Democratic 2020 candidates voice strong support for marijuana legalisation

A growing list of Democratic candidates running for presidency in 2020 are backing the legalisation of marijuana by the US government.

Last month New Jersey senator Cory Booker proposed a bill to decriminalise the drug at the federal level and provide extra funding for states taking steps to legalise it.

Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have co-sponsored the Marijuana Justice Act.

And several other candidates, and anticipated candidates, have begun to talk about their support for legalisation on the campaign trail.

Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who is expected to join the Democratic field, last week emailed supporters to call for an end to the federal prohibition on marijuana.

“Who is going to be the last man – more likely than not a black man – to languish behind bars for possessing or using marijuana when it is legal in some form in more than half of the states in this country?” Mr O’Rourke wrote.

Ms Harris, the California senator whose home state is the nation’s largest legal pot jurisdiction, said national decriminalisation was the “smart thing to do”.

Another 2020 candidate, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, said she believes states should have the right to determine how to handle marijuana regulation within their borders but hasn’t signed on to Mr Booker’s legislation.

Washington governor Jay Inslee, who entered the contest this month, said in his announcement speech that it was “about time” to legalise the drug nationally.

During his 2012 run for governor, Mr Inslee opposed the ballot initiative that made Washington one of the first two states to legalise so-called recreational marijuana.

As governor, however, he has frequently touted what he describes as Washington’s successful experiment with regulation and recently began pardoning people with small-time marijuana convictions.

The new-found enthusiasm to talk about marijuana policy follows a growing level of acceptance about the drug across the country.

In the late 1960s – the era of Woodstock, and Vietnam – only 12 per cent of Americans supported legalisation, according to the Gallup poll.

By last year, the figure hit a record 66 per cent. About 75 per cent of Democrats support legalisation, along with a slim majority of Republicans also in support.

The willingness to discuss the drug represents a major change from 1992, when then-candidate Bill Clinton reluctantly admitted to using pot as a graduate student – claiming he tried it but “didn’t inhale".

By contrast, a relaxed Ms Harris talked about how she smoked pot at college in the 1980s during a recent radio interview on The Breakfast Club show.

The only dissenting view in the Democratic field comes from former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper. He opposed a ballot measure that legalised marijuana in Colorado in 2012, but said he accepted the will of the voters.

Rather than calling for national legalisation, Mr Hickenlooper wants the drug to no longer be a Schedule 1 controlled substance.

Many of the Democratic candidates have been keen to talk about how federal prohibition on marijuana – and its classification as a Schedule 1 substance alongside heroin – had criminalised too many people of colour.

“The war on drugs has not been a war on drugs, it’s been a war on people, and disproportionately people of colour and low-income individuals,” said Mr Booker when he introduced his bill at the end of February.

“The Marijuana Justice Act seeks to reverse decades of this unfair, unjust, and failed policy by removing marijuana from the list of controlled substances and making it legal at the federal level.”

Additional reporting by AP