Obama addresses Tweet to end "war on drugs"

At the start of his Twitter town hall Wednesday, President Obama sent a Tweet asking users to tell him "what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep" to reduce the deficit.

The president, who was responding to Twitter questions in a live video, was asked to address some of the responses to his query toward the end of the town hall. The first came from Brian McKeon, who wrote, "Cut defense contracting, End war on Drugs. Eliminate agribiz and big oil subsidies. Invest in public campaign financing."

"That's not a bad list," Mr. Obama said, looking at the Tweet on a big screen.

President Barack Obama walks over to a Macbook laptop for a live-tweet during the first ever Twitter Town Hall, Wednesday, July 6, 2011, in the East Room of the White House in Washington.

/ AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

After saying the administration is "already making progress" on defense contracting, he addressed the "war on drugs."

"What we've always said is that investing in prevention, reducing demand is going to be the most cost-effective thing that we can do," he said. "We still need to interdict the big drug kingpins, and we still have to enforce our drug laws, but making sure that we're spending more on prevention and treatment can make a huge difference."

Mr. Obama went on to endorse eliminating subsidies for agribusiness and "big oil" and to say he has supported campaign financing in the past - though it's worth noting that he did not accept it in his 2008 presidential campaign.

Addressing other responses to his Tweet, the president would later defend "modest" foreign aid as a "force multiplier" that reflects "America's role as a global leader," repeat his call for tax hikes for high-earners, call for "fairly gradual" and "thoughtful" defense cuts that maintain obligations to service members and veterans, and defend "well designed" welfare programs that don't encourage dependency.

More from the Twitter town hall:

Obama warns of "second recession or worse"
Obama says he didn't realize magnitude of recession at first
Obama says "back to the drawing board" on mortgage help
Obama: Time to for NASA to "revamp" space mission

[dfudski]

Target the users? How many users do you think there are in the US alone? The president has a duty to defend the the people of the US against foes both foreign and domestic. The drug traffic problem is the same as terrorists and should be dealt with as such. It's just that the drug trade operates in a much quieter mode; no big bangs such as 9/11 or trade center bombings or embassy bombings. How many people have been killed by the drug trade. A whole lot more than the 9/11 trade center attacks. The president must be afraid of offending the Mexican government who can't control their own people. What happens in the US if a governor or DEA agent or judge is murdered and mutilated? All hell would break loose. What happens in Mexico???? Clearly nothing. If we knew that al-quaida was building bomb materials somewhere we would execute a surgical strike of some nature to eradicate the threat. Drug dealing is no less sserious and should be dealt with accordingly.


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[venusvegasvada]

Currently the US Govt. is capped at 14.3 Trillion Tweets.
They need to increase the tweet limit another 2 to 4 trillion tweets so they can keep on tweeting.

[1VNVet]

Tweeting: The PERFECT job for this TWIT.

[documemts]

He can't and won't address the "war on drugs" because the gov't has too much invested in attacking in it's "war on American citizens".

[xSugarMagnolias]

Sounds like a plan to kill off the waste of humans in the US.

[Proj-Coord]

Why Wars on drugs? We should be fighting users not makers/sellers.
Without users then there wuld be no commerce. Are we willfully going after the wrong thing?

[Progress4U]

Problem with that is that a large number of them are Wall St. execs. Wait...maybe that's NOT a problem!?!?!

[dfudski]

Target the users? How many users do you think there are in the US alone? The president has a duty to defend the the people of the US against foes both foreign and domestic. The drug traffic problem is the same as terrorists and should be dealt with as such. It's just that the drug trade operates in a much quieter mode; no big bangs such as 9/11 or trade center bombings or embassy bombings. How many people have been killed by the drug trade. A whole lot more than the 9/11 trade center attacks. The president must be afraid of offending the Mexican government who can't control their own people. What happens in the US if a governor or DEA agent or judge is murdered and mutilated? All hell would break loose. What happens in Mexico???? Clearly nothing. If we knew that al-quaida was building bomb materials somewhere we would execute a surgical strike of some nature to eradicate the threat. Drug dealing is no less sserious and should be dealt with accordingly.

[Bojax39]

Funny, looks to me as if he didn't address a damned thing. Just more doubletalk.