In a video announcement Monday declaring his bid for Texas governor, former U.S. Congressman Beto O’Rourke (D), included adult-use hashish legalization in his platform. O’Rourke, who misplaced a Senate race to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, will problem Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. He additionally included hashish reforms in his earlier bids for U.S. Senate and the presidency.
The final time a Democrat held the Lonestar State’s highest workplace was in 1995.
“These in positions of public belief have stopped listening to, serving, and taking note of, and trusting the individuals of Texas, and they also’re not targeted on the issues that we actually need them to do like ensuring that we have now a functioning electrical energy grid, or that we’re creating the perfect jobs in America proper right here in Texas, or that we have now world class faculties, or that we make progress on the issues that almost all of us truly agree on, like increasing Medicaid or legalizing marijuana.” — O’Rourke, “I’m Working for Governor,” Nov. 15, 2021
Throughout his 2020 marketing campaign for president, O’Rourke had launched a plan for federal hashish legalization, which included clemency for all federal hashish prisoners, in accordance with the Texas Tribune. The plan additionally known as for a federal tax on the hashish trade with the proceeds earmarked for a “Drug Battle Justice Grant” for these previously incarcerated for nonviolent hashish crimes.
“We have to not solely finish the prohibition on marijuana,” O’Rourke stated in a 2019 assertion relating to his philosophy on hashish legalization, “but additionally restore the harm performed to the communities of colour disproportionately locked up in our felony justice system or locked out of alternative due to the Battle on Medicine.”
A 2020 American Civil Liberties Union report discovered Black individuals in Texas are 2.6 occasions extra doubtless than white individuals to be arrested for hashish possession.
O’Rourke can also be the co-author of Dealing Demise and Medicine: The Huge Enterprise of Dope within the U.S. and Mexico which examines the unlawful hashish commerce between the U.S. and Mexico, with a selected deal with El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The ebook was launched in 2011 and is co-authored by Susie Byrd, who served with O’Rourke on the El Paso Metropolis Council.
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