Pot-Litics: Democrats of 2020 stand behind legalization

More and more Democratic presidential candidates want the US government to legalize marijuana, reflecting a change nationwide as more and more Americans turn to cannabis.

Making marijuana legal at the federal level is a "smart thing to do," says California Senator Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor whose home country is the country's largest legal pot store. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, a prominent advocate of legalization at Capitol Hill, said the war on drugs was a "war on the people".

Former Texas Congressman Beto O 'Rourke, who appears ready to join the 2020 Democrats, wrote a book in which it is written that the legalization of marijuana would hinder the cartels of the United States. drug. In an email sent this week to supporters, he again called for an end to the federal ban on marijuana.

"Who's going to be the last man – more likely than a black man – to languish behind bars for possession or use of marijuana while it's legal in one form or another in more than half of the states? from the country?" O & # 39; Rourke wrote.

This is a very different approach from that of a not-so-distant past, when it was perceived as politically damaging to recognize tobacco smoking and that no legalization backed by a presidential candidate major had been supported.

In 1992, Bill Clinton, then White House candidate for the White House, delivered a very tortured response about a young alliance with cannabis, claiming that he had tried it as a "graduate student in England, but that he" had not inspired ". And two decades ago, President Richard Nixon sparked a war against marijuana and other drugs, which brought him to a second term.

This year, the main Democrats hold similar positions in favor of legalization. Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont campaigned to decriminalize the pot when he ran for president.

Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota senator, another 2020 Democrat candidate, supports legalization and believes that states should have the right to determine how to manage marijuana regulation within their borders, but they do not have the right to do so. have not adhered to Booker's legislation.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who participated in the contest this month, said in his speech that it was "time" to legalize the drug nationwide.

In her run for governor in 2012, Inslee opposed the voting initiative that made Washington one of the first two states to legalize so-called recreational marijuana. As governor, however, he has often touted what he describes as Washington's successful regulatory experiment and urged the Obama and Trump administrations not to intervene. He has recently begun to forgive people sentenced to a minor penalty for possession of marijuana.

The widespread approval of the national reform of marijuana among Democrats follows the evolution of the country's views.

According to the Gallup poll, in the late 1960s, in Woodstock and Vietnam, 12% of Americans supported legalization. Last year, this figure reached a record of 66%. About 75% of Democrats are in favor of legalization, with a slight majority of Republicans.

Most Americans now live in states where marijuana is legal. Potted clinics are familiar sites in cities like Los Angeles and Denver, and conservative homesteads like Utah and Oklahoma have set up marijuana programs for medical purposes.

For Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project, a group defending legalization, it is not surprising that the candidates largely support the end of the federal prohibition.

"It's no longer popular to be in favor of the prohibition of marijuana," Tvert said.

But there are limits: "We do not see any candidate saying," I am a marijuana user, "he added.

The path to the legal pot came with a change of generation.

At a 2003 Democratic presidential forum, candidates John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean admitted to having already used marijuana. Former President Barack Obama spoke openly about his young drug use, sometimes with a hint of humor: "When I was a kid, I was often inspired." the goal, "he said in 2006.

In a recent radio interview on the "The Breakfast Club" network, Harris is remembered to have smoked marijuana at the university in the 1980s. She was one of the first followers Marijuana for medical purposes, but the Los Angeles Times reported that in 2010, the year of his election as the California Attorney General, Harris had opposed an initiative to legalize more widely marijuana.

The power of the legal pot platform with voters in 2020 is only a hypothesis.

Polls show that the strongest support comes from young voters. In California, the millennial generation is now the largest generation of registered voters. However, the youngest voters are also the most likely to stay home on election day, said Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc., a non-partisan research firm.

President Trump's stand on cannabis remains somewhat opaque. He stated that he supported the laws legalizing marijuana for medical purposes but did not make a definitive pronouncement on a broader legalization.

Attorney General William Barr renounced his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, and said he would "not take it" from marijuana growers in states where cannabis was legal, even he personally thought that this drug should be banned.

The man who presided over one of Canada's first legal recreational marijuana markets, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper.

Hickenlooper objected to the vote measure that fully legalized marijuana in Colorado in 2012. But he said he had accepted the voters' wishes and had been commended for its implementation. He claims that his "worst fears" about legalization have not materialized and believes that the system is better than when the drug was illegal.

Yet, Hickenlooper does not want to go as far as some competitors. Rather than seeking national legalization, he wants the drug no longer a controlled substance listed in Schedule 1 in order to be studied.

He does not think that the federal government "should intervene and tell each state that it should be legal," saying states should make their own decisions.

"I trust this process by which states should be models or laboratories of democracy," he said.

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Riccardi brought back from Denver. Associate Press Writer Gene Johnson in Seattle contributed. Blood is a member of the AP Marijuana Beat Team. Follow our full coverage on marijuana: https://apnews.com/Marijuana.