President Obama Gave His First Official Support Of Legalization Of Marijuana, Happy 4/20 Everyone!
Slate – President Obama offered support for decriminalizing medical marijuana, as well as an overall change in the way the country deals with drug offenders, during an interview scheduled to air on Sunday night as part of a CNN special on marijuana. Obama talked to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the network’s chief medical correspondent, for his documentary Weed 3: The Marijuana Revolution, which will air Sunday night.
In the interview, Gupta asks Obama whether he supports a Senate bill that would change the classification of marijuana and prohibit the federal government from targeting state-approved medical marijuana programs. According to a Huffington Post preview of the program, Obama replied:
“You know, I think I’d have to take a look at the details, but I’m on record as saying that not only do I think carefully prescribed medical use of marijuana may in fact be appropriate and we should follow the science as opposed to ideology on this issue, but I’m also on record as saying that the more we treat some of these issues related to drug abuse from a public health model and not just from an incarceration model, the better off we’re going to be.”
In the documentary, President Obama also offered an approach that suggested marijuana should be treated the same way as how tobacco is handled in the US. It’s a nice sentiment cleverly tied to the worldwide celebration of pot on 4/20 but what really matters here is the followthrough. With the federal government generally not wanting to step in on the pro side of the pot debate on a state-to-state level, it’s almost impossible to have change overnight when the government and its health agencies have beaten down pot as a bad thing for literally decades upon decades. But our president coming out and saying that he thinks that the science should speak for itself in a clearly articulated way — well, as clearly articulated as Obama can be given the way he couches everything — is just a nice victory on a day in which people are generally the most embarrassing about how much they love weed, from people wearing hoodies covered in pot leaves to stoner conventions of people who think this is somehow an important civil rights issue instead of just admitting they like getting high to guys like this:
Full disclosure: I’ve only been in one legalized pot area in the US before, in Colorado. At least as of a year ago, their public dispensaries have a weird setup where you wait in one area without any pot products before getting whisked into a locked area with all the stuff, various foods and gummies and a pot sherpa they call a “budtender.” The goal is to educate people so they’re not overindulging and whatever except it’s a really stupid process because they’re just stoners working in a pot shop with very little attention to detail. I went with friends who hardly smoke and they were warned to only take one pot gummy due to its potency but for some reason were also sold a gooball with approximately 25x more milligrams of pot in it and no warning about that. Meanwhile I got some Indica juice in a Kool-Aid pouch which had no recommended dosage, drank it all per the budtender recommendation and went on a hike with my friends. Things were fine and dandy until I found myself completely paralyzed standing in the middle of a mountain confused as to how nature works while almost forgetting the basic principles on how to move and walk down an incline trail. Really, the bottom line is we’ve still got a loooong way to go even in places pot is legalized, but it’s just nice that people who actually matter are thinking about it too.
(h/t @t_sievers7 on the Facebook pic)