Anti-Pot Group Trumpets Obama’s 2011 Comment on Drug Legalization As ‘Huge News!’

This morning I received a fundraising appeal from
the anti-pot group Project SAM that opens with “huge news!”
Apparently “the President just stated, plainly and
emphatically, that he is ‘not in favor of legalization.'” Project
SAM’s co-founder and chairman, Patrick Kennedy, says Barack Obama
uttered
those words “at a YouTube Town Hall”—which is true, except the
event occurred
in January 2011. The staleness of the story takes on added
significance at the end of Kennedy’s message, where he says “SAM
continues to keep up the pressure,” which makes it seem as if the
organization is trying to take credit for something Obama said two
years before it was founded.

At the same event where Obama said he was against legalization,
by the way, he also said
“this is an entirely legitimate topic for debate.” It seems that
debate has either started to persuade Obama or made him feel more
secure in revealing his true opinions on the subject. The last time
Project SAM made a big deal out of one of Obama’s comments, you may
recall, was when it
rebuked him for saying, in an interview with The New
Yorker, that marijuana is safer than alcohol—although Kennedy
himself
admitted that statement was correct. In the same interview,
Obama
had this to say about the legalization of marijuana in Colorado
and Washington: “It’s important for it to go forward because it’s
important for society not to have a situation in which a large
portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and
only a select few get punished.” And so far, to the
consternation of many Republicans, Obama has in fact allowed
these experiments to proceed, based on a
policy of prosecutorial forbearance that reserves the Justice
Department’s resources for cases involving “federal enforcement
priorities.”

Those developments seem more relevant to the current debate
about marijuana legalization than a comment Obama made more than
three years ago. They suggest that Obama may be “evolving” on the
subject of marijuana in much the same way that he “evolved” on the
subject of gay marriage,
coming around to a position he privately held all along. But
maybe that possibility is too depressing for the diehard
prohibitionists at Project SAM to contemplate. This should cheer
them up: The first lady just
stated, plainly and emphatically, that marijuana “is taking
America captive.”