If you are looking for the presidential candidate most likely to ensure marijuana will be legalized across the country, Donald Trump is your man.
Trump is on record claiming US ‘drug enforcement is a joke’ and drugs should be legalized to ‘take the profit away from these drug czars.’
According to Trump, tax revenues from the legalized drug trade will be used to educate the public about the dangers of drugs.
It seems Trump’s plans to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US also applies to the drug trade. He doesn’t want foreign drug czars getting rich and employing thousands of foreign staff when it should be American drug czars making the profits and providing employment for Americans.
Under President Trump, if drug lords are to be created, they better be made in the USA — and how can you blame him? Our drug dealers have been outsourced to other countries for far too long. If America hopes to create the next Walter White, we must locally foster and create drug lords and keep them within our borders.
Trump also stated we’re losing badly the war on drugs, and you have to legalize drugs to win that war. For a candidate that bases his entire brand on ‘winning,’ losing a war on drugs would severely chip away from the superhuman aura he’s manifested since he announced his run for president on June 16, 2015.
According to Trump, getting a ‘win’ against the war on drugs starts with complete legalization of all drugs.
Now that Trump has shifted from business man to a political Frankenstein created by the GOP and the media, his stance on marijuana has slightly shifted. In a November interview with GQ last year, Trump states ‘[marijuana for] medical purposes for medicinal purposes it’s absolutely fine.’
While his stance on marijuana may seem to change, his belief that the ‘war on drugs’ is a joke has not. On ABC’s ‘This Week,’ Trump told host Martha Raddatz that the country is doing a ‘poor job’ policing drugs; specifically, “We don’t want to do anything. And if you’re not going to want to do the policing, you’re going to have to start thinking about other alternatives.”
But it’s not something that I would want to do. Don’t worry, I speak double-talk Trump — let me translate. Donald Trump simply restated his 1990 position on the War on Drugs however the semantics have shifted to him exploring ‘other alternatives’ to alleviate this problem.
In that same statement, Trump insists that we (he) doesn’t want to do anything about the ‘war on drugs’ solely because he believes the enforcement isn’t working. Of course the only remaining ‘other alternative’ to his proposal is something that he’s reiterated in the past, complete drug legalization.
Presidential candidates tend to swing far right/left early on to appeal to their party’s core demographic in order to be their respective party’s nominee. Once the country is left with two candidates, both shift towards the middle to appeal to voters in the opposing field.
That’s just the way the political game has been operating for as long as any CNN talking head can remember.
Could Trump’s recent shift in his stance on marijuana be an objective attempt to garner key votes in his party? Of course it is.
In 2004, Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he identifies ‘more as a democrat’ and that it “seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.”
Therefore Trump dipping to a more liberal center if/when he becomes the Republican nominee doesn’t seem that unreasonable.
That tilt towards the center would also reflect his previously held stance on drug legalization. Compared to current field of presidential candidates, Trump has held the most radical stance against the enforcement of marijuana and other drugs for for the longest duration.
According to a 2012 RAND report commissioned by the White House, the organization found that $100 billion dollars a year is being generated by illegal drug trade in America, with $40 billion coming from marijuana.
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