After Donald Trump endorsed a Florida poll initiative that might legalize leisure marijuana in that state, Kamala Harris accused her Republican opponent of flip-flopping on the difficulty. But the vice chairman herself didn’t publicly assist marijuana legalization till 2018, when two-thirds of People already favored that coverage.
The reality is that each presidential candidates have modified their positions on this subject over time, reflecting a sea change in public opinion. However that doesn’t essentially imply that both, if elected, would make investments any effort in addressing the untenable battle between state marijuana legal guidelines and federal prohibition.
In 1990, when Trump was well-known as a billionaire New York developer moderately than a politician, he known as the conflict on medication “a joke” and really useful legalization as an alternative. “We’re dropping badly the conflict on medication,” he mentioned throughout a speech in Miami. “You need to legalize medication to win that conflict.”
In an interview after the speech, Trump mentioned he hoped “folks will begin to understand that that is the one reply; there isn’t any different reply.” As a Republican presidential candidate 25 years later, he implausibly claimed his 1990 remarks didn’t depend as an endorsement of legalization.
Throughout that marketing campaign, Trump’s place on marijuana legalization was basically the identical as Hillary Clinton’s. “I actually imagine we must always depart it as much as the states,” he said, though he made it clear that he took a dim view of legalization, which he described as a “dangerous” coverage that had triggered “some huge issues” in Colorado.
Regardless of Trump’s avowed choice for letting states go their very own means on marijuana coverage, his first lawyer common, Jeff Classes, rescinded a Justice Division memo that inspired federal prosecutors to depart state-licensed hashish suppliers alone. However no crackdown adopted, and Classes’ successor, William Barr, didn’t even attempt to instigate one.
As president, Trump additionally proposed eliminating an yearly renewed spending rider that bars the Justice Division from interfering with state medical marijuana packages. Nothing got here of that both.
These two strikes, the Harris marketing campaign argues, have been plainly inconsistent with what Trump mentioned in a Fact Social post on Saturday. Predicting that Florida voters will approve marijuana legalization in November, he cited causes to welcome that consequence.
“Somebody shouldn’t be a legal in Florida” for possessing marijuana “when that is authorized in so many different States,” Trump wrote. Pot busts, he added, “smash lives & waste Taxpayer {Dollars}.”
It’s honest to say that Trump’s views on marijuana legalization have developed. However the identical is true of Harris.
As USA Right now notes, “Harris has been criticized for aggressively prosecuting weed-related crimes when she was California’s lawyer common and San Francisco’s district lawyer, notably given the racial disparities in punishment nationwide.” She opposed a California legalization initiative in 2010, when she was the San Francisco district lawyer; laughed at a query about legalization in 2014, when she was operating for lawyer common towards a Republican who favored it; and declined, as California’s lawyer common, to take a place on the 2016 initiative that legalized leisure use in her state.
As a senator two years later, Harris lastly took the plunge, saying, “We have to decriminalize marijuana nationwide.” Later that yr, she co-sponsored a invoice that might have repealed the federal ban, and she or he introduced the same invoice in 2019.
President Joe Biden, in contrast, has all the time resisted federal legalization, and the 2024 Democratic platform says nothing about it. The Republican platform, in the meantime, doesn’t even allude to marijuana reform.
That silence is putting, on condition that 38 states have legalized medical marijuana and 24 of them, accounting for a lot of the U.S. inhabitants, additionally permit recreational use. In keeping with Gallup, 70 % of People—together with 87 % of Democrats, 70 % of independents, and 55 % of Republicans—think marijuana must be authorized.
As of Saturday, each major-party presidential candidates agree. Nevertheless it stays unclear whether or not both is ready to do something about it.
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