President Jimmy Carter, at a meeting that included state legislators and regulators from Colorado and Washington, as well as most of the states targeted for legalization in 2016, and attended by the nation’s premier public health scientists like former White House Deputy Drug Czar Thomas McLellan, announced that despite mischaracterizations, he “opposed the legalization of marijuana” and predicted the experiments in Washington and Colorado would go badly. He also said that he didn’t believe in imprisoning users of marijuana, but favored SAM’s approach of arrests with treatment referral and health assessments.
President Carter has been falsely characterized as supporting legalization by pro-marijuana lobbyists nationwide. Today, he set the record straight:
“I do not favor legalization. We must do everything we can to discourage marijuana use, as we do now with tobacco and excessive drinking,” President Carter told the crowd. “We have to prevent making marijuana smoking from becoming attractive to young people, which is, I’m sure, what the producers of marijuana….are going to try and do.”
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