Sanders plans to tell the attendees that marijuana should be downgraded by being removed from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Schedule I list of the most unsafe drugs.
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Bernie Sanders will announce his support for the legalization of marijuana at the federal level in a town hall with students from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, tonight. “States should have the right to regulate marijuana the same way they do alcohol and tobacco”. “That is wrong. That has got to change”.
Ever the progressive focused on using government spending to solve social problems, however, Sanders did note that states could legalize marijuana, tax it, and use the money “to fight the effects of substance abuse of hard drugs like opiates that are harming so many communities”.
Sanders’ plan essentially leaves drug policy to the states. The Washington Post first reported the news. Although about the same proportion of blacks and whites use marijuana, a black person is nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, the American Civil Liberties Union has found. “The racial disparity in marijuana arrests in Virginia is deeply troubling, and the barriers that a criminal record brings are particularly worrisome”, he said in a statement.
Sanders’ chief rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, has said she wants to see how laws legalizing marijuana for recreational use in Colorado, Washington and other states work before supporting federal changes to how marijuana is classified. At that time, the legislature meant to reinvest scarce resources wasted on marijuana possession arrests to more important priorities such as large scale drug trafficking.
On Wednesday, the rabble-rousing senator from Vermont proposed the most aggressive marijuana policy reform in the Democratic presidential race to date.
Businesses that sold marijuana would be able to participate in the banking system, and their profits would be taxable.
The Democratic presidential candidate said the nation’s massive prison population and more than 600,000 arrests a year ago for marijuana possession demands a shift in the country’s drug laws. His journey to Wednesday’s speech began at the first Democratic debate, when he floored marijuana advocates by saying he personally would vote for a state ballot initiative legalizing marijuana use. “Therefore we need more states, cities and the federal government to begin to address this”.
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Martin O’Malley has said he would like to see marijuana reassigned to the less restrictive Schedule II.
