The presidential nominees for the Libertarian and Green Parties are both in support of marijuana legalization.
Libertarian pick Jo Jorgensen and Green nominee Howie Hawkins recently discussed their views on the issue.
Jorgensen said in a recent interview with C-Span, “The biggest problem we have right now is not the drugs, it’s the drug prohibition. Now, do drugs and alcohol cause problems? Of course they do. However, they’d be much more manageable if it were legal.”
“What’s the difference between me drinking bourbon in my home and somebody else smoking marijuana in their own home?” she said. “If there is no victim, there is no crime.”
Jorgensen had tweeted in April, “Ending the failed drug war would be a top priority if elected. It has led to the highest incarceration rate in the world. On day 1, I would pardon ALL nonviolent, victimless offenders in federal prisons. If there is no victim, there is no crime.”
She then tweeted in June, “The US prison population jumped from 350k to 2.3mil in just 30 years. The overall crime rate went down, however. How is this possible?
Draconian sentence lengths, mandatory minimums, and an increase in the number of drug laws which creates more “crimes”.
Hawkins has said, “We’ve got to treat drug abuse as a health problem. You should legalize marijuana and decriminalize the hard drugs like Portugal,” he said. “Instead of just throwing people in prison and building the biggest prison industrial system in the world—which Joe Biden had a lot to do [with], he wrote the legislative architecture for that as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee—we should be treating drug addiction as a health problem, not a criminal problem.”
“We want to decriminalize all drugs, except marijuana—we just want to legalize it like alcohol and tobacco,” he said in an interview with C-SPAN. “It’s not as dangerous as those two drugs and it should be taxed and regulated. For other illicit drugs, we want to do like they did in Portugal about 20 years ago.”
He tweeted in April, “The war on marijuana has caused tremendous damage and Joe Biden has been a major force in waging it. When we end the marijuana war we need to do so not only to create a policy that will work for the future but one that corrects the mistakes of the past.”
In June Hawkins said on Twitter, “One of the central changes to policing is to end the war on drugs. 20% of incarcerated people in the US are locked up due to a drug offense. We need to legalize marijuana, decriminalize other drugs, and make treatment readily available like Portugal did.”
