The candidate says "too many Americans have seen their lives destroyed." | M. Scott Mahaskey Sanders calls for removing marijuana from federal list of dangerous drugs

Bernie Sanders announced Wednesday evening that he wants the federal government to remove marijuana from its list of most dangerous drugs.

“Too many Americans have seen their lives destroyed because they have criminal records as a result of marijuana use,” Sanders said, according to remarks released by his campaign at a town hall with students at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “That’s wrong. That has got to change.”


Sanders would be the first presidential candidate to advocate the removal of marijuana from the Drug Enforcement Agency's Schedule I list of controlled substances, which also includes heroin, LSD and MDMA.

“In the United States we have 2.2 million people in jail today, more than any other country. And we’re spending about $80 billion a year to lock people up. We need major changes in our criminal justice system – including changes in drug laws,” Sanders said.

The senator's plan would not explicitly legalize marijuana nationwide but rather remove barriers rom states to allow the regulation and taxing of the drug in a similar way to alcohol and tobacco taxes currently function. In states like Colorado and Washington where marijuana is already legal, Sanders' proposal would permit dispensaries and other related businesses to use banks and apply for tax deductions that they are not eligible for currently under federal law.

Sanders' Democratic opponents have not called for its removal from the DEA list, but Martin O'Malley has pushed for it to be a Schedule II drug, and Hillary Clinton has said that she wants to see how the experiment works in states that have legalized before making any decision about the federal status.