The president is quoted today saying some things I never expected a president to say. Maybe it is a sign of the times or maybe it’s the liberation of not needing to seek reelection or maybe it’s just Obama, but it’s refreshing. Here’s the first:
In an interview published Sunday by the New Yorker, President Obama said pot is no more dangerous than alcohol — and that marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington state is an “important” move towards a more just legal system.
“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 told reporter David Remnick. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.” In fact, the president went on to admit pot was actually less dangerous “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”
Obama also dived into the vastly disproportionate effect marijuana arrests and incarcerations have on non-white Americans. “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.”
Here’s the second:
President Obama doesn’t have a son, but if he did, he wouldn’t let him play pro football. The president disclosed that fact in the latest issue of the New Yorker, where he also compared playing football to smoking.
“I would not let my son play pro football,” Obama said. It’s important to point out that Obama said pro football, meaning there’s a chance he’d let his son play Pop Warner football.
I love football, too. I used to get up every Sunday morning and go pound up against other guys for a couple hours. I gave it up at thirty when my brother who was then forty finally retired. But it’s dangerous and, despite becoming America’s favorite pastime, the president was honest about.
And he wasn’t a hypocrite about his pot-smoking, either, but a lot of parents who want to discourage marijuana smoking in their kids are not going to thank him for it. The thing is, what he said was correct.
LINKS please…. I’m not sure I buy Obama stated on record he smoked pot as a kid.
The links are right in the story, just above the block quotes.
Pretty sure he said as much in his book.
Dreams From My Father, Chapter five.
I remember at one point in the 2008 campaign he said, “Of course I inhaled. That was the point.”
It is very refreshing. Thanks for posting this.
My favorite comment so far on this story at the CNN website:
lowell
What else would you expect a COVERT Soviet agent to say?
Man, this country is filled chock full o’ nuts. This is the thanks the prez gets for taking a small step towards some sanity in our antediluvian drug laws.
So -that- is how Stalin is going to finally beat us.
And I’m a parent of a 10-year-old. I smoked dope when I was a kid. Haven’t for 15 years now, because I prefer whiskey, but I fully expect my son to smoke for a while, when he’s the age. In fact, it’d be weird if he didn’t. I’m more concerned about drinking. And even more concerned about Saying Stupid Shit Under His Own Name In a Permanent Digital Medium.
When I think of the stuff that I said as a teenager, I recoil at the thought of any of it being around forever. Like some worldwide arrested development …
What an idiotic comment. By definition, all Soviet agents are covert. Duh. They have to have day jobs and covers, since the agency they work for was run by a country that dissolved 25 years ago, and it also paid them in a currency that no longer exists. Obama’s gotta pay for all the tradecraft tools somehow. Have a heart, dude.
Yeah, used to be you could get your secret decoder ring for free from the cheereos box. Now you have to pay for everything yourself.
it amazes me how Republicans can be so ambivalent toward GWB’s drug use and partying as a youth and yet have so much disdain for Obama’s use.
IOKIYAR — It’s not a Russian liquer.
The Democrats would be political fools to cede this issue to the Republicans. I don’t know the makeup of the New Hampshire legislature, but they recently passed legalized recreational marijuana. And everyone I saw quoted in favor was a Republican, while Dems said to wait on Colorado first; the governor promised to veto anyway.
Harry Reid also has come out in support of MMJ.
Good for Obama. He’s always been willing to do truth-telling that other politicians won’t; it’s one of his most endearing traits.
Of course, he’s saying things that a majority of Americans (and parents) already believe – but that doesn’t mean most politicians are likely to say them. We expect our elected leaders, especially presidents, to hold onto certain myths long after a lot of ordinary people have rejected them.
The gold standard, of course, is that “we” still demand our leaders, especially our presidents, to be devoutly Christian and ostentatious about it, when the number of people in the US who attend services regularly is actually rather low (and declining), and the number who don’t consider themselves Christian – including those who don’t identify as theist at all – is pretty significant. There’s exactly one open atheist in Congress. That right there is the most underrepresented group in the US. When Obama acknowledged non-believers in his 2008 Grant Park it was, in its own way, historic, and thrilled a lot of people. And even though Muslims now outnumber Jews in the US, Congress doesn’t exactly reflect that, either.
Obama, by virtue just of who he is (racially, tempermentally, and in his personal history), has done a lot to popularize the idea that powerful politicians can be of and from the same world as the rest of us. I hope it’s a trend that continues – though I certainly don’t see any of the plutocrats lining up for 2016 as embodying anything remotely similar.
What’s remarkable about Obama is that as extraordinary as he and his life experiences are, he’s the most “normal”-seeming President we’ve had since Harry Truman.
Curious about how you define “normal” …
Just like he is someone you can imagine being your next-door neighbor, unlike most of the other modern Presidents. He doesn’t have this bizarre sense of (huge) ego that so many of the others have. Doesn’t seem driven by these operatic demons (although I guess he is, in a way, with his dad). He seems like an emotionally healthy person with good perspective on himself and a real appreciation for the simple things in life.
The others just seem like they’d be very strange people in “real” life. Imagine meeting some weird guy like LBJ, or Dubya?
These quotes and a withdrawal from the Middle East are awesome. A man who does not have to raise a billion dollars for reelection can afford to speak honestly.
I’m more interested in his football comment, and wonder how Obama would prevent an adult-aged son from playing pro football? I mean, by college the kid will already be making his own decisions, personally and legally.
So I assume Obama meant to say “wouldn’t let my kid play football” — period. And I agree.
Btw, I played only one year of football, high school. Last game of the season, our two biggest most talented defensive linemen hit the opposing RB head on — and the latter never got up. Last game I ever played or wanted to play.
As for pot — it appears Remnick didn’t press him as to when he reached these welcome, benign conclusions about mj. I’m left to conclude this is what he thought all along, but waited until his reelect was safely behind him, plus a decent interval, to speak the truth.
Can we now expect quite a few presidential pardons for those given harsh mj sentences?
Liberal view on the use of cannabis for recreational use, has made room for a warning to detrimental effect for undeveloped brain of young people. The Dutch have procedures in place to guarantee quality of weed, yet researchers are placing warning signs – cannabis is a contributory cause of psychoses like schizophrenia.
Marijuana is going to drive everyone crazy! Reefer madness was right!!!
Just not in the way that they argued. It makes adults paranoid.
Every single adult who smokes cannabis becomes paranoid?
Guess I should start becoming paranoid when I use it so I”m not left out!!!
Oh man!!! Stop it!!! Yer SCARIN‘ me!!!
AG
Corporal punishment is also a contributory cause for psychoses like schizophrenia and other conditions.
Time to have good honest straight-forward research, which has not occurred in how long? Because governments regulate the research samples and vet the researchers on the results of their studies. No doubt there are developmental effects, just as there are for most chemical substances, like for example commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals.
Criminalizing has shown over a hundred plus years that it does not work for any controlled substance. Regulated markets seem to work better.
Bread and Circuses. Obama gets us talking about pot and forgetting about the Trans-Pacific Partnership which is infinitely more important.
And what is the DOJ doing re: pot? I think we know the answer to that.
How tough is it to get through life only being able to hold one idea in your head at a time? Is there some drug you can take to alleviate the symptoms?
A President who is up for re-election can test the political waters for politicians who might be reluctant during an election year to say where they stand.
What will be more interesting than the President’s statements is the political response next week.
And this relates to some tough decisions that DOJ has to make with regard to the new marijuana laws in Washington state and Colorado and the growing number of states that permit medical marijuana.
The statement about pro football is a more than polite heads up to the NFL owners, who are showing little concern for the guys that are making them gobs of money.
Somehow we turned a corner with Obama and found new times. He is young enough to have opinions on public issues formed during a more recent period than the others who ran against him in 2008. Also, until his two books brought sudden income, he was of relatively modest net worth. His perspective on life wasn’t distorted by living in a bubble of privileged wealth as for so many other past presidents and presidential candidates.
I am really curious to see how MJ stacks up among Dem candidates. I’m interested in seeing some flexibility of mind among them. I’m hoping to get a sense that some are ready to resolve issues of this era and aren’t stuck in obsolete modes of conventional wisdom.
WAY back in the 70s, I had a close buddy whose father would not allow him to play high school football. The man was a medical examiner (MD). I look back now on that and think that he very much knew what he was doing.
And despite his seeming deference to the “smartest people in the room” which leads him to wrong policy, I genuinely think he hates DC and its culture. Which is back to that bubble. I think it’s in that New Yorker article actually, tho IMO you can see it on his face.
Someone mentioned Obama’s book Dreams From My Father.
Another bit of the profile mentioned that post 2nd term President Obama will begin writing his memoirs (himself I reckon, has GWB had some ghostwrite his memoirs yet…I kid I kid) and also that First Lady Michelle is also gonna be writing a memoir!!!!
Is it too early to add both books to my kindle list for 2017…lol?
Might take until 2018, but if there are working titles it’s probably not too early. Hopefully it will be closer to Jimmy Carter’s White House Diaries than most Presidential memoirs.
What would have real import is Obama instructing the FDA and DEA to reevaluate the class one designation as a controlled substance.
When he’s ready to act, the simple, scientifically correct, within his purview thing to do is order that cannabis sativa be properly scheduled per DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis Young’s ruling, made in the previous millenium.
Like follow the law, dude.
Laws?
We don’t need no stinkin’ laws.
Well, personally I’ve lived my life by exercising natural rights based upon the understanding that I take them and not that I am given them by society. I did learn that it pays to be aware of what other folks (and the law) consider to be “rights”, however.
But as long as we have so much law that can be bent this way and that, it makes sense to use it. It’s also a personal challenge to Obama because of that ‘constitutional law professor’ deal.