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" (Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post) &amp;quot;I inhaled. That was the point.&amp;quot; If there was one quote that prompted me to vote (twice) for Barack Obama, it was that one. (Somewhere in my house, there is a T-shirt with that quote emblazoned on it.) It promised that, maybe, having been a bit of a stoner in his youth, this new guy would come out and make sense out of the immensely costly, and immensely stupid, &amp;quot;war&amp;quot; on marijuana. TRAITOR! White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that President Obama does not &amp;quot;at this point advocate a change&amp;quot; in how marijuana is classified, despite believing that targeting individual pot smokers was &amp;quot;not the best allocation for federal law enforcement resources.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The priority in terms of the dedication of law enforcement resources should be targeted toward our drug kingpins, drug traffickers and others who perpetrate violence in the conduct of the drug trade,&amp;quot; Earnest told reporters. What does he have to lose now? Seriously. Even Sanjay Gupta&amp;#039;s on board. &amp;quot;We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that,&amp;quot; Gupta wrote.  (Not everyone is thrilled by Dr. Gupta&amp;#039;s sudden attack of common sense, including crazy theocrats. Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to many other abuses, including alcohol, cocaine, crack, LSD, ecstasy and heroin. I know because marijuana led me to all of those drugs-and more-and led many of my friends down the same path to addiction. (I wrote about this last year in an article called, &amp;quot;How God Delivered Me From the Demon of Pharmakeia.&amp;quot; Youth ministry movement leader Ron Luce also offers an excellent piece about how legalized pot is a buzz kill for teens. Youth ministry leaders know from buzz kills, I&amp;#039;m betting.) Nobody I know who actually indulged ever was &amp;quot;misled&amp;quot; by the government&amp;#039;s arrant bullshit on the topic. (Gupta apparently spent several decades in an old episode of Dragnet.) Most of the people I knew who indulged found the government propaganda hilarious. (Not for nothing has Reefer Madness been a camp hit for four decades now.) My guess is that, back in his inhaling days, the president found all of this as funny as we did. Sad what growing up can do to a fella. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19322/youthful-indiscretions/>