With Colorado having transformed into a bastion of legal marijuana, The New Yorker sat down with President Barack Obama to get some of his candid thoughts on smoking weed. The President played it safe, offering measured support of further decriminalization, saying “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.” He’s referring to the fact that minorities tend to get punished more harshly for possession of weed, a well-known statistic. “As has been well documented,” he goes on to say, “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” …
