Free Republic

Speaking to New Yorker editor David Remnick, Obama said he still viewed pot smoking negatively – but that on the whole, the drug wasn’t the social ill that it’s been viewed as in the past. “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. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol,” Obama told the weekly magazine. The president said pot was actually less...

President Obama knows something about being a low-level, nonviolent drug offender, such as the kind the Justice Department today exempted from harsh mandatory prison sentences. In a sense, he was one himself once, although the young Barry Obama was never arrested or charged with a crime. Obama wrote openly in his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” about using marijuana and “maybe a little blow” during his high school days in Hawaii in the 1970s. Biographer David Maraniss reported that Obama was even a pot-smoking trend-setter and leader in the “Choom Gang.” But decades later, openly reflecting on the “stupid”...

At Kenmore Middle School in nearby Arlington on Monday, President Obama instructed students to do as he says, not as he did back when he was a trouble-making middle-schooler. "I've got a confession to make," Obama said. "This probably is right about the time I was at my worst. I was getting in trouble all the time. I was in the principal's office all the time." Obama's teen-aged misadventures have been well chronicled in his memoir "Dreams of my Father," and they seemed to last well into his college days. At Occidental College in the ’80s, Obama apparently picked up...