Inside Barack Obama's History With Marijuana

On the surface he may have a squeaky clean exterior, but there's a shady side to Barack Obama, such as indulging in drugs in his youth. Long before he was president, Obama admitted in his 1995 memoir "Dreams of My Father" that he smoked marijuana in high school. "[I smoked] in a white classmate's sparkling new van," the former POTUS wrote (via ABC News). Obama did not smoke joints just to fit in. "I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind," he wrote (via NBC News). More details of Obama's marijuana usage were revealed while he was in office. 

When he was in high school, Obama and friends were part of a crew dubbed "the Choom Gang" who had a few inventive games when smoking up. "Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends," writer David Maraniss wrote in the 2012 biography "Barack Obama: The Story," (via ABC News). The group often rolled around in a Volkswagen minibus they called the "Choom Wagon." To best utilize their weed, Obama and his friends used to hotbox their ride. "When they were chooming in a car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste," Maraniss wrote.

According to the biography, Obama was often eager to cut in during a weed circle. "[H]e often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted!,' and took an extra hit," Maraniss wrote. Smoking weed was not limited to Obama's childhood, as he also imbibed in college.

When Barack Obama was in college he still smoked some marijuana, but apparently, it was far more tempered than his "Choom Gang" days. The fact that Obama had openly discussed smoking weed became news fodder when he was running for president in 2008. The New York Times spoke to some of his old friends and classmates to find out just how much pot was part of his college curriculum. "If someone passed him a joint, he would take a drag," Vinai Thummalapally, who went to California State University at the same time as Obama. "We'd smoke or have one extra beer, but he would not even do as much as other people on campus," Thummalapally added.

Originally, Obama's drug usage was a hot button topic when he was running against Hillary Clinton to represent the Democratic Party in the presidential election. That eventually turned into a non-issue as Obama had openly discussed his past leading up to his campaign. "When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point," he told a group of magazine editors in 2006, per The New York Times.

Eventually when he was in office — before marijuana was legalized — Obama discussed the hypocrisy of strict weed laws. "[W]e should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing," he told The New Yorker in January 2014. During that same interview, Obama made his stance on recreational weed usage very clear.

Barack Obama openly talked about his past with marijuana, and while he wasn't embarrassed, it also wasn't a fact he was particularly proud of. "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 ," he told The New Yorker in January 2014. The interviewer asked the then-president to compare the dangers of weed versus alcohol. "Less dangerous," he said about pot. Even though this was a progressive view for the Chief of Staff to hold, Obama was not eager for his daughters to experiment the way he had in school. "It's not something I encourage, and I've told my daughters I think it's a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy," he added.

It may have been discouraged, but it appeared that Malia Obama picked up a bad habit from her dad. When she was 18-years-old, a video of her smoking at Lollapalooza was released by Radar in August 2016. In the footage it was difficult to see if the then-first daughter was just having a cigarette, but a bystander told the outlet that she was in fact smoking weed, per the New York Post.