Getty 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. 
 
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 “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. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– President Barack Obama sat down with VICE co-founder Shane Smith, and the two jawed about issues of the day based on questions sent in after a VICE online query—Smith says "the Internet blew up" after VICE posted its request. Highlights from the interview (which Politico notes was posted at 4:20pm yesterday), or you can watch in the gallery: On climate change: The president mentions goals such as doubling fuel-efficiency standards, upping clean-energy production, and making appliances more efficient. "If I'm able to do all those things now, when I'm done, we're still going to have a heck of a problem," he says. "But we will have made enough progress that the next president and the next generations can start building on it." And to snowball-hurling detractors like Sen. Jim Inhofe? "That's disturbing," Obama says. "I guarantee you that the Republican party will have to change its approach to climate change, because voters will insist upon it." On an Iran nuclear deal: How does the president feel about the 47 senators who sent their own letter to Iran? "I'm embarrassed for them," he says. "I think it's entirely legitimate for my friends in the Senate who signed that letter to ask very hard questions. … [But] this is a good example, I think, of where the state of our politics … leads Republicans to be more worried about a Tea Party primary than they are about what ordinary folks are thinking. It damages the country, it damages our standing, it's not productive." On pot: According to Smith, the "No. 1 question from everyone on the Internet": How does the president feel about marijuana legalization? While Obama discusses what he thinks is a currently "skewed" criminal justice system with too-long prison terms for nonviolent drug offenders, costly state incarceration programs, and the "terrible effect on many communities," pot shouldn't be Generation Y's first priority: "Young people, I understand this is important to you, but you know, you should be thinking about climate change, the economy, jobs, war and peace. Maybe way at the bottom you should be thinking about marijuana." (Sadly, the president didn't cap the interview by reading mean tweets about himself.)