It might seem incongruous, to say the least, but some people in the cannabis community are at least open to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance taking back the White House. Others seem to genuinely believe that it doesn’t matter much who wins.
Some of them are just fascists who just happen to like weed. Others are “libertarians.” Still others are faux-left “populists” who just instinctively hate Democrats. This latter group consists largely of people who wish they had lived in the ’60s, when there really was much less of a difference between Democrats and Republicans. That’s why they like to use phrases like “The Establishment,” and why so much of their rhetoric makes them sound like the hippies depicted on Adam-12 and Dragnet. They think Trump would be a better president than Kamala Harris, or at least no worse, because Harris is “a cop.”
The main reason to avoid voting for Republicans, obviously, is that it would spell the end of the American democratic experiment. But even if you’re a one-issue voter and your one issue is weed, voting for Republicans, even ones who seem pot-friendly, would be a grave mistake. It doesn’t help that some Democrats are opposed to pot reform to one degree or another, and that Republicans like the otherwise-odious Matt Gaetz are staunch advocates of reform. But, as a unit, the Republican Party is the main stumbling block to real reform, including federal legalization. If the Democrats had control over both houses of Congress during the Biden administration (and sans the filibuster) weed would likely be legal right now.
As for the top of the GOP ticket itself, there’s no help there. Trump doesn’t seem particularly exercised by the cannabis issues (or by anything other than his narcissism). If the GOP leadership told him to veto reforms, which seems likely, he probably would. But those reforms would reach his desk only if the Democrats were to win both houses of Congress.
J.D. Vance, meanwhile, is as weird on weed as he is on most issues, but given the firehouse of weirdness that he constantly spews lately—allegations that Haitian immigrants are eating cats, declarations that childless women are inferior, etc.—this might get lost. But it’s no less weird for him to say, as he did last week, that, thanks to “Kamala Harris’s border policies,” evildoers in Mexican drug cartels are sending “bags of marijuana” and “candy laced with THC and fentanyl” across the border.
Weird, if true. Or if false, which of course it is. Vance was speaking at an event held in Atlanta by the Faith & Freedom Coalition. Vance claimed he’d been invited into an evidence room of a sheriff’s office, where he saw the contraband in question. Sounding a lot like Trump, he recounted his exchange: “I say, ‘Guys, what is going on here? You’ve got all these drugs here that look to me just like a box of candy—a box of Nerds candy. And they say, ‘Well, sir, that’s actually THC and fentanyl.’ But I say, ‘Wait a second, the cartels have disguised deadly fentanyl to look like child’s candy so that they can make it easier to get into our country?”
He insisted that “one of those packets of fentanyl is going to end up in one of our neighborhood streets. One of those packets of fentanyl is going to end up in a child’s playground. One of those packets of what looks like Nerds candy, but is actually a deadly substance, is going to end up in our schools, and a kid’s going to open up a packet of candy, take a piece of candy out and lose their life because of it.”
It’s unknown whether any of this happened at all, much less that it went down the way Vance told it. What is known is that Mexican cartels aren’t targeting children in the United States by disguising fentanyl (or weed) as candy.
Nevertheless, Vance said, Harris “has given these drug cartels free rein over our country, and now they’re smuggling in deadly drugs that look like child candy.”
Child candy? Oh, no!
Whatever your political worldview, or your stance on weed, do you really want to send a guy like that to the White House?
