Stoned And Obsolete

It's not really a question about inhaling. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life," Barack Obama told The New Yorker. Then he added the kicker: "I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”
How dangerous is that? Every day in the United States, where Barack Obama is the President, approximately thirty people die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver. That's more than one an hour. And here's the kicker from the Center for Disease Control web site: "Drugs other than alcohol (e.g., marijuana and cocaine) are involved in about 18% of motor vehicle driver deaths. These other drugs are often used in combination with alcohol." Inhibitions are lowered. Reaction times are slowed. Bad things happen, especially when you start adding motor vehicles and other chemicals to the mix and things can get even worse.
So, if our President is correct in his assertion that pot is no more dangerous than alcohol, that's still pretty bad, right? "It’s not something I encourage," Obama continued, "and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.” As for legalization? "When it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?”
That's why being a parent is so hard. I imagine being President is just a little more difficult.