Barack Obama’s marijuana smoking days with the ‘Choom Gang’

He also reportedly popularised “roof hits” after smoking in cars
with the windows closed: “When the pot was gone, they tilted their
heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.”
Former members recalled to Maraniss that the gang’s favoured vehicle was a “Volkswagen
bus, also known as the Choomwagon”, that belonged to fellow member Mark
Bendix.

The disclosures are unlikely to harm Mr Obama politically. In addition to a
relaxation in attitudes towards soft drugs since Mr Clinton’s confession 20
years ago, voters knew when they elected him in 2008 that Mr Obama had also
tried cocaine while a university student in New York.

Recalling personal struggles from that time in his 1995 memoir, ‘Dreams From
My Father’, Mr Obama wrote: “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little
blow when you could afford it”. He added that he had never tried heroin.

A Rasmussen poll earlier this month claimed that 56 per cent of Americans
favoured legalising and regulating marijuana like alcohol and tobacco, while
36 per cent remained opposed.

None the less, the future president appears to have been remarkably indiscreet
about his activities. In his high school yearbook entry he thanked the “Choom
Gang, and Ray for all the good times”.

Maraniss writes that Ray, a long-haired hippie who worked in a pizza parlour,
was the group’s drug-dealer. “Many years later they learned that he had
been killed with a ball-peen hammer by a scorned gay lover,” according
to the book.

The excerpts were published by BuzzFeed, a website. They emerged after Mitt
Romney, Mr Obama’s presumed Republican opponent, faced embarrassment over
disclosures about his own school days.

Mr Romney was alleged to have led a boisterous gang during his final year at
Cranbrook School, Michigan, in 1965. He and the group, which was likened by
an onlooker to something from ‘Lord of the Flies’, are alleged to have
pinned down a pupil who was presumed to be homosexual and forcibly chopped
off his fringe with scissors.

Both findings appeared to match the caricatures of each man drawn by their
opponents decades later: Mr Obama as an unabashed liberal and Mr Romney as a
ruthless bully.

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