to or consumed by Americans, as a landmark on “the road map to pot decriminalization.”
I guess you need to pretend there’s a pony somewhere when you’re digging through that much horse shit.
