http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/obama-and-his-pot-smoking-choom-gang/

May 25, 2012 12:54pm
Obama and His Pot-Smoking ‘Choom Gang’

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Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama never tried to say he didn’t inhale.

In his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”

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Now that we have a pot head as Prez …

… as a little L libertarian, I’ve always thought that our “drug policy”, “(pseudo) War on (some) Drugs”, was a best “misguided”, at worst “corrupt”. We have too many examples, anecdotal evidence, of pot not being as “bad” as booze, of high achievers who “inhaled” …

Don’t you think we could have a national dialogue about “drugs”, “drug policy”, and factual evidence?

We have mj prohibition because of hemp’s competition with the politically connected paper industry.

We have mj prohibition because of Hollywood’s “reefer madness” propaganda.

We have mj prohibition because of its association with the black community.

We have arguably ¼ of the federal prison population due to mj.

We have sick people, who need it and have no alternative for them. Not an effective alternative. Never mind a cheap alternative.

Ignore that not everyone who has a medical mj RX needs it. There are folks who legitimately need it (i.e., AIDS, chemotherapy patients, glaucoma).

Since the Chinese dynasty, there has been a residual addiction rate. Regardless if addicts were sentenced to death in China. Dealers were imprisoned for long stretches in Southeast Asia. No “public policy” makes a dent in the problem.

If the Gooferment can’t keep “drugs” out of its prisons, then perhaps we need a better strategy?

Walmart and Walgreens seem to be able to restrict access to stuff from minors.

So, why can’t we shift from the “punishment” meme that is immoral, ineffective, and inefficient to a “treatment” meme. 

How much worse could we do?

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