Photo: Rex USA. Yesterday, we told you about the upcoming "Marijuana Bowl." It's the moniker being given to this year's Super Bowl, which features teams from Washington and Colorado, the only two states that have decriminalized the recreational use of marijuana. We wrote that the championship game will galvanize pot advocates and serve as a springboard for a national conversation in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl.
Well, it doesn't get more national than the president.
In an upcoming interview with The New Yorker, President Obama is very candid about his views on marijuana, and his past experiences with the drug. "I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice," he told the magazine. "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."
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But, the president also reiterated what many pot lobbyists use as their central argument for the legalization of marijuana — that alcohol is the far more dangerous substance. He also lamented that the amount of arrests and imprisonments for marijuana use is inherently hypocritical. "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.
While the widespread legalization of marijuana is still a long way away, the mere fact that our president can discuss the topic so freely, including his own experiences with drugs, marks a giant leap forward in the process. We've certainly come a long way since the days of the Clinton administration, when the then-president was raked over the coals for admitting that he used Marijuana.
The times, they are a changin'. (USA Today)