Barry is contradicting his own drug czar: Marijuana causes brain damage and has more carcinogens than cigarettes.
ISTOOK: Obama's White House drug experts contradict his marijuana claims - Washington Times
Well, of course it contradicts his Drug Czar. The federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I substance, which is retarded. All Class I drugs act chemically and biologically in very similar ways, except for marijuana which doesn't resemble any of them in the way they act on the body. The best part, to show just how determined the government has been over the years to scare people of marijuana, they have artificially classified it as a drug with no accepted medical use (
DEA / Drug Scheduling).
Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.
Schedule I Drugs include:
heroin, LSD, PCP, marijuana, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote
Schedule II Drugs, less dangerous, include:
cocaine, methamphetamine, methadone, hydromorphone (Dilaudid), meperidine (Demerol), oxycodone (OxyContin), fentanyl, Dexedrine, Adderall, and Ritalin
Even an idiot can see that marijuana isn't anywhere near as dangerous as a single Schedule II drug.
The reason marijuana is so special in the eyes of the government begins with the origins of why it was made illegal in the first place (something pioneered by the US and then quickly adopted by the rest of the world). It was all about racism towards Mexicans initially, and then later towards blacks.
King James I in 1619 ordered every colonist, meaning every person, to grow a minimum of 100 marijuana plants for export to England. Hemp was valuable for fabric and rope, and was even used a money. Corn, wheat and hemp were the three primary crops throughout the US during the 1700s and 1800s. George Washington's primary crop was hemp. Ben Franklin owned a paper mill where he produced both wood and hemp paper. At least some of the working drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on Franklin's hemp paper (Jefferson's original
Rough Draft of the Declaration is in the Jefferson Papers collection at the Library of Congress).
In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was an influx of Mexicans, many of whom smoked pot to relax after working in the fields. People didn't like that. Later blacks from New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago and Harlem made jazz and pot synonymous. A 1934 newspaper editorial stated matter of factly:
“Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.” Add to that the efforts to regulate pharmaceuticals, pot got caught up in that, because it was listed as treatment for more than 1000 ailments in the pharmacology books.
One of the other reasons that pot got caught up in that was the invention of something called a decortinator, which is is a machine for stripping the skin, barks, or rind off nuts, wood, plant stalks, grain, etc., in preparation for further processing. In 1916 decortinators were being used on hemp to strip them for paper fibers, as well as for different chemicals, including plastics. That same year the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientists declared hemp to be superior to that of wood. The industrialization of hemp came into being in 1935, when more paper was produced from hemp than from wood William Randolf Hearst's wood pulp, and it was better paper than that made of wood.
William Randolf Hearst, who not only owned a lot of newspapers, but also a really lot of trees, producing most of the country's paper products, and the DuPont family who had just invented a way of creating plastics, cellophane, celluloid, methanol, nylon, rayon, etc., from oil, teamed up to make pot illegal. Hearst and DuPont stood to lose 60-80 percent of their business if hemp were allowed to be fully industrialized.
The largest investor in DuPont was Andrew Mellon, who became Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury. He appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Ansliger was on a mission to demonize hemp, and with the aid of Hearst's Yellow Journalism, they succeeded with the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, effectively eliminating it's use for anything other than medical purposes.
Ironically, hemp is by far the number one biomass source on Earth, corn and soybeans are mere amateurs by comparison, and could easily provide the US with all its oil and gas needs. Press the seeds and stalks, then filter the oil, and you can dump it directly into a diesel engine, and it'll burn cleaner than anything you can buy today. I do love a good irony. 
