Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Monday asserted that the solution to the arrest gap between black and white Americans was for African-Americans to smoke less marijuana.

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, the president had said that marijuana use was not “more dangerous than alcohol,” but he discouraged its use because “it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.”

ADVERTISEMENT

On Monday, conservative radio host Michael Graham told Fox News that the Obama administration “is screaming at me, ‘Put down the ice cream, stop eating those cookies!'” while he said the president was also “telling me, ‘Dude, pick up a bong, what’s the big deal.'”

“Of course the problem is, the more pot you smoke, the more you want the cookies and the ice cream,” he opined.

But liberal radio host Richard Fowler pointed out that the president had never advocated legalizing marijuana nationwide.

MacCallum suggested that the high incarceration rate among African-Americans and other minorities could be solved if those groups used less drugs.

“The reason he believes that it should be legal, and that the experiment in Washington in Colorado is a good one is that he says that minorities are incarcerated at an unfair rate compared with non-minorities who are smoking pot,” she noted. “And that may be true in the numbers.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“Maybe there should be a campaign to discourage pot use among minorities, to say that there’s a better way to make it in your future and to take better care of your body,” the Fox News host added.

Graham, however, argued that Obama’s recent comments were more about politics than inequality.

“President Obama and the Democrats know they have a problem with young voters,” he said.

ADVERTISEMENT

A 2013 study from the ACLU found that whites ages 18-25 consistently used marijuana at higher rates than African-Americans in the same age group.

Watch this video from Fox News, broadcast Jan. 20, 2014.