Obama: Drug Enforcement Wrongly Targets 'Select Few'

As proof that the growing consensus against the War on Drugs and the criminalization of marijuana use has reached the upper echelon’s of influence, President Barack Obama said in an interview published Sunday that current drug enforcement wrongly punishes “a select few.”

“We should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing,” Obama said, speaking with writer David Remnick, who quoted the president for a New Yorker profile.

“As has been well documented, 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,” Obama continued. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Obama went on to criticize enforcement of drug policy which he says unfairly targets young minorities, a view long-held by social justice advocates who say that the War on Drugs has enabledsystematic racism wthin the criminal justice system.

“Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” Obama said. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.”

When discussing experiments with legalization, such as legislation recently passed in Colorado and Washington, Obama said of the new laws: “it’s important for [the law] 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.”