Obama on Marijuana: ‘I Don’t Think It Is More Dangerous Than Alcohol’

President
Barack Obama says he views marijuana as a "bad
habit" and "a vice," but no more dangerous than
alcohol.
"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 told The New Yorker's David Remnick.
"I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol."
The president acknowledged marijuana is less
dangerous than alcohol "in terms of its impact on
the individual consumer."
"It's not something I encourage," Obama
continued, "and I've told my daughters I think it's a
bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy."
Still, he said, "we should not be locking up kids or
individual users for long stretches of jail time when
some of the folks who are writing those laws have
probably done the same thing."
On the legalization of recreational marijuana in
Colorado and Washington, Obama said, "it's
important for it 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."
Obama's support of legalization was welcomed by
pot advocates.
"The first step to improving our nation's marijuana
policy is admitting that marijuana is less harmful
than alcohol," Mason Tvert, director of the
Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement. "Now
that he has recognized that laws jailing adults for
using marijuana are inappropriate, it is time to
amend for those errors and adopt a more fact-
based marijuana policy.
But the president also said legalization is a slippery
slope:
"When it comes to harder drugs, the harm
done to the user is profound and the social
costs are profound. And you do start getting
into some difficult line-drawing issues. 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? If somebody says, We've got a
finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn't going
to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with
that?"
His comments were part of a lengthy, wide-ranging
profile published online Sunday. Some other
notable quotes from the piece:
· Obama doesn't have a son. But if he did, he
"would not let my son play pro football." He then
compared concussion-prone football players to
boxers and smokers: They all know the dangers.
"At this point, there's a little bit of caveat emptor,"
Obama said. "These guys, they know what they're
doing. They know what they're buying into. It is no
longer a secret. It's sort of the feeling I have about
smokers."
· Obama on losing some older white voters in the
2012 election: "There's no doubt that there's some
folks who just really dislike me because they don't
like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side
of it is there are some black folks and maybe some
white folks who really like me and give me the
benefit of the doubt precisely because I'm a black
president."
· His 2004 speech at the Democratic National
Convention in Boston put him on the map,
politically, but critics say its theme — about
Washington rising above partisan politics — was a
fantasy. "My speech in Boston was an aspirational
speech," Obama countered. "It was not a
description of our politics. It was a description of
what I saw in the American people."
· The president says he doesn't watch "Meet The
Press," "Reliable Sources" or any of the Sunday
political talk shows, for that matter. "I don't watch
Sunday-morning shows," Obama said. "That's been
a well-established rule." He usually spends them
with his family or plays basketball.
· Obama on the expectations of the office during a
second term: "The conventional wisdom is that a
President's second term is a matter of minimizing
the damage and playing defense rather than
playing offense. But, as I've reminded my team,
the day after I was inaugurated for a second term,
we're in charge of the largest organization on
earth, and our capacity to do some good, both
domestically and around the world, is unsurpassed,
even if nobody is paying attention."