Former President Bill Clinton, who once famously said he smoked marijuana but "didn't inhale," says he thinks legalization should be for the states to decide — not the federal government.
"Look, I think there's a lot of evidence to argue for the medical marijuana thing," Clinton said in an interview with NBC's David Gregory broadcast on Sunday's "Meet the Press."
"I think there are a lot of unresolved questions," Clinton continued. "This really is a time when there should be laboratories of democracy, because nobody really knows where this is going. Are there adequate quality controls? There's pot and there's pot; what's in it? What's going to happen? There are all these questions."
States like Colorado — which in January was the first U.S. state to legalize recreational marijuana — should be allowed to experiment with marijuana laws. I think we should leave it to the states," Clinton said. "If the state wants to try it, they can. And then they'll be able to see what happens." he said.
Clinton's comments were welcomed by pot advocates who say he's come a long way since he was in the White House.
"When Bill Clinton was president his administration tried to punish doctors just for discussing medical marijuana with their patients," Marijuana Majority chairman Tom Angell told Yahoo News. "Now he not only says that there's a lot of evidence to support medical marijuana, but he thinks states should be able to legalize marijuana outright without the feds standing in the way. Whereas this issue was once seen as a political third rail, there's no question it has now emerged into the mainstream."
In 1992, Bill Clinton, then a Democratic candidate for president, commented on his own use of pot during a campaign forum in New York.
"When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two and didn’t like it," Clinton said of his time as a student at Oxford in the late 1960s. "I didn’t inhale, and I didn’t try it again."
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