Obama in Prison: Why He’s Lucky He Went as President, Not as a Pot Convict

[eridani]

Where I would disagree with Obama is in calling cannabis use a "mistake." Using drugs is only a mistake if you get into a bad relationship with the drug. That is far less likely to happen with cannabis compared to other drugs, legal and illegal, though I'm sure it happens.

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/07/16/obama-lucky-visit-prison-president-not-pot-convict?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-07-16

So, Why Should You Care? Half of the more than 200,000 people serving time in federal prison are locked up because of nonviolent drug offenses. And you don’t have to be an El Chapo–style kingpin to end up doing time in a federal prison. According to the ACLU, 88 percent of marijuana arrests are for possession—not people trying to sell drugs but trying to use them.

There’s also a significant racial disparity in who gets arrested for drugs. In her 2010 New York Times best-seller The New Jim Crow, civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander detailed how more black Americans are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850. The ACLU found that a person who is black is 3.67 times more likely to be arrested for pot possession than someone who is white. “About one in every 35 African American men, one in every 88 Latino men, is serving time right now,” the president said during a speech at the NAACP’s national conference in Philadelphia this week. “Among white men, that number is one in 214.”

During his visit to El Reno, Obama made it clear that he wasn’t advocating for shorter sentences for rapists and murderers. But teenagers who might have been busted with a bag of weed during a traffic stop are branded for life with the “felon” label. They’re no longer eligible for student loans, and they have to check the “felon” box on job applications, which helps contribute to the United States’ sky-high recidivism rate.

“When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different from the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” Obama said after the visit, according to the Times. “The difference is, they did not have the kind of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”