9. BARACK OBAMA
Represents: The dawn of 21st century in America, Legal recreational pot in America
America truly ”came of age” when it elected Barack Hussein Obama on November 4, 2008 as the 44th President of the United States. And while Obama’s relationship with reefer wasn’t always perfect, he will go down historically as the president in office when American states began legalizing recreational pot—beginning with Washington and Colorado in 2012—with weed being sold at retail outlets strictly for the sake of getting stoned.
Obama will also be remembered for dismantling some of the most heinous apparatuses of the War on Drugs, such as reducing sentences of offenders, as he did in May 2016, and publicly demanding the end of mandatory minimum sentencing, per CNN.
Eric Holder served as U.S. Attorney General under Obama, and together the two men crafted the “Smart on Crime” sentencing policy in 2013 to end the needless incarceration of low-level drug offenders.
Of course, even before he was first elected as POTUS, “Barry” gained instant cannabis street cred with stoner and marijuana Millennial voters when he boldly admitted to an audience of magazine editors in 2006, “I inhaled… frequently. That was the point.”
Per FOX News, the policies of the current Trump administration’s Department of Justice, led by anti-pot Attorney General Jeff Sessions, seek to reverse Obama’s progress on the drug war, which underscores how vital consistent progressive leadership is…
