Marijuana, which has just been made legal for sale and purchase in the state of Colorado, is no more dangerous than alcohol, President Barack Obama said in an interview published Sunday. Speaking to the New Yorker, Obama said he still viewed pot smoking negatively but that on the whole, the drug wasn't the social ill that it's been viewed as in the past.
"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," Obama told the weekly magazine.
Obama said pot was actually less dangerous than alcohol "in terms of its impact on the individual consumer." "It's not something I encourage, and I've told my daughters I think it's a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy," he said.
Instead, Obama said in the New Yorker interview that he's focused on making laws that treat users fairly. "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," he said.
"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?" Obama wondered. "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?"
Source: huffingtonpost.com
