As Canada Moves To Fully Legalize Pot, Grandpa Trump Tells America To Just Say No

As Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau reminds his southern neighbors what progress looks like, the trapped in the past Trump administration is reviving the failed war on drugs.

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The New York Times reported that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had fulfilled a campaign promise by introducing legislation fully legalize marijuana across Canada. The government plan will allow each Canadian province to decide how pot will be distributed and sold. The country will also develop equivalents of breathalyzers and blood alcohol standards so that it can catch impaired drivers. Canada will open up a brand new revenue by taxing marijuana.

As Canada is set to become only the second country in the world to fully legalize marijuana, the Grandpa Trump and his time machine back to decades past are reviving the war on drugs.

Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions is taking steps to revive the war on drugs policies of the 1980s and 1990s that include harsher minimum sentences, and a destruction of the progress that was made on the drug issue during the Obama years. Sessions said during a speech in Richmond, VA last month, “Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad. It will destroy your life.”

Some of the drugs that are bad and destroying lives are legal prescription opioids.

Trump isn’t declaring war on those though because the opioid epidemic is backed by the pharmaceutical industry, and it disproportionately impacts white people.

It is much easier for the Republican administration to send a minority male individual to private prison on a harsh minimum sentence than it is to political justify imposing the same treatment on white painkiller addicts in red states.

Donald Trump is trying to take America back to one of the greatest policy failures of the last thirty years, while Canada is acting like the world leader that the United States should be.

Voters who sat out the 2016 election because they believed that it didn’t matter if Trump or Clinton won are being reminded that elections have consequences.

If you want the US to be more like Canada when it comes to drug policy, don’t sit out 2018 and 2020.

Reject Trump’s ghost of drug wars past, and embrace Canada as the progressive path for what America can become.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association