Is Marijuana Legalization Now Part Of The Political Mainstream?

Over the weekend, David Freedlander did a story for the Daily Beast on The New Politics of Pot: The 2014 Candidates Who Want to Legalize It. "Forget decriminalization or medical marijuana," he wrote in way of introduction. "Bolstered by state ballot victories, top-tier contenders in 2014 are seeking full legalization, the drug’s highest-profile advocacy ever… Advocates for marijuana legalization say the 2014 elections represent the first time that serious, top-tier candidates for major state and federal offices are advocating for full legalization of the drug.

The pro-pot candidates of 2014 have been bolstered by state ballot initiatives in Washington and Colorado that legalized marijuana starting next year and by a Gallup poll in October that showed 58 percent of Americans support legalization. It was a 46 percent increase since 1969, when the polling company first started asking the question, and the first time a majority has backed legalization.

But if legalization is as popular as advocates insist it is, how come more candidates aren’t backing it?

“Politicians, and I know a lot of them, tend not to seek out controversy,” said Daylin Leach, a state senator in Pennsylvania who is running for an open congressional seat in suburban Philadelphia and who has made legalization a central plank of his campaign. “You know the Wayne Gretzky line, ‘I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it will be.’ Well, most politicians want to skate where the puck already was.”

Leach introduced a bill in the Pennsylvania Senate this year that would have legalized marijuana. Passage remains unlikely, but if there were a secret ballot, he said, “it would pass overwhelmingly.” A conservative lawmaker who was publicly opposed to the bill, Leach said, told him privately, “I hope it passes so I can stop smoking pot in my living room and start on my front porch.”

The state senator is in a crowded field, but if he wins, he will join a small cadre of members of Congress who are backing full legalization. A bill introduced this year to decriminalize marijuana and turn regulatory power over to the states has 10 Democratic co-sponsors, and Republican Steve Stockman, who announced Monday that he was running for the Texas Senate seat now held by Republican John Cornyn, supports a bill mandating that the federal government respect state marijuana laws.

“We shouldn’t put people in the criminal justice system for smoking a plant which makes them feel giddy,” Leach said. “We are now requiring everyone, including our kids, to buy pot from behind the local bowling alley from someone they have never met before, instead of going into a state store in a strip mall, as you would to buy a bottle of vodka.”

The 2014 candidates’ pro-pot stance appears mostly to be a way for them to distinguish themselves in primaries where the candidates largely share the same views, particularly on social issues. In Maryland, for example, the candidate pushing legalization, Heather Mizeur, also is vying to be first openly gay governor of the state and is running a campaign designed to appeal to liberals and young people. Mizeur rejects “old paradigm assumptions about conventional wisdom and what is and isn’t safe to do in politics,” she said. “I am a candidate who never plays it safe. I always stand up for what I believe in. In the past, politics has been about catching up to where people are.”

In Pennsylvania, former governor Ed Rendell told the Daily Beast that he thought Hanger’s position on marijuana was what distinguished him most among voters with the Democratic primary five months away.

Hanger said he agreed.

“This issue alone could win me the Democratic primary,” he said. His plan would expunge the record of those who have been convicted of marijuana possession. “I would like Democrats to reclaim the word liberty or at least not surrender it completely. I put this issue in the same category as marriage equality for gays and lesbians or reproductive choice for women. To me, this is a question of individual autonomy, and it is rooted in some fairly traditional values of letting people live their lives how they want to unless they are hurting others.”

When Blue America is considering which candidates to endorse, marijuana legalization in not a question we have ever asked. We've been more interested in making sure our candidates back equality under the law for minorities and oppose neoliberal schemes like Chained CPI. But now candidates are bringing the issue up to us. Aside from Barney Frank, who was already in Congress when he started talking out about legalization, the first candidate who ever talked to us about it was Jared Polis, in 2008. We endorsed him, though marijuana wasn't the reason why, even if his forthright advocacy helped us to see his leadership potential, courage and willingness to buck conventional wisdom. Polis is now the congressman from Boulder and is likely to replace Steve Israel as head of the DCCC when Israel has another failing cycle next year.

As Freedlander pointed out, there are more candidates than ever who have legalization as part of their platforms. And without even trying-- or overtly considering the issue-- Blue America has endorsed many of them. Kenyan-born John Hanger is certainly one of our favorites running for governor of Pennsylvania and there's no way I could conceive a cautious conservative like Allyson Schwartz-- the dull, careerist Establishment pick in that primary-- to ever get out front on any issue that "radical." Ironically, the candidate who are backing in the primary to win the House seat Schwartz is giving up, state Senator Daylin Leach of Montgomery County, is probably the most outspoken advocate of legalization of anyone running for the House. Watch the video he made on the subject up top. "I don't know," he says, "how any progressive can say that we should continue a policy that is so harmful to our kids and so harmful to the minority community, and costs us so much money that we could be using on other things." You can help Daylin win his primary here.

And Blue America is big time behind two other top tier candidates aggressively calling for legalization this cycle, Heather Mizeur, who is running for governor of Maryland, and Maine's progressive U.S. Senate candidate, Shenna Bellows. You can watch a local TV interview with Mizeur about why she's calling for legalization at the bottom of this post. This is, in part, a guest post Bellows did for DWT just over a month ago:

A few years ago, as executive director of the ACLU of Maine, I was discussing marijuana policy with a prosecutor. As we debated, he started reminiscing about his days as a pot smoker. At that point, I had to tell him that I’d never smoked pot due to my severe asthma. He thought this was funny, but I was troubled by the hypocrisy. When the prosecutor who is locking people up for marijuana laughs about his own use, something is terribly wrong. And when our last three U.S. Presidents have acknowledged marijuana use at the same time that poor kids-- particularly young males of color-- are getting thrown in jail for the same activity, we need change.

As a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, I support marijuana legalization. We need to end the war on drugs and reform our criminal justice system, and we cannot afford to wait. The United States incarcerates more people in total and more people per capita than any other country in the world, and the racial disparities are alarming. Even in my home state of Maine, which is the whitest state in the union, blacks are 2.1 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. Government spends billions of dollars each year enforcing counterproductive drug laws, which are truly the New Jim Crow. The economic and human rights costs are enormous.

Our limited public resources would be much better spent investing in drug treatment facilities and community education in a regulated system that promotes community health and safety. Instead of spending billions on a prison industrial complex, we could invest those funds in education, prevention and rehabilitation.

We should treat drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. Mainers have been using medical marijuana safely now for over a decade. I met a senior citizen recently whose wife just died of lung cancer. He told me that marijuana was a necessary part of her palliative care. His daughter risked arrest time and time again to bring them marijuana in her mother’s last months. Medical marijuana patients all across the country have similar heart-rending stories.

Maine is already a leader on marijuana policy. Maine voters overwhelmingly approved medical marijuana, first in 1999 and then again in 2009. Portland citizens just voted in a landslide to approve the recreational use of marijuana in small amounts for adults over 21. Now is the time for federal reform. We need a commonsense approach to drug policy based on science and liberty; we need to end prohibition. With your help, I will be a voice in the United States Senate for sensible drug policy.

Another Democratic Senate candidate, Jay Stamper, has a great deal of appeal to principled libertarians in South Carolina who detest Lindsay Graham's Big Brother/NSA-backing stands. Republican elected officials in the state are notorious drunkards and coke-heads… and hypocrites. This morning, Jay took it right to them: "I think it's time for politicians to put down their scotch and sodas and vote to legalize marijuana. Prohibition of marijuana, like alcohol before it, serves only to enrich and empower violent criminal cartels that turn our cities into war zones and corrupt our public institutions."

If you'd like to help Shenna Bellow's and Jay Stampers's campaigns, you can do it here. And Heather Mizeur's is here.