Hotboxing the Oval: A look into Presidential drug use

In 2006, during an interview with a political journalist, a man was asked about his marijuana use, and answered with honesty.

“Look, when I was a kid, I inhaled, frequently. That was the point.”

Two years later, this man, after admitting to smoking marijuana, was elected to be our nation’s 44th president. Yes folks, Barack Obama has openly admitted to getting high; using the substance which was once described by President Regan as being “equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast.”

Have we elected a brain-damaged president? Not according to the degrees he received from Columbia and Harvard Law. No, the Commander-in-Chief seems fully functional.

And we know this. Presidents are people, just like us. Especially the presidents we’ve grown up with.

The Millennials are watching, and they see Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton as people who were just stereotypical college kids, doing the same things you can find in any dorm across the country.

Pot use has become more and more socially acceptable with each passing generation. Using the illegal substance no longer carries the burden it once held, with politicians like John Kerry and John Edwards coming out of the hemp closet during a 2004 primary debate (see video below) without worry.

In a controversial interview with Bill Clinton, the former president admitted to trying the drug while on scholarship at Oxford in England, but not inhaling (liar). And during an exit interview with Rolling Stone magazine during his last few months in office, Clinton called for the decimalization of small amounts of pot, despite maintaining the War on Drugs.

Yet, maybe he doesn’t consider marijuana to be a drug. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once described marijuana as being a leaf, not a drug. And it’s a leaf that hundreds of thousands of Americans smoke daily.

In 1999, the Clinton administration called for soon-to-be President George W. Bush to “not cave in” to questions the media had been asking about his own drug use.

Eventually, the media ate up stories about Bush’s own cocaine use, and his arrests for possession of the drug and drunk driving. However, newspapers have reported that Bush has denied using any illegal drug since 1974.

Our generation is very accepting of the fact that drug use exists and we don’t really judge. College-aged kids participate in using such drugs as adderall, cocaine, acid, and especially marijuana.

One day, a new president will be elected, one who grew up in the same world we did. This president will most likely come out and say that they’ve tried some kind of drug that people of our generation are familiar with, and maybe they’ll even say that they liked it.

Presidential drug use isn’t even limited to the ones Gen Y has grown up with.

President Kennedy’s alleged mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, asserted that she had smoked with JFK many times, but it doesn’t stop there. She also described situations in which she and the President took LSD. Cuban Missile Crisis, anyone?

A whole lot of our early presidents used the hemp plant also, including Washington, Pierce, and Jefferson.

Jefferson had the plant growing in his backyard, and that’s what he used to draft the Declaration of Independence on. Yes, this country was founded on hemp paper.

According to the book Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, George Washington had once written a letter about using the “Indian hemp seed” to it’s full use. And he described a way to farm it, which matches up to a popular technique used today to increase the potency of the plant.

The other pothead president, Franklin Pierce, wrote home to his family raving about how smoking hashish was the only good thing to come out of the Mexican War.

It seems unconstitutional (another document drafted on hemp), that the plant is illegal in the States today. I don’t think we’ve even begun to really see presidential drug use, something that is sure to change when Gen Y moves into the Oval Office.

No one will be surprised when, one day, the State of the Union includes a few paragraphs about the legalization of a plant that has been, and still is, very much in use.