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Friday, March 27, 2009

Who has time to vote for town hall questions? Oh yeah, stoners!

Yesterday, President Obama hosted an online "town hall" campaign stop, er, meeting where he took questions submitted by the public and answered the most popular ones. In addition to the obligatory softball questions, thanks to the winners over at NORML, many of the top rated questions had to do with the legalization of marijuana. As Politico reports:
In this moment of national economic crisis, the top four questions under the heading of “Financial security” concerned marijuana; on the budget, people voted up questions about marijuana to positions 1-4; marijuana was in the first and third positions under “jobs”; people boosted a plug for legalizing marijuana to No. 2 under “health care reform.” And questions about decriminalizing pot occupied spots 1 and 2 under “green jobs and energy.”

Luckily, even though Mr Obama does have some experience in the drug world, he stuck to his political and reasonable guns and answered the question directly: "'The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy,' he said, as the audience in the room applauded and joined him in a laugh."

Even though I think that the "War on Drugs" has been an abysmal failure and is really misdirected in its goals and tactics, I am still against the blanket legalization of pot and most other drugs, and this was certainly not the format for it to be addressed. It does seem kinda obvious though that it's the pot-heads that have the time to vote those questions to the top of the list.

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