​Immediately after the Seattle Times ran an editorial last week supporting marijuana legalization, the newspaper got a telephone call from Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske in Washington, D.C., Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger reports.

The Stranger. Kerlikowske, who heads up the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), wanted to fly to Seattle to “talk personally” to the paper’s full editorial board, reports Dominic Holden at

Holden called the meeting “an apparent attempt by the federal government to pressure the state’s largest newspaper to oppose marijuana legalization.”

The White House called “right after our editorial ran, so I drew the obvious conclusion — he didn’t like our editorial,” said Bruce Ramsey, the Seattle Times editorial writer who penned the unbylined piece.