Obama: 'I smoked pot as a kid'
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama said he
doesn't think marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol, "in terms of its impact
on the individual consumer."
"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. I don't think it is more
dangerous than alcohol," the president said an interview with "The New Yorker"
magazine.
Smoking
marijuana is "not something I encourage, and I've told my daughters I think it's
a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy," Obama said.
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Obama's
administration has given states permission to experiment with marijuana
regulation, and laws recently passed in Colorado and Washington legalizing
marijuana recently went into effect. The president said it was important for the
legalization of marijuana to go forward in those states to avoid a situation in
which only a few are punished while a large portion of people have broken the
law at one time or another.
The
president said he is troubled at the disproportionate number of arrests and
imprisonments of minorities for marijuana use. "Middle-class kids don't get
locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do," he said. "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 in the interview that users shouldn't be locked up for long stretches of
time when people writing drug laws "have probably done the same thing."
But
Obama urged a cautious approach to changing marijuana laws, saying that people
who think legalizing pot will solve social problems are "probably overstating
the case."
"And
the experiment that's going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is
going to be, I think, a challenge," the president said.
Ethan
Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance praised Obama's
words, saying his use of the word "important" about the new Colorado and
Washington laws "really puts the wind in the sails of the movement to end
marijuana prohibition.
Critics
of the new laws raise concerns about public health and law enforcement, asking
whether wide availability of the drug will lead to more underage drug use, more
cases of driving while high and more crime.
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