HUFFINGTON POST COLUMN: …“What you’re seeing now is Colorado, Washington, through state referenda, they’re experimenting with legal marijuana,” [President Barack] Obama said in response to host Hank Green.”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 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,” Obama 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.”…
The United States, home to 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Harsh sentences for nonviolent drug crimes have bolstered that figure. A 2013 American Civil Liberties Union report found that blacks were nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites… (more)
EDITOR: We sense that the President is speaking of how we should treat the use of all drugs, not just marijuana. When we perceive the use of cocaine, heroin and the overuse of marijuana as health rather than criminal justice issues, we will be able to assist people towards recovery rather than making addicts pariahs in the community.
