Schwarzenegger said that pot is not a drug but better than that is his totally pragmatic attitude to the subject (“Why should I care if a politician takes sleeping pills every night so long as he can do his job?”).

Of course after the fact his media people rushed out to say he was just joking and that of course pot is a drug but it’s still great to see the mainstreaming of the attitude that pot isn’t a big deal.

Note that despite what sticklers like to assert the claim that, “Pot is not a drug” is not actually false or meaningless. There are clearly two different definitions of drug. One is the technical medical usage on which things like alcohol, aspirin, etc… qualify as drugs but people who have used aspirin or had a beer don’t answer affirmatively when asked “have you ever used drugs?” The meaning of drug in these contexts is something more like, dangerous addictive psychoactive substance¹. Applying the standard rules of conversational charity it is clear that Arnold was (reasonably) saying either that pot isn’t dangerous/problematic like other drugs or that it isn’t really socially forbidden.