Obama says young people shouldn't care about legal pot — but the drug war affects everyone

published 18 March 2015

In an video interview published by Vice on Monday, President Obama said that millennials shouldn't care whether marijuana is legalized:

[W]hen 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." [Politico]

Despite the president's downplaying of the issue, pot legalization would have important practical consequences for young people. While some, like Obama himself, avoid a criminal record, a pot possession conviction can be life-ruining.

Moreover, as the Drug Policy Alliance notes, the United States spends some $51 billion annually to fight the drug war at various levels of government. Criminalizing marijuana use has helped give America the highest incarceration rate in the world, and some millennials have even lost access to student loans because they've been caught with pot.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.