Poking fun at Bill Clinton in 2006, Obama said, "When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point." More seriously, Obama has acknowledged that, as a young man, he used marijuana and cocaine when he could afford it. "Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," he wrote in "Dreams From My Father." "I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind."
Last month in New Hampshire, Obama told high school students that he'd "experimented with drugs" and made some "bad decisions" as a kid. "It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time.'"