.California Democrats Move to Make Marijuana Legalization Part of Their Platform

California’s Democratic Party officials moved to make regulating cannabis like alcohol a plank of their platform during a voice vote Sunday at their convention in Los Angeles, the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle report.

California should be leading the national debate about pot, not following, said Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom in a speech to the convention. Watch below.

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“This is not a debate about stoners,” said Newsom. “You can be pro-regulation without being an advocate for drug use.”

The comment seemed to respond to Governor Jerry Brown, who last week dismissed regulating marijuana like alcohol because “some of the potheads” might not be able to compete with the Chinese. (This insane, oft-repeated ‘clash of civilizations’ argument presumes that a disastrous Drug War on its own citizens somehow makes the United States more competitive on the global stage.)

The Dems agreed to the legalization plank by a near-unanimous voice vote.

Reformers have started to work from the inside of the Democratic Party, bucking the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ ethos of legalization in the Seventies, as we’ve reported.

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