Joe Biden's reluctance to endorse full legalization could upset younger, cannabis-focused voters interested in social-justice reform.
DENVER — Once a politically dangerous subject, legal marijuana has become something of a de facto platform plank for the 2020 Democratic candidates: All support either legalizing or decriminalizing its use, and the differences lie in just how far the candidates are willing to take it.
“The debate has changed dramatically in the past couple years. It’s very new. It’s very new, and it’s very welcome," said Andy Bernstein of HeadCount, a voter-registration nonprofit targeting concertgoers and cannabis users."A decade ago, mentioning marijuana made you a fringe candidate. Today, you’re out of the mainstream if you don’t have a position, and a position to provide greater access.
Story continues"We think this is the biggest opportunity to turn out people who otherwise don’t vote," Bernstein said."This could be the thing that brings those people out, and makes non-voters into voters.” "Supporting legalization is no longer enough," said Queen Adesuyi, 25, the national affairs policy coordinator for Drug Policy Action, the political advocacy arm of the nonpartisan Drug Policy Alliance."There's a large segment of the public that purely cares about marijuana. And then there's other people who come to the table principled by the concept that mass incarceration is destroying lives and destroying communities.
Especially for young voters, she said, a candidate's attitude toward marijuana is a proxy for a wide array of issues, including social justice and criminal-justice reform. But Skyler McKinley, a Colorado-based Democratic political activist who helped write the state's first-in-the-nation marijuana rules, said he doesn't think Biden's stance will cost him large numbers of voters. That's because 11 states and Washington, D.C., have now legalized without federal interference, generally attributed to the power of the 10th Amendment, which grants states' rights.
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