Obama pot-smoking details revealed in new book

GlobalPost

Biographer David Maraniss wrote about President Barack Obama's high school days in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was a member of the "Choom Gang," known for playing basketball and smoking marijuana, in an upcoming book called "Barack Obama: The Story."

The book has yet to be released, but excerpts have made their way around the internet and on Google Books, giving details of the president's pot-smoking days in the late 1970s at Hawaii's prestigious Punahou prep school, according to The Telegraph.

America's future president made his mark on the "Choom Gang" by creating several smoking styles, including what he called "total absorption"("TA"), which Maraniss — who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1993 — said "was the antithesis of Bill Clinton's claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled," reported the Daily Beast. Another style Obama is said to have favored is "roof hits," in which the president formerly-known-as Barry and his friends would smoke in a car with the windows rolled up and not leave until they'd inhaled all the smoke.

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Barry was also known to penalize anyone who wasted smoke by denying the person the next hit.

"When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo [Hawaiian slang for 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," Maraniss said, according to the Huffington Post.

And one of Barry's favorite smoking styles? "Interceptions." 

"When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted!,' and took an extra hit," Maraniss wrote, reported The Washington Post.

BuzzFeed has even created a "User's Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama," complete with authentic 1970s photos of the president.

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