It’s hardly a drop in the bucket, and it certainly doesn’t mitigate all the evil he’s committed, but one must be honest. Barack Obama is capable of at least small change, as exemplified by his commuting the sentences of a small number of people that were sent to jail for long prison terms for non-violent drug offenses.
Of course there are bound to be many more in the prison system, and Obama’s reasoning, that they deserve to have their sentences commuted because those sentences were way too long is flawed (non-violent drug offenders should get NO prison sentence at all) but in the case of such obviously malignant statists as Barack Obama, beggars can’t be choosers, and the people released from their hell will not complain.
So the United States has now, in a short period of time, seen the legalization of the use of marijuana in a number of states, has seen the softening of a stance on the drug war among a large part of its population, and now has seen a president commuting the sentences of non-violent drug offenders. Regarding drug policy, libertarians should be hopeful that the United State is finally at least moving in the right direction.