Whenever a politician or celebrity releases a memoir, you usually can’t help wonder what juicy details they left out. But former First Lady Michelle Obama didn’t mince words in her new biography Becoming, where she discusses smoking marijuana in her youth.
Obama’s high school boyfriend Dave “fooled around and smoked pot in his car,” she writes. No additional detail is provided in the book, though there is mention of “looser, more wild” young Barack Obama in another section. As a teen, Michelle writes that Barack “smoked pot in the lush volcanic foothills of Oahu.”
Related: 5 Celebrity Offspring Who’ve Been Caught Smoking Weed
ABC’s Robin Roberts asked Obama about these admissions in a recent interview: “You could’ve left that out, so why did you talk about that?”
“That’s what I did,” Obama replied. “That’s part of the becoming story. Everybody had something that they had to work through, something that they were figuring out.”
“Why would I hide that from the next generation?” she added.
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This is just another example of the Obamas slowly untangling lingering stigmas around cannabis usage. Voters will remember during the 2008 election when Barack Obama’s teenage marijuana use was under scrutiny, and a frequent criticism of opponents. Barack was also candid in his admission, stating, “When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point.”
While Michelle Obama openly discusses marijuana on this book tour, let’s hope Congress listens and moves legislation toward legalization.
