Barry Obama Leader of the Choom Gang, Hypocrite in Chief

Back in 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama said that his views on medical marijuana was that it was a state rights issue best left up to state and local governments to decide.

“I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” he said to the delight of many who utilize medical marijuana and it’s advocates. He also promised an end to Bush era raids on providers of medical pot, which is legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.

But it didn’t take very for President Obama to go back on those words and unleash a multi­agency crackdown on medical marijuana that goes far beyond anything perpetrated  by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, promising to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, in addition to threatening state employees with prison time for regulating medical marijuana. With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, the Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts.

“There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “He’s gone from first to worst.”

The estimated 730,000 patients nationwide, many of whom are seriously ill or dying, who rely on state-sanctioned marijuana recommended by their doctors are obviously being adversely affected by the crackdown. In addition, drug experts warn, the White House’s war on law-abiding providers of medical marijuana will only expand the black market for real criminals.

“The administration is going after legal dispensaries and state and local authorities in ways that are going to push this stuff back underground again,” says Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a former Republican senator who has urged the DEA to legalize medical marijuana, pulls no punches in describing the state of affairs produced by Obama’s efforts to circumvent state law: “Utter chaos.”

Some might describe the president’s high school years as utter chaos. Those very same years when him and his friends were known as the “Choom Gang” for their marijuana smoking prowess.

In his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot as a high school kid. He would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”

Now a soon-to-be published biography by David Maraniss entitled “Barack Obama: The Story” gives more detail on Obama’s pot-smoking days, complete with testimonials from young Barry Obama’s high school buddies.

According to Maraniss, teenage Obama was not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator.

“As a member of the Choom Gang,” Maraniss writes, “Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends.” One of which was “Total Absorption” or “TA”.

“TA was the opposite of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled,” explains Maraniss. Here’s how it worked: If you exhaled prematurely when you were with the Choom Gang, “you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around.”

As one of Obama’s old high school buddies tells Maraniss: “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated.”

Another Obama innovation was called “Roof Hits.”

“When they were chooming in a car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.”

Maraniss also says Obama was known for his “Interceptions”: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.”

So not only was the president a weed head but he was also a bogart.

A bogart and hypocrite who wrote about doing drugs enthusiastically in his youth, who promised to respect state laws on medical marijuana and who is ultimately hurting  those who rely on it to combat a variety of aliments.

A president so hip and cool he can laugh and brag about the fun times he had in his youth, while locking people away for doing the very same although not for fun but for relief from pain.

 

Penn Jillette Calls Out Obama on His Hypocritical Drug Use

Well done sir.

 

NYC residents losing custody of their children over minor marijuana possession…

Hundreds of New Yorkers who have been caught with small amounts of marijuana have had civil child neglect cases brought against them in recent years, even though they were not charged criminally, according to city records and defense lawyers. A small number of parents have even lost custody of their children. These cases are even being brought against parents just for admitting to marijuana use.

New York City’s child welfare agency said that it was pursuing these cases for appropriate reasons, and that marijuana use by parents could be an indicator of serious problems in the way they cared for their children.

In California, where the medical marijuana movement has flourished, child welfare officials must demonstrate actual harm to a child from marijuana use in order to bring neglect cases, but in New York the opposite is true. The child welfare system in NY has become an alternate system of justice, with legal standards on marijuana that appear to be tougher than those of the criminal courts. In interviews with lawyers from the three legal services groups that the city hires to defend parents they said they see hundreds of marijuana cases each year, most involving recreational users. The lawyers said they currently had more than a dozen cases on their dockets involving parents who had never faced neglect allegations and whose children were placed in foster care because of marijuana allegations.

Marijuana is the most common illicit drug in New York City: 730,000 people, or 12 percent of people age 12 and older, use the drug at least once annually, according to city health data. Over all data shows that the rate of marijuana use among whites is twice as high as among blacks and Hispanics in the city but defense lawyers said these cases were rarely if ever filed against white parents.

Michael Fagan, a spokesman for the Administration for Children Services, said the defense lawyers were offering a simplistic portrayal of these cases.

“Drug use itself is not child abuse or neglect, but it can put children in danger of neglect or abuse,” Mr. Fagan said. “We think the argument that use of cocaine, heroin or marijuana by a parent of young children should not be looked into or should simply be ignored is just plain wrong.”

Mr. Fagan said most of the cases involved additional forms of neglect, like a child who is not going to school or who has been left unattended.

“In other times, we find that admitted marijuana use masks other substance abuse,” Mr. Fagan said.

Lawyers for the parents say that the agency often brought neglect charges based solely on recreational marijuana use, then searched later for other grounds to bolster cases.

State law makes possession of as much as 25 grams of marijuana a violation, similar to a traffic offense, punishable by a fine of up to $100. ACS does not track the number of parents facing marijuana charges, they only comply statistics on the total number of neglect cases for drugs and alcohol, not for individual drugs. There were 4,891 such cases in 2010.

State law considers a child neglected if their well-being is threatened by a parent who “repeatedly misuses” a drug. The law does not distinguish marijuana from other drugs. The law says that if parents have “substantial impairment of judgment,” then there is a presumption of neglect, but it does not refer to quantities of drugs. Child welfare authorities do not have to catch parents high or with drugs in their possession. An admission of past use to a caseworker is enough for a neglect case.

Caseworkers are obligated to remove children who they believe are in imminent danger, but they can recommend that the agency file neglect charges against the parents without removing the children. Neglect findings, while sometimes allowing parents to keep their children, prohibit parents from taking jobs around children or from being foster care parents or adopting and make it easier for Family Court judges to later remove children from their homes. The findings stay on parents’ records with the Statewide Central Register until their youngest child turns 28.