

After years of supporting marijuana law reform, Nevada’s most read newspaper is now staunchly anti-pot.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal on Wednesday published an editorial imploring readers to vote against the state’s upcoming Question 2 initiative to regulate marijuana like alcohol.

The piece was the paper’s first anti-marijuana editorial in years, as well as the first under the purchase of conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who has spent millions of dollars in efforts to foil both medical and recreational marijuana legalization throughout the U.S.

After purchasing the paper in December, Adelson sent the editorial staff to visit a drug treatment center and reconsider their pro-legalization stance, Marijuana.com reports.

“Legalizing weed would jeopardize the health of countless Nevadans, expose more people to drug abuse and addiction, put excessive stress on the state’s health-care facilities and do little to relieve the state’s bloated prison population,” read the paper’s Wednesday editorial.

The tone is a far cry from the same paper that claimed “has long supporting the decriminalizing, regulating and taxing the sale of currently illegal drugs” in an editorial last summer.

“It’s pretty obvious that this is the position of an overzealous newspaper owner and not that of an objective editorial board,” said Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project to Marijuana.com. “Most Nevadans are already wary of Adelson, and now they are probably even more so given how glaring the hypocrisy is in this case. This is a guy who has made a fortune pushing booze on casino-goers, but wants to keep a much less harmful product illegal. Hopefully the Review-Journal will keep Adelson’s opinion confined to the opinion section and not let it leak into its new coverage.”