As legalization spreads, treat marijuana like cigarettes or alcohol, Obama says

President Barack Obama, who admitted to smoking marijuana in his youth, said the drug should be treated as a “public-health issue, the same way we do with cigarettes or alcohol,” in a post-election interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

“I am not somebody who believes that legalization is a panacea. But I do believe that treating this as a public-health issue, the same way we do with cigarettes or alcohol, is the much smarter way to deal with it,” Obama told Rolling Stone during a sit-down interview on Nov. 9, the day after the election.

The full, wide-ranging interview was posted this week.

Proponents of marijuana legalization made significant gains in the 2016 election, winning victories for recreational use in California, Massachusetts, Nevada and Maine and medical use in Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota.

Eight states, including the entire West Coast, now allow (or will soon allow) adults to use marijuana for recreational purposes. Now about 20 percent of Americans live in states where marijuana is legal, a situation that presents difficulties for federal law enforcement officials.

Marijuana, however, is still illegal under federal law, creating an “untenable” situation, according to Obama.

“It is untenable over the long term for the Justice Department or the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) to be enforcing a patchwork of laws, where something that’s legal in one state could get you a 20-year prison sentence in another,” Obama said.

He said the law would have to be done legislatively or through the DEA.

Obama compared the current marijuana situation to same-sex marriage, where states adopted different laws before a 2015 Supreme Court decision settled the issue on a nationwide basis.

“There’s something to this whole states-being-laboratories-of-democracy and an evolutionary approach,” Obama said.

President-Elect Donald Trump said in October 2015, when he was a candidate, that he believed legalization “should be a state issue, state-by-state.”

Obama’s views were not altered by the results of the election. Obama gave a very similar answer to his Rolling Stone one during a pre-election interview with Bill Maher for his HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher.” The question and answer on marijuana begins at the 7:08 mark in the video below.

This story was originally published November 30, 2016 at 7:45 PM with the headline "As legalization spreads, treat marijuana like cigarettes or alcohol, Obama says."