The Pot President

Hendrik Hertzberg on the hypocrisy of the hip. In a blog post at the New Yorker last week, Hendrik Hertzberg spotlighted a recent joke made by the President of the United States at the White House Correspondents dinner. In reference to the rapidly changing media landscape, Obama said: “You can’t keep up with it. I mean, I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around two A.M. (Laughter.) It’s true! (Laughter.)” The days of expressing a cringing contrition for your “youthful experimentation,” or claiming that you didn’t inhale, or clearly over. But of course, the president’s joke wasn’t really that funny. Hertzberg cites statistics from Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, suggesting that “from fifty to a hundred thousand Americans are behind bars for pot, and only pot, on any given night.” The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) disputes those figures, but the point is not so much whose numbers are closer to the truth, but rather the simple fact that while the president made his joke, too many people are locked up in federal and state prisons for an offense that a growing number of states are backing away from enforcing. As Hertzberg put it, the subtext of the president’s pot joke was that it “allowed the tuxedoed, evening-gowned, middle-aged audience at the Washington Hilton to feel, for a precious moment, hip. The subtext was that smoking pot, whether a lot or a little, is just a normal part of growing...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs