Contributor: Missy Matheny
The fight for legal recreational use of marijuana has been very fruitful across the U.S. in recent years, and the next president will have a major impact on the future of legalization. With most of the democratic candidates laying out plans for reform of cannabis laws, let’s investigate where the top contenders for the next President of United States stand on marijuana, and legalization.
Bernie Sanders
As of the writing of this article, Bernie Sanders is the current top democratic candidate for president.
From the official Sanders Campaign website, berniesanders.com. Sanders has laid out a comprehensive plan to legalize recreational marijuana use in all 50 states. He doesn’t stop at legalization, though. Sanders wants to go even farther, with a plan to expunge past marijuana convictions, as well as making sure money made from legal cannabis sales goes back into minority communities.
Sanders’ plan goes into detail on how his administration will nominate multiple heads of law enforcement, with the direction to declassify marijuana as a controlled substance. One of the parts that stands out in Sanders’ plan is that he would incentivize marijuana businesses to be structured like nonprofits, and ban big corporations, like tobacco companies, that have a history of bad business practices, from getting into the legal cannabis industry.
With this plan, Sanders hopes to help the communities that suffered the most during the War on Drugs. Sanders is the only democratic candidate that has spelled out the legalization of recreational marijuana as an individual policy of their campaign. Sanders is also the only candidate with a mostly positive history surrounding the legalization of cannabis.
Since the 1990s, Sanders has co-sponsored, and signed, several bills to legalize marijuana and declassify it as a Schedule One drug. There are a couple bills that Sanders signed that could be considered negative to the legalization movement, but they deal with firearms and violence, with cannabis not being the major component of those particular bills.
Joe Biden
Biden sits as the number two candidate for the democratic nomination, as of the writing of this article.
Joe Biden has an unfortunate history with cannabis legalization. He has declared marijuana a “gateway drug” on more than one occasion. He also said that he would need more research into the effects of cannabis before he would even consider legalization (Source: Washingtonpost.com).
During the 1980s and 1990s, Biden was a leader in the War on Drugs (Source: Vox.com), and helped fuel the mass incarceration that is currently plaguing the American justice system. In 1989, Biden went on record against the current president, George H.W. Bush, chiding the then president for not taking the War on Drugs far enough.
He called for harsher punishments to “hold every drug user accountable.” Biden also called for more police officers, prosecutors, judges, and prisons during this interview. Currently, Biden does seem okay with decriminalization of cannabis, and the legalization of medical marijuana, but as of this moment, his campaign hasn’t taken an official stance on the matter, nor have they suggested any policies that they might propose on the issue.
Recently, Biden has commented that he’s more open to the idea of legalization (Source: Politico.com), even suggesting that he thinks cannabis needs to be legalized. Unfortunately, Biden has not taken any official stance on marijuana laws, and he doesn’t seem to think the topic is incredibly crucial to his campaign platform.
Elizabeth Warren
Warren is currently in third place for the democratic nominee at the time of writing this article.
Elizabeth Warren has been a vocal advocate for total legalization of marijuana since 2016. She has shown this not only with her public voice calling for legalization of recreational marijuana, but with her actions as a public servant, working to get laws passed on the federal level, thus allowing states to make their own rules.
Before 2016, Warren wasn’t as outspoken about cannabis legalization as she is now. Although, she has always openly supported medical marijuana. Currently, the Warren campaign site, elizabethwarren.com, has a plan for criminal justice reform, with details on reworking the entire way law enforcement deals with controlled substances.
Warren, herself, has publicly said she would issue an executive order to declassify cannabis as a controlled substance, as well as expunge criminal records (Source: prospect.org). However, Warren doesn’t have a plan that focuses on cannabis specifically, and her plan for criminal justice reform covers far more than just the way marijuana is regulated.
Pete Buttigieg
As of the writing of this article, Pete Buttigieg is in fourth place.
Much like Warren, Buttigieg has a plan for criminal justice reform on his campaign website, peteforamerica.com. This plan has the legalization of recreational marijuana as part of the larger goal of decriminalizing controlled substances, with an emphasis on expunging previous convictions.
It really focuses on changing the way law enforcement handles controlled substances, from incarceration, to medical help for addiction. However, Buttigieg has an unfortunate history with his policies towards legal cannabis use.
During his time as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, marijuana arrests for black residents increased, making them four times more likely to be prosecuted than their white neighbors (Source: theintercept.com). This made racial disparity not only higher than the rest of the state, it became the highest in the United States, period.
Buttigieg has had a short political career, and the only history he has on policies for cannabis is signing legislation that cracked down on synthetic cannabis during his eight years as mayor of South Bend (Source: theburningtruth.us). During this time Buttigieg made a statement on Twitter that “synthetic marijuana gets far less attention than opioids, but it too can be lethal.” His focus did seem to be more on things like, rat poison being put into the synthetic marijuana, however, he did not make that apparent in the policies that were enacted (Source: 953mnc.com).
Instead, Buttigieg outlawed synthetic cannabis outright, with stiff penalties for those caught with the substance. In his short political career, Buttigieg hasn’t been friendly on marijuana legalization, and has singled out minorities in his pursuit to curb the use of controlled substances.
Michael Bloomberg
As of the writing of this article, Bloomberg is polling in fifth place for the democratic nominee.
Bloomberg stands out among the other candidates, as he has been staunchly opposed to the legalized use of marijuana in any form in the past. Bloomberg has even called the legalization of cannabis the “stupidest thing anybody has ever done (Source: marijuanamoment.net).” Bloomberg has stated that he’s open to the idea of decriminalizing marijuana since launching his presidential campaign.
However, Bloomberg’s history with decriminalization while the mayor of New York lead to racial disparities in the arrest rates. With a peak arrest rate in 2011 while he was mayor, although marijuana had been decriminalized in New York since the 1970s.
When faced with questions about this during his tenure as mayor, Bloomberg’s defense was, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” Bloomberg has called medical marijuana, “one of the greatest hoaxes of all time,” and referred to it as a “slippery slope.”
Bloomberg has shown serious hostility to any criminal reform for drug use as recently as 2012, pointing out that other countries have the death penalty for drug dealers. Bloomberg even went as far as saying, “think about the number of people who die from drug use here in this country. And yet we don’t take it seriously enough to dissuade people…Executing a handful of people saves thousands of lives (Source: marijuanamoment.net).”
He did clarify that he wasn’t endorsing killing drug traffickers, “I’m not suggesting we go kill ‘em. But when you talk to people overseas, they can’t understand why we allow people to deal drugs that are killing people (Source: marijuanamoment.net).”
Bloomberg publicly makes negative comments about marijuana users, and until throwing his hat into the ring for the democratic nominee, Bloomberg was very unapologetic for the controversies during his tenure as mayor of New York, and did not budge on his stance on marijuana laws.
Amy Klobuchar
As of the writing of this article, Klobuchar has made up a little ground, and is polling alongside Bloomberg.
Klobuchar is another candidate that has an unfortunate history with the legalization of marijuana. Although her campaign has said it favors legalization of recreational cannabis on a federal level, her campaign has no official policy on the subject (Source: amyklobuchar.com).
During her time as Attorney of Hennepin County, Klobuchar spoke out against legalization, and she had a reputation for incarcerating many people on drug convictions (Source: cannalawblog.com). Her first time voting in favor of any pro marijuana laws was in 2018, although she has been a senator since 2007.
Donald Trump
As the incumbent president, Trump getting re-elected is a possibility.
Although Trump has publicly supported medical marijuana, and denounced the War on Drugs repeatedly, in his budget for the coming fiscal year, Trump is proposing to end protection for state-legal medical marijuana programs (Source: leafly.com).
However, Trump has attempted this every year since getting elected, and as of right now, it doesn’t look like he will succeed this year, either. Although Trump publicly claims to be for (at least) medical marijuana, in his short history of making policies, it reveals him to be against marijuana use entirely.
