A.G. Gancarski
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolled out plans to reverse the Cole Memo, an Obama-era policy of detente in the federal war against cannabis, on Thursday.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was the first — and as of Thursday morning, the only — candidate in Florida’s 2018 field to decry Sessions’ move.
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is dangerously deluded about our nation’s drug policy. This decision is not rooted in science or justice — though that’s little surprise since he has compared marijuana to heroin,” Gillum asserted.
“While people of every walk of life smoke marijuana,” Gillum added, “the criminal penalties for doing so are far less equal. He has made his goal crystal clear: put more young people and people of color behind bars.”
Sessions’ move was teased since his confirmation hearings; his entire political career has seen him in opposition to increasingly liberal cannabis policies in states outside the southeast, a region characterized by a robust prison lobby and enforcement policies notoriously harsher for African-American males than other demographics.
Sessions — then a U.S. Attorney in Alabama — said he believed the Ku Klux Klan “were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”
In 2016, then Sen. Sessions said, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana … not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.”
Gillum is showing momentum in the race for Governor, touting $250,000 raised in December.
He tends to run behind Gwen Graham in polls of the Democratic field, leading other candidates.
The Trump White House is embroiled in internal crisis, and perhaps this move serves as a distraction.
Meanwhile, for a candidate like Gillum, a forthright position on this issue separates him from the rest of the field.
3 comments
Christopher M. Kennard
January 4, 2018 at 2:07 pm
Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party have ever supported ending the racist, damaging and immoral end of the federal prohibition of “marihuana” (a racist term in of itself, used against U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage and Mexican immigrants at the turn of the century, beginning around 1910), then used against black folks migrating up from the deep south to northern cities to find more work and better conditions.
Nixon and Rockefeller in the late 1960’s intensified the effort to victimize cannabis users by having them declared criminal felons deserving prison and losing their right as American citizens to vote for life. It is an easy way to harass, intimidate and control populations of people inside the United States and around the world.
The word ” marihuana” was used to conceal it was hemp and medicinal cannabis being made illegal at the behest of certain financiers, industrialists and other corrupt millionaires like Rockefeller (who owned Standard Oil and wanted petroleum used instead of hemp for auto fuel and oil), Andrew Du Pont (who started his Du Pont plastics company using petroleum as the non-biodegradable base for plastics instead of hemp), Andrew Mellon U.S. Secretary of Treasury and Wm. Hearst, (both who invested millions to purchase virgin forests to cut down for paper for Hearst’s chain of national newspapers instead of using hemp) and federal law enforcement prohibition agents who needed a job after alcohol was legalized once again in the early 1930’s. Other players, like the pharmaceutical industry soon joined the conspiracy to make cannabis illegal and kept it illegal all of these years (80 years and counting) just so these corrupt millionaires and their lackeys could become even more wealthy than they already were.
It is important to realize that many people had no idea that hemp (once one of the largest U. S. crops farmers planted every year) and medicinal cannabis were being made illegal by disguising this move using the word “marihuana” which few in the U.S. ever had heard before, instead of clearly making hemp or cannabis illegal, which most people knew and used in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
It seems that Mr. Gillum is signing on to a civil rights campaign to make cannabis legal once again in Florida that may well carry him to the Governor’s seat in our next round of elections.
Mr. Gillum may be the candidate whom I will support — this issue is one that addresses needed reforms in our criminal justice system, our medical practices and by ending the bondage that millions of American citizens are forced to work under; being subject to so- called “random drug tests” that detect cannabis use over a thirty day period, thereby being the basis for hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs every year around the country along with millions more who are denied employment for failing pre-employment drug tests detecting cannabis use.
Currently, today, there is a Florida constitutional amendment proposal being distributed in petition form for Florida voters to sign so we can vote in 2020 to make cannabis legal for every adult in Florida over the age of twenty-one to possess, use and grow their own cannabis for personal use on private property.
Once we pass this law, RIGHT OF ADULTS TO CANNABIS [Initiative Serial # 15-20] in November of 2020, just two months later, on the second Tuesday of January 2021, you can go plant cannabis in your own back yard veggie garden and use it freely on private property without fear of arrest or conviction.
Mr. Gillum ought to gather millions of supporters if he moves fast and makes this a central plank of his candidacy for Florida Governor this year. He needs our votes and we need someone in Tallahassee who sticks up for the average everyday Floridian citizen living here today.
Christopher M. Kennard
January 4, 2018 at 2:24 pm
Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party have ever supported ending the racist, damaging and immoral end of the federal prohibition of “marihuana” (a racist term in of itself, used against U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage and Mexican immigrants at the turn of the century, beginning around 1910), then used against black folks migrating up from the deep south to northern cities to find more work and better conditions.
Nixon and Rockefeller in the late 1960’s intensified the effort to victimize cannabis users by having them declared criminal felons deserving prison and losing their right as American citizens to vote for life. It is an easy way to harass, intimidate and control populations of people inside the United States and around the world.
The word ” marihuana” was used to conceal it was hemp and medicinal cannabis being made illegal at the behest of certain financiers, industrialists and other corrupt millionaires like Rockefeller, (who owned Standard Oil and wanted petroleum used instead of hemp for auto fuel and oil), Andrew Du Pont, (who started his Du Pont plastics company using petroleum as the non-biodegradable base for plastics instead of hemp), Andrew Mellon, U.S. Secretary of Treasury, and Wm. Hearst, (both who invested millions to purchase virgin forests to cut down for paper for Hearst’s chain of national newspapers instead of using hemp) and federal law enforcement prohibition agents who needed a job after alcohol was legalized once again in the early 1930’s. Other players, like the pharmaceutical industry soon joined the conspiracy to make cannabis illegal and kept it illegal all of these years (80 years and counting) just so these corrupt millionaires and their lackeys could become even more wealthy than they already were.
It is important to realize that many people had no idea that hemp (once one of the largest U. S. crops farmers planted every year) and medicinal cannabis were being made illegal by disguising this move using the word “marihuana” which few in the U.S. ever had heard before, instead of clearly making hemp or cannabis illegal, which most people knew and used in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Just look at the damage this has caused our nation. It is past the time we ended this national disgrace.
It seems that Mr. Gillum is signing on to a civil rights campaign to make cannabis legal once again in Florida that may well carry him to the Governor’s seat in our next round of elections.
Mr. Gillum may be the candidate whom I will support — this issue is one that addresses needed reforms in our criminal justice system, our medical practices and by ending the bondage that millions of American citizens are forced to work under; being subject to so- called “random drug tests” that detect cannabis use over a thirty day period, thereby being the basis for hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs every year around the country along with millions more who are denied employment for failing pre-employment drug tests detecting cannabis use.
Currently, today, there is a Florida constitutional amendment proposal being distributed in petition form for Florida voters to sign so we can vote in 2020 to make cannabis legal for every adult in Florida over the age of twenty-one to possess, use and grow their own cannabis for personal use on private property.
Once we pass this law, RIGHT OF ADULTS TO CANNABIS [Initiative Serial # 15-20] in November of 2020, just two months later, on the second Tuesday of January 2021, you can go plant cannabis in your own back yard veggie garden and use it freely on private property without fear of arrest or conviction.
You can find and print out a copy of this legal cannabis petition by going to FloridiansForFreedom.com and print out a petition for you to sign, if you agree, and a couple of more for other registered Florida voters to copy and sign, passing petitions on to others as well. In this way, we can initiate a “daisy chain” of cannabis civil rights petitions and gather the nearly one million signed petitions we need to vote on this matter by 2020.
Mr. Gillum ought to gather millions of supporters if he moves fast and makes this a central plank of his candidacy for Florida Governor this year. He needs our votes and we need someone in Tallahassee who sticks up for the average everyday Floridian citizen living here today.
While not a “single issue” voter, I understand how important and all reaching this comprehensive “civil rights” issue truly is to us all — here in Florida as well as the rest of the United States of America. Bernie Sanders, the first Independent U. S. Senator to introduce the end of the federal prohibition of cannabis in 2015, would like this kind of response by our state leaders. It may well be that Mr. Gillum is on the way to attract the kind of voters and attention he needs to campaign successfully for Governor this year.
G Dormo n
January 4, 2018 at 7:00 pm
30,000,000 marijuana arrests in the US since nixon
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