Obama snuffs stoner dreams of legalization In an interview with VICE News, Obama says he supports decriminalizing pot but stops short of endorsing legalization.

Barack Obama may be the first acknowledged stoner to hold the highest office, but he continues to blunt the hopes of advocates for legalizing pot.

Obama’s interview with VICE news – posted at 4:20 p.m. on Monday – is part of a stepped-up White House strategy to court millennials through non-traditional news outlets. But when VICE founder Shane Smith suggested to the president that legalizing marijuana would be “the biggest part of your legacy,” Obama’s response would harsh any mellow.


“First of all, it shouldn’t be young people’s biggest priority,” Obama chided. “You should be thinking about climate change, the economy, jobs, war and peace. Maybe way at the bottom you should be thinking about marijuana.”

As his administration prepares for a concentrated push on sentencing reform, Obama drew a distinction between his support of states’ efforts to decriminalize marijuana and reverse the crackdown on nonviolent drug offenders and actually encouraging drug use. It would be up to Congress, he said, to change pot’s legal status.

“Legalization or decriminalization is not a panacea,” he added, questioning whether it would work for drugs like meth and crack. “There is a legitimate, I think, concern, about the overall effects this has on society.”

Obama spoke more forcefully about another green issue: the environment, essentially accusing the Republican Party of immaturity on climate change.

“It’s not both sides arguing and creating gridlock. You’ve got one side that is denying facts,” Obama said. “That’s a phase that the Republican Party is going through right now. It’ll outgrow that phase.”

Obama’s cooler-than-thou tone toward Republicans continued throughout the interview, echoing a clip released week in which Obama said he was “embarrassed” for the 47 Republican senators who wrote an open letter to Iran about the nuclear negotiations.

Smith, whose questions were interspersed with clips from VICE documentaries, told Obama he was “rational, sane” and asked questions that easily set Obama up to mock his Republican opponents. It was just the latest interview granted by the president to a web-driven outlet that offered not only a Gen-Y audience but also sympathetic hosts and exceptional entertainment value.

In January, he talked to three YouTube stars, including the emerald-lipped comedian GloZell Green. Vox packaged the president’s answers into share-friendly video nuggets, complete with background music and graphics. And Ben Smith’s straight-laced interview for BuzzFeed News was published just days before a BuzzFeed Video-produced promotion for the Affordable Care Act featured the president with a selfie-stick.

Pot also came up in the BuzzFeed interview, but Obama has increasingly been bringing the subject up himself, minus the preaching. When Jimmy Kimmel asked him last week about Sean Penn’s stoner character in the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” the president replied, “”I lived it, man, I didn’t just see it.”

He followed that up Saturday at Washington’s annual Gridiron dinner, where he predicted he’d get more laughs than usual. “I’m not saying I’m any funnier. I’m saying weed is now legal in D.C.,” he quipped.

Obama acknowledged smoking pot in his pre-campaign autobiography “Dreams From My Father,” but it wasn’t until his second term approached that Obama started to let his stoner humor loose. David Maraniss’s detailed descriptions of his exploits with a group of friends dubbed the “ Choom Gang” in his biography “The Story,” made it clear that Obama certainly did inhale — often and with gusto. He also made a knowing pitch to “Harold and Kumar” fans during the 2012 campaign, and at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2013, he marveled at the changing media landscape.

“I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around 2 a.m.,” he said.