
In the recent Democratic Party debate, Vermont Senator and Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders said he favored marijuana legalization, a stance that he had been hinting at for a while.
Sanders took a step further today by introducing a bill in the US Senate that would take marijuana off of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s “most dangerous drugs” list. (You’ll remember that two years after President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act— which classified marijuana as a schedule 1 drug [no redeeming medical value]– Nixon’s drug policy advisers told him to legalize marijuana instead. Hating the hippies for their constant harassment of him and his Vietnam War policies, Nixon went the other way by locking down marijuana use, locking up marijuana users, and stopping all medical research into marijuana.) Will marijuana users finally see justice?
Sanders’ Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act is similar to a bill in the House of Representatives proposed by Rep. Jared Polis, a Democrat from Colorado. From the Huffington Post...
“Just as alcohol prohibition failed in the 1920s, it’s clear marijuana prohibition is failing today,” Polis said in a statement. “For decades, the federal ban on marijuana has wasted tax dollars, impeded our criminal justice system, lined the pockets of drug cartels, and trampled on states’ ability to set their own public health laws. …