Obama Predicts More States Will Legalize Marijuana

Hmm, why didn’t he mention this in his State of the Union address? On Thursday, President Obama told YouTube interviewers that more states will legalize marijuana in the near future.

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“What you’re seeing now is Colorado, Washington through state referenda, they’re experimenting with legal marijuana,” said the President.

“The position of my administration has been that we still have federal laws that classify marijuana as an illegal substance, but we’re not going to spend a lot of resources trying to turn back decisions that have been made at the state level on this issue. My suspicion is that you’re gonna see other states start looking at this.”

“What I am doing at the federal level,” Obama responded, “is asking my Department of Justice just to examine generally how we are treating nonviolent drug offenders, because I think you’re right.”

“What we have done is instead of focusing on treatment — the same way we focused, say, with tobacco or drunk driving or other problems where we treat it as public health problem — we’ve treated this exclusively as a criminal problem,” the president said. “I think that it’s been counterproductive, and it’s been devastating in a lot of minority communities. It presents the possibility at least of unequal application of the law, and that has to be changed.”

Obama’s position is laudable from a libertarian perspective. However, with all the threats America is facing right now–ISIS, a troubled economy, an uncontrolled Southern border–the last thing this country needs is a bunch of people getting higher than kites on legal pot.

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