Donald Trump’s View On Cannabis

Despite his hyper-conservative ideas, fanbase, and rhetoric, Donald Trump could be one of the most promising candidates when it comes to legalizing cannabis. At least that’s what some commentators are starting to say.

So far, Donald Trump has come under fire for all sorts of things throughout his campaign. At one point Donald Trump described Mexican immigrants by saying: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

He’s also drawn criticism for suggesting that the U.S. should ban all Muslims from entering the country, for his long history of misogynistic comments about women, and for the violence that has become a feature at many of his rallies and events.

In many cases, that violence has been directed at people of color attempting to protest at Donald Trump events. Given all that, it may seem surprising that he could, in fact, be one of the candidates most likely to be open to legalizing marijuana.

Long before he entered the political arena, Trump told a reporter in April of 1990, that U.S. drug laws are “a joke.” He also said that legalizing drugs would be the best way to “take the profit away from these drug czars.”

Last November, Donald Trump told GQ Magazine:

“Legalized marijuana is always a very difficult question. For medicinal purposes and medical purposes, it’s fine.”

Some have seen this line as a move away from legalizing all forms of marijuana, and an attempt to focus primarily on medical cannabis instead. But others have argued that Trump maintains the same perspective on legalization, but has used slightly more toned down language for the sake of his campaign.

That interpretation seems to be backed up by the fact that when Donald Trump was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly he never actually said he wouldn’t want to legalize marijuana. The most he said about it was: “I would want to think about that one Bill because in some ways, I think it’s good and in other ways, it’s bad.”

And when O’Reilly claimed that drug dealers are all stocking up on weed in Colorado and then selling it in other parts of the country, Donald Trump simply changed the subject. So while we haven’t yet heard precisely how Donald Trump feels about legalization during his campaign, there seems to be a reason to assume that he may be surprisingly open to the idea.

Elsewhere in the ongoing presidential campaign, Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders has spoken quite openly about the possibility of moving toward legalization. His home state of Vermont is currently working on a bill that would legalize both medical and recreational marijuana.

And at a rally in Michigan earlier this month, he admitted that he’d smoked marijuana twice. “And what it did for me was it made me cough a lot, that was my response,” Sanders told the crowd. “But I gather other people have had different experiences.”

Marijuana legalization is an ongoing concern in the political world, especially for the cannabis community. At the beginning of the year, President Obama said he would not make cannabis law a priority for his last year in the White House.

Despite this, the Supreme Court just made what many have said is a landmark decision in favor of the legalization movement. The Supreme Court voted last week to deny a lawsuit filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma against Colorado.The two states claim that large amounts of marijuana are coming into their states from Colorado. They filed the lawsuit in hopes of getting the Supreme Court to crack down on certain aspects of Colorado’s laws. The Court’s refusal to hear the suit means that Colorado’s marijuana laws will remain unchanged.