Not only does the number 4/20 represent a day in April, it is also a symbolic representation of marijuana. In today’s society, marijuana is something that has become more and more prominent. Although not everyone is in support of making possession and consumption of marijuana legal, it has become so relevant to society that it is now a topic discussed throughout presidential elections. Throughout this blog post I will be discussing and informing the reader of what sides some of the current presidential candidates take when it comes to the issue of marijuana legalization.
First, we will begin with Donald Trump. This presidential candidate used to be very against legalizing marijuana, but recently he has changed his mind. Donald Trump believes that medical marijuana should be legal for only patients who are indeed very sick and it may be their last option. But when it comes to recreational marijuana, he states that he believes that it should be up to each state to decide whether or not marijuana will be legal in that state. Trump claims he has never touched alcohol, drugs, tobacco, or coffee.
John Kasich is a presidential candidate that I haven’t talked about too much so I decided to include his view on marijuana both medically and recreation-ally. He believes that marijuana should not be legalized in any form because he thinks that legalization would give younger generations “the wrong idea” and incline them to do drugs. He believes that marijuana is a gateway drug and that everyone should just stay as far away from it as possible. A point that he makes in his argument about not legalizing marijuana is that less kids will smoke if they just hear the words “do not smoke” so he does not believe that legalizing marijuana would lower the amount of people put in jail for marijuana violations; he just believes they would violate them more.
Next, we have Hillary Clinton. Clinton has stated that she supports the use of medical marijuana and also supports further research on possibly positive effects that marijuana can have. She, like Donald Trump, believes that if recreational marijuana is made legal, it should be up to each individual state to make that decision. Clinton is usually pretty liberal when it comes to social issues, but as we can see, when it comes to marijuana she is pretty in the middle.
Finally, I will discuss Bernie Sander’s view on legalizing marijuana. The first point Bernie Sanders makes is that he believes that the United States’ current system on dealing with drugs is failing. He wants to minimize the amount of people that are put in jail due to marijuana violations, and believes that this will be possible if recreational marijuana is legalized. Something else he strongly advocates for is treating addiction to marijuana as a drug addiction rather than punishment by jail time. Bernie, like many other candidates in this presidential election believes that it should be up to the states to opt for full legalization of marijuana.
I like how this blog post discusses each candidate’s position on the different issues. I find it a little pointless that presidential candidates are discussing the issue when it should be clearly up to the states to decide whether or not to legalize marijuana. It is social issues like marijuana and abortion for example that continue to dog the Republican Party. They are constantly asked questions like these rather than substantive policy questions, which only results in the further isolation of themselves with young voters and continue the notion of the “old white man” party. However, I believe that Kasich has it right in to not legalize it due to the fact that it is a gateway drug for harder substances such as heroin and cocaine as well as the fact that it’s legalization would lead to the incline of users. I think Bernie Sanders is completely wrong in treating it as an addiction problem. This idea just takes all responsibility off of the offender and makes them look like the victim rather than the criminal who broke the law. This just places the responsibility on society to fix the problem rather than the individual.
I like how you are bringing light to this extremely controversial topic in recent politics. This will probably be the first election where the majority of the candidates are not openly opposing marijuana as either a possible legal recreational drug or a medicine. I chose medical marijuana as my topic for last semester’s Paradigm Shift paper and TED Talk as I strongly agree that this issue should be openly debated. It is great to see that a few candidates are actually taking a position on this issue as opposed to either refusing to acknowledge it as a medicine or taking an unbiased stance. As long as a candidate has an opinion about it that is backed up by some source, he/she has my respect about that issue. I can’t wait to see where you go with this issue in the future! Great post, keep it up!