Likely presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., joined a pair of Democratic senators Tuesday to introduce legislation that seeks to block the federal government from prosecuting medical marijuana users and providers in states where it’s been legalized.
The announcement comes shortly after Paul received praise from pro-marijuana activists at a major gathering of conservatives near Washington, and it appears to further his interest in making pot a campaign issue.
The bill, which Paul is introducing with Democratic Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, would forbid federal interference in states setting medical marijuana policies. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana, but it’s still against federal law, which advocates say makes access more difficult and carries the potential threat of federal prosecution.
Paul said Tuesday that he thought few Americans wanted a sufferer of multiple sclerosis who got around in a wheelchair to be threatened with jail time for using marijuana.
“I think society is changing,” Paul said.
The bill he’s sponsoring with Booker and Gillibrand would reclassify marijuana from a schedule I drug to a schedule II drug, meaning it has a legitimate medical purpose and can be prescribed more easily.
It would allow marijuana-related businesses that are legal under state laws to have access to banks and credit unions, so they don’t have to operate just through cash.
“My guess is that even more tax money would be paid if they were allowed to keep their money in banks and not brown bags,” Paul said.
The bill also would allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to prescribe marijuana to veterans and make it easier for researchers to access marijuana for studies.
Paul has sought to make marijuana an issue in the 2016 race for the presidency, slamming fellow Republican potential candidate Jeb Bush for “hypocrisy,” noting that Bush opposed legalizing medical marijuana in Florida despite admitting he’d smoked pot as a prep student at the elite Phillips Academy.
Paul won praise from marijuana advocates at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, where nearly two-thirds of the 3,000 activists who voted in a straw poll said marijuana should be legal for either recreational or medical purposes. Paul, who won the conference straw poll for the third consecutive year, has been by far the most active of the Republican potential presidential hopefuls on the marijuana issue, but Bush and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also said during the conference that legalization should be left up to the states.
On Tuesday, Booker said the federal government had “long overstepped the boundaries of common sense, fiscal prudence and compassion with its marijuana laws.” The Senate legislation contains elements that already have been introduced in the House of Representatives, and marijuana activists hope it’s a breakthrough.
“The fact that two young Democrats with likely long political futures have teamed up with a probable 2016 Republican presidential candidate shows how medical marijuana is a nonpartisan, noncontroversial issue that draws support from across the spectrum,” Tom Angell, chairman of the pro-marijuana group Marijuana Majority, said a statement.
But getting any bill through Congress is incredibly difficult, particularly one changing drug laws, and Gillibrand conceded that the legislation is just “the first step of a long process of advocacy.”
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