President Says Pot No More Dangerous Than Alcohol

Jan. 21--WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said he doesn't think marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol, "in terms of its impact on the individual consumer."

"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," the president said an interview with The New Yorker magazine.

Smoking marijuana is "not something I encourage, and I've told my daughters I think it's a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy," Obama said.

Gregory Smolin, a founder of AllBetterCare Urgent Care Center in South Middleton and Silver Spring townships, said marijuana isn't known to have major negative health effects. Medically, he said alcohol is known to cause diseases of the liver and pancreas and can kill someone from an overdose.

"Hands down, the drug that accounts for the largest number of emergency room visits is alcohol," he said. "Of course, the caveat on that is that alcohol is much more widely available than marijuana, heroin, you name it, so obviously it's going to be a statistically more common thing to be seen.

"Marijuana has fairly limited health consequences, as far as diseases that it causes -- respiratory irritation, things like that, coughs and bronchitis," he said.

With marijuana, there seems to be a lot of information out there that isn't true, he said, because it has been labeled a bad drug.

Speaking solely from a medical standpoint, he said a lot of people see marijuana as a gateway drug, which is likely one of the major reasons it has a bad stigma attached to it. However, when a medical professional looks at the affects the drug has on a person, it hasn't been shown to cause as many problems as perhaps tobacco or alcohol.

"People think that it's medically dangerous, but that's probably not accurate," Smolin said. "If the two substances were both legal, then we would have a much easier way to compare what the actual effects are. Versus labeling them the drug that everyone uses, alcohol and the bad drug that bad people use, marijuana. I think if we saw the two of them side by side, we would probably have a little more different view of which one is better and which one is worse. ... There's really not a toxic level of marijuana, if you smoke too much, you won't die from it, you'll be very intoxicated from it, but you're not going to die. And there's really no direct disease process that comes from smoking pot."

Obama's administration has given states permission to experiment with marijuana regulation, and laws recently passed in Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana recently went into effect. The president said it was important for the legalization of marijuana to go forward in those states to avoid a situation in which only a few are punished while a large portion of people have broken the law at one time or another.

The president said he is troubled at the disproportionate number of arrests and imprisonments of minorities for marijuana use.

"Middle-class kids don't get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do," he 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."

He said in the interview that users shouldn't be locked up for long stretches of time when people writing drug laws "have probably done the same thing."

But Obama urged a cautious approach to changing marijuana laws, saying that people who think legalizing pot will solve social problems are "probably overstating the case."

"And the experiment that's going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge," the president said.

Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance praised Obama's words, saying his use of the word "important" about the new Colorado and Washington laws "really puts the wind in the sails of the movement to end marijuana prohibition.

Critics of the new laws raise concerns about public health and law enforcement, asking whether wide availability of the drug will lead to more underage drug use, more cases of driving while high and more crime.

The Associated Press contributed information to this article.

Email Samantha Madison at smadison@cumberlink.com and follower her on Twitter @SentinelMadison.

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