Read it and weep, marijuana reform activists.

The federal government is not going to pull back on its efforts to curtail marijuana farming operations, Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, said Wednesday in Fresno. The nation's drug czar, who viewed a foothill marijuana farm on U.S. Forest Service land with state and local officials earlier Wednesday, said the federal government will not support legalizing marijuana.

"Legalization is not in the president's vocabulary, and it's not in mine," he said.

Kerlikowske said he can understand why legislators are talking about taxing marijuana cultivation to help cash-strapped government agencies in California. But the federal government views marijuana as a harmful and addictive drug, he said. "Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit," Kerlikowske said in downtown Fresno while discussing Operation SOS—Save Our Sierra—a multiagency effort to eradicate marijuana in eastern Fresno County.

The story goes on to detail expensive marijuana-eradication efforts that, like all such efforts, will fail.

Statewide, more than 5.3 million plants were seized in 2008, or two of every three confiscated in the United States, said Bill Ruzzamenti, director of the Central Valley High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.

Slog readers in California: any of you guys down there have any trouble getting your hands on pot in 2008? Didn't think so.