Joe Biden Walks Back Marijuana 'Gateway Drug' Comment After Week Of Criticism

[NNadir]

24. I think I made it clear that I'm against prison for drug abusers, but they are abusers.

Look, my father was a tobacco addict. It cost him, 25 years ago, a quarter of a million dollars to die.

Should he have gone to prison for smoking tobacco?

No, of course not. But the fact is that his "choice" to smoke tobacco, to which he was addicted since he was eight years old, represented a cost to society at large.

There are consequences of getting high with or without prison. For one thing, pot abuse makes many people idiots. And please don't hand me tiresome bullshit about Carl Sagan. So what? Suppose he was a genius while high; does it prove he wouldn't have been smarter and greater without pot?

However, it is a typical baby boomer focus - and I'm speaking as a person who came of age in the 60's and 70's - to make their sybaritic excesses the most important thing in the world.

Guess what?

Their consumer shit sucks.

800 million people go to bed hungry every night. More or less important than getting high?

The planetary atmosphere is collapsing. More important or less important than getting high?

Fascism is rising around the world is rising. More important or less important than getting high?

Plastic in the oceans will soon outweigh fish. More important or less important than getting high?

Seventy million people die every decade from air pollution. More important or less important than getting high?

Kids get shot for the crime of being black. More important or less important than getting high.

Kids are living in cages at the US border. More important or less important than getting high.

How about we teach kids not to get high on anything, and not to take any addictive substances. Good idea or bad idea?

There's plenty of injustice on this planet. Having grown up as a baby boomer, I know lots of people who got busted for pot and didn't go to prison, didn't get shot, and didn't have their lives destroyed by the arrest.

I really, really, really, really, really don't like being lectured on what is or is not important about justice.

You know something? Whenever I comment on the fact that pot is a drug and make a negative statement about it, I hear a lot more passionate objections than when I talk about any of the stuff above.

The only thing that's worse, is the crap I hear when I criticize Elon Musk's car for millionaires and millionaires.

My generation disgusts me. There was so much more we could have done than sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

We're a bunch of terminal asses, and the orange asshole in the White House is in many ways the avatar of what we were. The sooner we're gone, the better.