Politicians and marijuana — topics that when intertwined are political catnip. From former President Bill Clinton's charge that he smoked "but didn't inhale" to President Obama's admission that he enjoyed the illegal drug as a college student in Dreams from My Father, it's no secret that weed has affected America's leaders. Now, according to the Washington Post, in a forthcoming book, Barack Obama: The Story, author David Maraniss goes into greater detail about Obama's green history.
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The Washington Post reports:
Maraniss notes that Obama spent a lot of time at the Punahou School in Hawaii with a "self-selected group of boys who loved basketball and good times and called themselves the Choom Gang. Choom is a verb, meaning "to smoke marijuana."
"As a member of the Choom Gang," Maraniss writes, "Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends."
One of those was: "Total Absorption" or "TA".
"TA was the opposite of Bill Clinton's claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled," explains Maraniss. If you exhaled prematurely when you were with the Choom Gang, "you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around."
One of Obama's old friends at the school, Tom Topolinski, told Maraniss: "Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated."
Read more at the Washington Post.
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