In Penn Jillette’s sunday school YouTube channel, he recently went on a several minute rant after Obama appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show and admitted to smoking weed. If you have any doubt that the system we live in is screwy, just sit back and watch Penn explain. The United States is a country where the last three presidents have admitted smoking weed, yet we arrest more than 800,000 people for marijuana-related crimes every year. Let that sink in for a second. Imagine the whole city of Austin, TX being thrown into squad cars and taken into a police station and the gravity of that statistic sinks in. We have a higher percentage of our population in prison then any other country, and it is without question a result of our so called “war on drugs”.

What might the most outrageous aspect of the war on drugs is that all of the past presidents have admitted to smoking marijuana. We shouldn’t just pick on Obama. Bush and Clinton have both admitted to smoking the drug, which would land them in prison under the very laws that they support. Obama could change the drug laws and declassify marijuana with the stroke of a pen. Instead, he’s laughing it up on Jimmy Kimmel, while marijuana casualties are sitting in a small cell.

In a Barbara Walter’s interview after the 2012 election, President Obama made it very clear that he has no intention of legalizing weed. Here is the direct quote, taken from the whitehouse.gov website.

Barbara Walters:

Do you think that marijuana should be legalized?

President Obama:

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But what I think is that, at this point, Washington and Colorado, you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue. And as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions. It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that’s legal.

…this is a tough problem because Congress has not yet changed the law. I head up the executive branch; we’re supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we’re going to need to have is a conversation about how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it’s legal.

When you’re talking about drug kingpins, folks involved with violence, people are who are peddling hard drugs to our kids in our neighborhoods that are devastated, there is no doubt that we need to go after those folks hard… it makes sense for us to look at how we can make sure that our kids are discouraged from using drugs and engaging in substance abuse generally. There is more work we can do on the public health side and the treatment side.

This is downplaying the power that the President has over the FDA and DEA. Marijuana could easily be declassified as a controlled substance without an act of congress. This is just another example of a politician passing the buck. We can understand that our President doesn’t want to look soft on drugs, but we can’t forgive his inaction as millions of lives are being ruined for engaging in the same activity that he has engaged in as well.

Please take the time to visit the whitehouse.gov’s We The People website and sign any open petitions asking the Obama administration to finally do something about the injustice we are facing in these United States.