US president Barack Obama has said that smoking marijuana is less dangerous than drinking alcohol in an interview that risks undermining national drugs laws.
Mr Obama said that using the drug, which remains illegal under US federal law, was safer than drinking "in terms of its impact on the individual consumer".
He told an interviewer that it was "important" for the controversial legalisation of marijuana by two American states to proceed, as it would end the unfair penalisation of a minority of smokers.
However the president, who has admitted experimenting with drugs in his youth, added: "I've told my daughters I think it's a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy."
"As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life," he told 'The New Yorker'.
"I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol".
Mr Obama's remarks risked undermining the national drugs laws that are imposed by his justice department.
Despite marijuana being legalised in Colorado and Washington by referendum, the drug remains a schedule 1 controlled substance -- along with heroin and ecstasy -- under federal law.
While the justice department said last year that it would not challenge the legalisation passed by both Colorado and Washington, the White House has stressed that Mr Obama does not favour amending the federal rules.
Source: Jon Swaine, Irish Independent, 20/01/14
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