So you may remember former President of the United States Bill Clinton’s admission that he had once smoked marijuana, although he claims he did not inhale. Then there is George Bush, whose mother was either drinking, smoking weed or falling down stairwells for fun whilst she was carrying him in her womb.

Then there is Barack Obama, current incumbent of the Oval Office, who has come out in the past and admitted to enjoying a toke or two whilst studying at Occidental College and then Columbia University. Shock, horror, he even inhaled.

We shouldn’t be all that surprised, then, that he has made vocal his support of the decriminalisation of marijuana in the US. In an interview with a Kansas City radio station he said the following, as reported in CNN:

I think that we have to separate out legalization — there’s a lot of concern about drug abuse of any sort by our children and the general population — versus the heavy criminalization of non-violent drug offenses (sic)…And I think that a lot of states are taking a look to see, do we have proportionality in terms of how we are penalizing the recreational user.

He then came out with this pearler, which is pretty much one of the most-widely bandied around reasons for the legalisation of weed:

…do we want to be throwing people in jail for five, 10, 15 years if they’re not major drug dealers but they’re using a substance that’s probably not good for them but is probably not hurting too many other people?

Nail. Head. Hit.

[source:cnn]