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What’s Sarah Palin been smoking? The former Alaska Governor said Wednesday night that while she opposes marijuana legalization, law enforcement should not focus its energy on such a “minimal problem.”
Make up your mind, Sarah — should pot be legal, or not?
Palin made the comment during an appearance on the Fox Business Network with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), reports Andy Barr at Politico.
Congressman Paul, a libertarian, said that enforcing marijuana laws specifically and the War On Drugs in general is a “useless battle,” a point with which Palin partially agreed, although she made clear that she does not support legalization.
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”If we’re talking about pot, I’m not for the legalization of pot,” said former GOP vice presidential candidate Palin.
“If somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody any harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in and try to clean up some of the other problems we have in society,” Palin said in her typically tortured syntax.
Palin then advised law enforcement officers to “not concentrate on such a, relatively speaking, minimal problem we have in the country.”
“Listening to Ron Paul’s opposition to marijuana laws and Palin’s reluctance to defend them, you start to wonder if anyone in the right-wing activist movement still cares about fighting a war on marijuana,” wrote Scott Morgan at StoptheDrugWar.org.
The half-term Alaska governor has confessed that she used to smoke pot in her youth, but claims she dropped the habit since she “didn’t enjoy it.”
“I can’t claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled,” she confessed to Anchorage Daily News in 2006.
Marijuana was legal under Alaska’s libertarian drug laws during Palin’s youth.
In 1975, a landmark ruling by the Alaska Supreme Court allowed adults to have small amounts of marijuana for personal use.
However, that ruling was overturned in 2006 when a law was passed re-criminalizing the herb in Alaska.
Palin said that legalizing pot would “send the wrong message” to children.
“I think that would just encourage our young people to think that it was OK to go ahead and use it,” Palin said.