Search Results: presidential (113)

Marijuana’s future in the United States remains a hot topic as Super Tuesday approaches. Formerly dismissed by virtually every presidential candidate, supporting pot legalization now seems a prerequisite for any
Democratic hopeful. The level of support varies, however, with some candidates preferring giving states the right to choose, while others are pledging to legalize marijuana through executive action if need be.

Before you submit your ballot for the March 3 count, read the past and present pot opinions of the eight Democratic contenders below.

Remember the stoner kid in Dazed and Confused who swears that George Washington’s old lady, Martha, lit up a fat bowl for Georgie at the end of the day? Probably bullshit, but whatever: Washington definitely grew hemp before it was banned more than a century later. He had a lot of stress with that whole revolution thing, and it’s fun to imagine Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and other banknote heads passing around a joint while talking about their brave new world. Although colonial dirt weed certainly wasn’t as potent as the modern Presidential Kush, I can’t help but feel a little more stately when I get an eighth of this sticky hybrid and blaze one for the nation.

 

Keith Bacongo-Flickr edited by Toke of the Town.


The legalization of recreational marijuana will be a huge issue on your 2016 ballot in California. It’s a presidential year, and pro-pot forces are expecting a larger-than-normal turnout at the polls. The Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project already made waves in recent days by announcing it would “begin raising funds to help place the measure on the November 2016 ballot.”
But the MPP wasn’t the first organization to eye the November, 2016 ballot in California, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

You might have assumed that Gov. Rick Perry’s fumbling last attempt to score the 2012 Republican presidential nomination guaranteed we’d never see him on the national stage again.
But then Perry announced he wasn’t running for re-election as governor of the great state of Texas. Then he started traveling the country encouraging people and businesses to relocate to the famously business-friendly Texas. He spouted off soundbites of independence and defiance on the Affordable Care Act, and we began to wonder what he was up to. He went to Iowa — the state people only traditionally visit if they’re lost, there for the Iowa Workshop or running for president — and our suspicions grew. The Houston Press examines further.

ColorLines
Mexico’s Drug War has claimed more than 50,000 lives in five years

After More Than 50,000 Prohibition-Related Deaths in 5 Years, Candidates Say Reducing Violence More Important Than Simply Seizing Drugs, Making Arrests
 
DPA Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann: Next President Should Show Bold Leadership and Follow Other Latin American Presidents’ Call for “All Options On The Table”
 
The top three presidents candidates in Mexico have all promised a significant shift in their country’s drug war strategy, according to a front page story in Monday’s New York Times. The candidates are pledging to prioritize a reduction in prohibition-related violence, which has led to more than 50,000 deaths since President Calderon launched a war on the drug traffickers in 2006, over conventional measures such as arrests and seizures. 

The Chronicle
Newt Gingrich: “See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality … That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”

​GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich does not support the legalization of medical marijuana, and in fact, would like to see the United States adopt a tougher policy against the use of cannabis and other substances, including the death penalty for some dealers.

Gingrich on Saturday told Yahoo! News’ Chris Moody that California showed medical marijuana was a “joke.” He introduced legislation to legalize the use of medicinal cannabis in 1981, but has since changed his mind about it, reports Eric W. Dolan at The Raw Story.
“What has changed was the number of parents I met with who said they did not want their children to get the signal from the government that it was acceptable behavior and that they were prepared to say as a matter of value that it was better to send a clear signal on no drug use at the risk of inconveniencing some people, than it was to be compassionate toward a small group at the risk of telling a much larger group that it was OK to use the drug,” Gingrich claimed.

Photo: Steve Elliott/Reality Catcher
Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson at Portland Hempstalk 2010 in September

​Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is already known as a supporter of cannabis legalization, and has said he smoked pot during his youth. “I never exhaled,” he joked recently. But now Johnson has admitted publicly for the first time that he smoked marijuana more recently — from 2005 to 2008 — for medicinal purposes.

“It’s not anything I volunteer, but you’re the only person that actually asked about it,” Johnson told reporter John McCormack of The Weekly Standard. “But for luck, I guess, I wasn’t arrested,” said Johnson, who was Governor of New Mexico from 1994 to 2002.
Although marijuana was illegal for medical or any other purposes in New Mexico until 2007, Johnson said he needed cannabis after a 2005 paragliding accident in Hawaii. His sails got snared in a tree, and Johnson fell about 50 feet to the ground, he said, suffering multiple bone fractures.
“In my human experience, it’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt,” Johnson said.
“Rather than using painkillers, which I have used on occasion before, I did smoke pot,” Johnson said, “as a result of having broken my back, blowing out both of my knees, breaking ribs, really taking about three years to recover.”

Photo: Steve Elliott/Reality Catcher
Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson at Portland Hempstalk 2010 in September

​​Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson could bring the issue of marijuana legalization into the 2012 Republican presidential primary if he decides to run.

“The issue of marijuana legalization is already an attention-getter,” Johnson told Marc Caputo of the St. Petersburg Times after a visit to Florida last week to test the political waters. “And you can’t shy away from it. I have to defend it. I have to defend the position.”
According to Johnson, marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, and arresting and locking up pot smokers costs too much, both in terms of civil liberties and for the taxpayers.

Bernie Sanders isn’t coy about his desire to see marijuana legalized, but the Democratic presidential candidate’s plans for the plant will go much further than that if he’s elected to the White House in 2020.

Sanders’s pot platform, just released today, October 24 (at 4:20 p.m. Eastern time, no less), includes plans to federally legalize marijuana and declassify marijuana as a controlled substance via executive action within 100 days of his inauguration, as well as to ban tobacco and cigarette corporations from entering the legal pot trade.

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