Bill Maher and guests discuss Obama’s marijuana gaffe
(Video: Bill Maher, via YouTube)
Asked about medical cannabis, during his campaign for the White House, candidate Obama replied, “I don’t think that should be a top priority of us, raiding people who are using medical marijuana. With all the things we’ve got to worry about, and our Justice Department should be doing, that probably shouldn’t be a high priority.”
Still, the DEA raided medical marijuana dispensaries on the day of President Obama’s inauguration. More DEA raids followed in February. Two weeks ago, according to the New York Times, Attorney General Eric H Holder announced a seismic shift in the enforcement of federal drug laws, saying the administration would effectively end the Bush administration’s frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana.
However, last week, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, armed DEA thugs stormed a cannabis clinic in San Francisco.
According to a recent Zogby poll, commissioned by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 72 percent of Americans want Obama to honor his word and stop the raids.
On the day after the raid on Emmalyn’s California Cannabis Clinic in San Francisco, President Obama appeared at a televised town hall meeting and was asked, “With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?”
The President made a little jest at the expense of the online community, “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” and added, “The answer is no, I don’t think that’s a good strategy to grow our economy.”
To be clear, there are two arguably intertwined issues here: the compassionate use of cannabis for a limited number of medical conditions approved by voters at the state level, and the absurdity of a prohibition that creates an entire class of criminals without victims, the result of which is that the criminals themselves become the victims of America’s obsessive reefer madness.
Bill Maher and guests (above), and writer Kathleen Parker and retired Seattle police chief Norm Stamper take on the president’s callousness, inconsistency and utter lack of cool on the subject.
From The Daily Beast:
Obama’s Marijuana Buzz Kill
The formerly cool president could have given a reasoned response to a question about legalizing pot. Instead, he was dismissive and insulted his stoner constituency.
Barack Obama’s first online town-hall meeting may have been a new media success, but he lost the stoner vote.
Asked whether he would seek to legalize marijuana as a strategy to boost the economy, the usually long-winded president—who famously admitted to his own youthful inhalations—answered with little more than a dismissive “No.”
Whereupon America’s laid-back lobby recoiled in, well, withdrawal. Where was the love?
More than 64,000 viewers posted about 104,000 questions online for the virtual meeting, the topic of which was the president’s budget. Of those questions, Obama answered seven that were preselected based on interest as measured by online votes.
Apparently, a significant portion of those casting 3.6 million votes wanted to talk pot.
Obama joked that he wasn’t sure what the question’s popularity said about his online audience (snarf, snarf), but said he doesn’t think legalization is a good strategy to grow our economy.
Dude.
From The Huffington Post:
Marijuana No Laughing Matter, Mr. President
By Norm Stamper
The president’s busy. He’s got important things to do, like rescuing the economy, saving jobs and mortgages and industries. But we ought not to let him off the hook for his frivolous dismissal of a widely popular question he faced in Thursday’s Online Town Hall.
At the top of the televised event, the president announced that of the 3.5 million votes on the thousands of questions received in advance, one topic “ranked fairly high.” It was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and encourage job creation. He responded: “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.” He then asked rhetorically what the question says about “the online audience.”
Get it? His in-the-flesh audience got it, chuckling politely at the allusion to a Stoner Nation plugged in to the “internets.”
The problem for Mr. Obama is that marijuana reform was at or near the top of the list of all questions in three major categories: budget, health care reform, green jobs and energy. Our leader doesn’t seem to understand that millions of his interlocutor-constituents are actually quite serious about the issue.
Which is not to say that drugs, particularly pot, doesn’t offer up a rich if predictable vein of humor. Cheech and Chong’s vintage “Dave’s not here!” routine is still a side-splitter. As Larry the Cable Guy would say, “I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there.”
But there’s nothing comical about tens of millions of Americans being busted, frightened out of their wits, losing their jobs, their student loans, their public housing, their families, their freedom…
And show me the humor in a dying cancer patient who’s denied legal access to a drug known to relieve pain and suffering.
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Comments
One Comment so far. Comments are closed.I respect Obama he is a talented politician, President Obama seems to posse’s insightful, reasonable judgment on many issues, although in the case of marijuana prohibition laws I find Obama’s choice to answer with mocking humor to be lacking. Smoking marijuana is an easy thing to laugh about, it seems there is something about being stoned that brings a smile to people’s faces, however marijuana prohibition is not a joke. We should not be making jokes as millions of Americans are arrested for being caught on the wrong side of moral politicking, we should not laugh as we spend over 30 billion dollars a year going after Americans for smoking weed, we should not giggle and poke fun as we watch billions of dollars in tax revenue slip through our fingers each year, and should we not be jolly as thousands of people are murdered by cartels profiting from America’s moral hypocrisy. I believe there are profound latent consequences in prohibition that are not even factored in to our assessments of the effects of illegality, such as how we view the rule of law and the role of law enforcement in the community, the divisiveness between users and non users, the stigma of mental shock of incarceration. I say pot prohibition is no joke it has real costs paid for in real lives. Freedom is achieved in a country by placing responsibility in the hands of the citizen and not by the state legally enforcing morality.
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