WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama
believes smoking marijuana is a “bad habit” but thinks legal
penalties now fall disproportionately on minorities and that
states legalizing pot should go ahead with their plans, he said
in a profile released on Sunday.
“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,” he is quoted as saying in a New Yorker
magazine article. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than
alcohol.”
The president said he has told his daughters smoking
marijuana is “a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.”
However, he said he is concerned that marijuana-related
arrests fall far more heavily on minorities than on others.
Legalization of pot should go forward in the states of Colorado
and Washington 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,” he
said.
Marijuana remains illegal in the United States under federal
law, but 21 U.S. states allow or are about to allow medical
marijuana use, and Colorado and Washington have decriminalized
use of pot entirely. Alaska and the District of Columbia are
considering following suit.
The Obama administration said last year that federal law
enforcement will not target users in Colorado and Washington, as
long as they comply with their respective states’ laws.
The Department of Justice says it will not interfere with
states’ efforts to regulate and tax marijuana provided they are
able to meet a set of requirements, including keeping it from
children and restricting its flow into other states.
The president also said he believes that those who argue
that legalizing marijuana will solve a number of social problems
“are probably overstating the case.” Legalization in Colorado
and Washington will likely be a challenge, he said.
In the lengthy profile, the president muses over race, the
Middle East, and criticism of his efforts to woo Congress, among
other topics. Discussing race, he said that he believes some
people will never accept having a black president.
The president said that the three sets of negotiations
involving Iran, Israel and the Palestinians, and Syria each have
less than a 50-50 chance of succeeding, but are necessary steps
toward achieving stability in a volatile region.
If we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible
fashion … you could see an equilibrium developing between
Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which
there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or
proxy warfare,” he said.
On the question of whether Obama will write a memoir, former
adviser David Axelrod called it a “slam dunk” that the president
will. A literary agent estimated publishers will pay between $17
million and $20 million for one.
Obama said narrowing the gap between rich and poor would be
a key part of his legacy.
“I will measure myself at the end of my presidency in large
part by whether I began the process of rebuilding the middle
class and the ladders into the middle class and reversing the
trend toward economic bifurcation in this society,” he said.
(Reporting By Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
