With recent poll numbers showing favor for marijuana legalization, President Barack Obama has made a public statement that weed is no more dangerous than alcohol.
While Obama has been in the White House, California began selling marijuana for medical reasons and Colorado has opened the first recreational pot shops.
The legalization of marijuana has been a hot topic during Obama’s presidency, but before you think this is Obama’s official endorsement for getting high, he continues, “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life.” Obama opened up about marijuana in a newly-released interview with the New Yorker‘s David Remnick.
Interestingly enough, Obama also tackles the issues of arrests and longer sentencing for minorities for drug possession in the interview. “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do. And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties,” he said.
Obama added that legalization is “important 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.”
Even with the positive effects, Obama “keeps it real” about the slippery slope this could create for “harder” drugs. “If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that?” he poses in the interview.
Marijuana sales have also presented a new set of problems. Notably banks not accepting money from sales. The way that Obama handles this issue will be a sight to watch during his last term in the White House.
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