President Obama may be offering up an early 4/20 present.
The president will appear in a CNN documentary called Weeds 3 airing later tonight. Think Progress reports that Obama is expected to express his support for medical marijuana. Specifically, he is reportedly in favor of a Senate bill that would change the classification of medical marijuana from Schedule I to the less scary Schedule II.
“You know, I think I’d have to take a look at the details, but I’m on record as saying that not only do I think carefully prescribed medical use of marijuana may in fact be appropriate and we should follow the science as opposed to ideology on this issue, but I’m also on record as saying that the more we treat some of these issues related to drug abuse from a public health model and not just from an incarceration model, the better off we’re going to be,” Obama reportedly told interviewer Sanjay Gupta.
But will that be enough to appease advocates of medical marijuana?
“If the president means what he says about following science, then there’s no question he should support legislation to move marijuana out of Schedule I, a category that’s supposed to be reserved for substances with no medical value,” marijuana advocate Tom Angell said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And, since it’s so hard to get anything through Congress these days, he should even do more than that. He should exercise his power under the Controlled Substances Act to administratively reschedule marijuana right away. The only thing stopping him from doing that is his own reluctance to follow through on his stated principle of letting science dictate policy.”
We'll be watching tonight to see how it all plays out.
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