Democrats have effectively connected legalized marijuana to social justice, uniting on those platforms for 2020 to pull in millennial and African-American voters, The New York Times reported.
"A Democrat who is not on board with legalization or addressing it in terms of repairing harms brought by prohibition for decades is going to have a tough time convincing any voter they're serious about racial justice," executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law at New York University Law School Vincent M. Southerland told the Times.
As polling shows a rapid increase in support for legalization, it proves to be "catnip" for Democrats to rally a wide swath of votes against social conservatives, according to the Times.
Also, legalization has stopped being merely supported white Americans.
"Over the last 15 to 20 years, African-Americans have switched to favor legalization," Carnegie Mellon University professor Jonathan Caulkins told the Times.
Among the legalization proponents and social justice political reformists, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has introduced the Marijuana Justice Act to legalize the drug nationwide and expunge past convictions.
"It's not enough to legalize marijuana at the federal level — we should also help those who have suffered due to its prohibition," Sen. Booker tweeted.
Many in the 2020 Democratic primary field have signed on as sponsors of his bill, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif.
Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke also endorsed federal legalization, per the report.
"I say this as the father of a middle school student, where middle schools are one of the fastest growing markets for marijuana sales today: In the black market, they do not ID — they do not care — as long as they can make that sale," O'Rourke said Thursday in an appearance in Iowa, the famed opener for presidential primaries.
Now, former Vice President Joe Biden, once a leader in the '90's "war on drugs" faces his position on modern legalization as "his biggest liability in the 2020 primary," according to John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution to the Times.
"In 1994, Biden had a fairly mainstream position, but in 2020 that position is so far from the mainstream of Democratic politics that it is almost offensive," Hudak told the Times.
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