Imagining how Hillary could and should have championed marijuana reform based on DNC platform
I have been thinking more about my (crazy?) claim in this prior post that voter math in swing states suggest that Hillary Clinton could have won in a landslide if she had championed marijuana reform. Specifically, I went back and looked at this official language from the party platform embraced by Democrats back in July:
“Because of conflicting federal and state laws concerning marijuana, we encourage the federal government to remove marijuana from the list of ‘Schedule 1’ federal controlled substances and to appropriately regulate it, providing a reasoned pathway for future legalization. We believe that the states should be laboratories of democracy on the issue of marijuana, and those states that want to decriminalize it or provide access to medical marijuana should be able to do so. We support policies that will allow more research on marijuana, as well as reforming our laws to allow legal marijuana businesses to exist without uncertainty. And we recognize our current marijuana laws have had an unacceptable disparate impact in terms of arrest rates for African-Americans that far outstrip arrest rates for whites, despite similar usage rates.”