Barack Obama And His Drug Use: The Tell-All Book Details

Thanks to Buzzfeed for the piece that’s making the rounds online, though in quite a conservative way if I may say so. There’s been US Presidents in the past who have used drugs, experimented with others but this just takes the cake. This is one of the most elaborate, detailed accounts of President Obama smoking pot when he was a teenager.

Barry was quite the accomplished marijuana enthusiast back in high school and college. Excerpts from David Maraniss‘ Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot.

Click on the Buzzfeed link to see the pictures of Obama, holding his marijuana cigarette-one of them made the rounds back in 2008 I believe. In addition to that image, there’s his friends, and a couple of places they hang out. Here’s the rundown, from the book:

“A self-selected group of boys at Punahou School who loved basketball and good times called themselves the Choom Gang. Choom is a verb, meaning ‘to smoke marijuana.’” The best quote from Maraniss’ piece: “Barry also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind.”

As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.”

Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.

When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning “numbing tobacco”) instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated,” explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo.

He was a long-haired haole hippie who worked at the Mama Mia Pizza Parlor not far from Punahou and lived in a dilapidated bus in an abandoned warehouse. … According to Topolinski, Ray the dealer was “freakin’ scary.” Many years later they learned that he had been killed with a ball-peen hammer by a scorned gay lover. But at the time he was useful because of his ability to “score quality weed.”

…

In another section of the [senior] yearbook, students were given a block of space to express thanks and define their high school experience. … Nestled below [Obama's] photographs was one odd line of gratitude: “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.” … A hippie drug-dealer made his acknowledgments; his own mother did not.

 

Their favorite hangout was a place they called Pumping Stations, a lush hideaway off an unmarked, roughly paved road partway up Mount Tantalus. They parked single file on the grassy edge, turned up their stereos playing Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, and Stevie Wonder, lit up some “sweet-sticky Hawaiian buds” and washed it down with “green bottle beer” (the Choom Gang preferred Heineken, Becks, and St. Pauli Girl).

 

This is what I call vetting, my friends. This is what the media tried desperately to hide back in 2008 and they never bothered to check on Obama’s peccadilloes-and there will be more to surface if the discontent escalates.

Related Articles

• Flashback: Obama’s Sordid High School Past (rubinoworld.com)
• Barry-O a Confirmed Frequent Drug User in High School (dewgeneral.wordpress.com)
• Obama’s Lies To American Youths (personalliberty.com)
• It’s Safe To Say That Penn Jillette Does Not Agree With Obama’s Stance on Marijuana (hailmaryjane.com)