Although smoking pot is not as dangerous as alcohol, it is still "not very healthy," President Barack Obama says.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Obama said he smoked pot in his youth but it definitely is a bad habit.
"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," he told the magazine. "I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol." He also told his daughters that smoking pot is "a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy."
Despite marijuana being illegal in the U.S., nearly 21 states permit smoking pot. States like Colorado and Washington have legalized marijuana use. Obama also said the arrests in connection with marijuana mostly fell heavily on African Americans and Latinos and the middle-class people escaped the heavy punishments.
"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 also thinks that legalization of pot in Colorado and Washington is an important experiment as "it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."
According to the Department of Justice, Colorado and Washington's efforts to regulate and tax marijuana should meet a set of requirements that include keeping it away from children and restricting its flow into other states, reported Reuters.
Colorado legalized smoking pot from January 1 and Washington is expected to allow the drug's sale later this year.
