Pakalolo and the Choom Gang

[Superfreakie]

The Hawaiian Chronic.....als.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-high-school-pot-smoking-detailed-maraniss-book-154948662.html

Obama's high school pot-smoking detailed in Maraniss book

Bill Clinton he was not. When it came to smoking pot, the teenage Barack Obama had rules. You had to embrace "total absorption" or face a penalty. When you smoked in the car, "the windows had to be rolled up." And he could horn his way in, calling out "Intercepted!" and grab the joint out of turn.

Best-selling author David Maraniss' "Barack Obama: The Story" describes the future president's teenage antics, notably his copious marijuana smoking, details of which were published early Friday by Buzzfeed. While the book won't be released until June 19, vast sections of it were already available Friday on Google Books.

Starting on page 293, the reader begins to get the dope on high school-age Obama's group of basketball- and fun-loving buds, who dubbed themselves the "Choom Gang," from a verb meaning "to smoke marijuana."

"As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking  trends. The first was called 'TA,' short for 'total absorption.' To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton's claim that as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled," writes Maraniss, author of a biography of the 42nd president.

"When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang from marijuana, meaning "numbing tobacco") instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. "'Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated,' explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo."

Obama also made popular a pot-smoking practice that the future president and his pals called "roof hits." When they smoked in the car, they rolled up the windows, and "when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling," Maraniss writes.

Obama "also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted' and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind," according to the text.

Maraniss details how the Choom Gang relaxed at a spot they called "Pumping Stations" partway up Mount Tantalus on Oahu.
"They parked single file on the grassy edge, turned up their stereos playing Aerosmith, Blue Öyster Cult, and Stevie Wonder, lit up some 'sweet-sticky Hawaiian buds,' and washed it down with 'green bottled beer' (the Choom Gang preferred Heineken, Beck's, and St. Pauli Girl)," according to Maraniss.

"No shouting, no violence, no fights; they even cleaned up their beer bottles. This was their haven, in the darkness high above the city and the pressures of Punahou," he writes.

They also operated by consensus (NATO-style!), with any member able to "veto" a suggestion. "Whenever an idea was broached, someone could hold up his hand in the V sign (a backward peace sign of that era) and indicate that the motion was not approved. They later shortened the process so that you could just shout 'V' to get the point across," says Maraniss.

Sure, they drove around in a VW bus nicknamed the "Choomwagon." And their dealer was a "freakin' scary" guy named Ray who met a grisly end. "Many years later they learned that he had been killed with a ball-peen hammer by a scorned gay lover." (On his yearbook page, Obama says "Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.")

But Maraniss also suggests that Obama, like, oh, everyone in the world, embellished his mischief.

"Later in life, looking back on those days, Obama made it sound as though he were hanging out with a group of misbegotten ne'er-do-wells, what he called the 'club of disaffection.' In fact, most members of the Choom Gang were decent students and athletes who went on to successful and productive lives as lawyers, writers, and businessmen," the author says.

Obama was a solid student, and adept at what some readers might know as "osmotic learning." "He seemed nonchalant, yet performed well. How did he do it? He told his Choom Gang mates that the trick was if you put the textbook under your pillow the night before you would perform better on an exam. 'It never worked for me,' said Topolinski."

[ytowndan]

Obama "also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted' and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind," according to the text.

Good god!  Even at that age, the prick was a socialist.

[mbw]

Obama "also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted' and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind," according to the text.

Good god!  Even at that age, the prick was a socialist.

That sounds more like free market capitalism.

[Superfreakie]

Obama "also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted' and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind," according to the text.

Good god!  Even at that age, the prick was a socialist.

That sounds more like free market capitalism.

Depends if the levying of the "intercepted" is considered a tax. Now if he then proceeded to dole out a shotgun with the j, one might consider this allocation socialism at its finest. Additionally, it is entirely possible that the act itself could be viewed as an usurping right, in which case the action could be misconstrued as totalitarian. However, without question, the communal inhaling of the roof smoke screams Pinko to the high heavens.   

[ytowndan]

Obama "also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted' and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind," according to the text.

Good god!  Even at that age, the prick was a socialist.

That sounds more like free market capitalism.

Indeed.  That was the 'joke' (which I must admit, I totally stole from Bill Maher's monolog earlier tonight). 

[gah]

I'm proud of him.

[Buffalo Budd]

I'm proud of him.

[VDB]

"Roof hits"  :hereitisyousentimentalbastard

[mattstick]

If things continue along this trajectory, in 2020 the US President will have been a weed dealer at one point in his life...

[mbw]

If things continue along this trajectory, in 2020 the US President will have been a weed dealer at one point in his life...

redrum 2020!

[PIE-GUY]

If things continue along this trajectory, in 2020 the US President will have been a weed dealer at one point in his life...

redrum 2020!

Lulz

[runawayjimbo]

I'm proud of him.

I know you guys are somewhat joking, but let's not forget that Richard Nixon would be proud of the escalation of the War on Drugs under President Interception.

[Superfreakie]

I'm proud of him.

I know you guys are somewhat joking, but let's not forget that Richard Nixon would be proud of the escalation of the War on Drugs under President Interception.

Just wait till the second term. That's when he's going to go all "leftist" on your asses. There'll be dispensaries and gay massage parlours on every corner. In fact, I'm very much looking forward to visiting the land of Sodom come December. 

[runawayjimbo]

I'm proud of him.

I know you guys are somewhat joking, but let's not forget that Richard Nixon would be proud of the escalation of the War on Drugs under President Interception.

Just wait till the second term. That's when he's going to go all "leftist" on your asses. There'll be dispensaries and gay massage parlours on every corner. In fact, I'm very much looking forward to visiting the land of Sodom come December.

Zero crime since he's gonna take all the guns and everyone will be healthy thanks to all the free Z-packs for the sniffles and MRIs for a headache and death panels for those pesky and expensive burdens old people.

Also, this made me LOL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQr9ezr8UeA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[VDB]

I'm proud of him.

I know you guys are somewhat joking, but let's not forget that Richard Nixon would be proud of the escalation of the War on Drugs under President Interception.

I finally got around to reading the recent Rolling Stone interview with BHO, and they pointedly ask him about that. While I may not like it, I have to acknowledge that Obama is correct in saying that the executive branch's job is to enforce laws, and it's Congress, not Barack Obama, who's to blame for marijuana being illegal.

Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not "use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana." Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What's up with that?

Here's what's up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana – and the reason is, because it's against federal law. I can't nullify congressional law. I can't ask the Justice Department to say, "Ignore completely a federal law that's on the books." What I can say is, "Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage." As a consequence, there haven't been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes.

The only tension that's come up – and this gets hyped up a lot – is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we're telling them, "This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way." That's not something we're going to do. I do think it's important and useful to have a broader debate about our drug laws. One of the things we've done over the past three years was to make a sensible change when it came to the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. We've had a discussion about how to focus on treatment, taking a public-health approach to drugs and lessening the overwhelming emphasis on criminal laws as a tool to deal with this issue. I think that's an appropriate debate that we should have.

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