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President Barack Obama made some interesting comments about marijuana earlier this week, saying that the drug is no more dangerous than alcohol to the health of Americans, according to The Huffington Post.
Obama was interviewed by David Remnick from the New Yorker. The story was published on Sunday. The president said that he feels the drug is “not very healthy,” but he also said that it is not as harmful as some people make it out to be.
“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 said in the interview with Remnick.
Obama was asked if he thinks weed is not as harmful as alcohol. He admitted that he feels it is less damaging “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.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration lists marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug. It is in the same category as LSD, heroin and ecstasy. Obama said that he is focused on changing the laws that punish users of drugs.
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“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.
The president’s administration announced back in August that it would not put a stop to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington.
Obama said that the new laws are very important when speaking with the New Yorker.
“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 said.
