In a past election cycle, it might have made waves when a potential Republican frontrunner for the presidency admitted to having used marijuana.
But when former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush recently did just that, Republicans hardly batted an eyelash.
“I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover,” Bush told the Boston Globe. “It was pretty common.”
Now, such admissions from likely presidential candidates have become common, with marijuana legalization poised to become a mainstream issue in the 2016 election cycle.
The fiercest Republican attack against Bush for having smoked pot came from Sen. Rand Paul, a likely challenger, who criticized Bush not for having used marijuana, but for having refused to relax Florida’s drug sentencing laws.
“This is a guy who now admits he smoked marijuana but he wants to put people in jail who do,” Paul told the Hill. “You would think he’d have a little more understanding.”
Paul has proposed changing the nation’s drug laws to abolish minimum prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, an idea that has united him with some Democratic allies, including Sen. Cory Booker.
That coalition of progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans is becoming increasingly common as Republicans with a federalist bent have come around to the idea of marijuana legalization as a states-rights issue.
Last year the Republican-led House, which has struggled to pass even some of its own priorities, approved legislation, now law, to prohibit the Department of Justice from spending money on enforcement targeting state-legalized medical marijuana.
Such relatively gutsy legislating reflects the changing public attitudes toward marijuana, which has rendered it less of a toxic political issue for lawmakers.
Since 2004, support for full marijuana legalization has climbed 17 points in Gallup’s tracking poll, from 34 percent to 51 percent as of November, while opposition has plummeted from 64 percent to 47 percent.
Of course, presidential candidates are not only now beginning to talk publicly about marijuana. Such disclosures have been a mainstay of campaigns for decades.
In 1992, the same year the federal government reversed its limited approval of medical marijuana, candidate Bill Clinton admitted to having used marijuana while studying at Oxford University.
“I’ve never broken a state law,” he said. “But when I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale it, and never tried it again.”
But one of Clinton’s Democratic opponents, Edmund G. Brown Jr., argued when asked the same question that such a discussion was not “relevant” to a presidential campaign.
Clinton’s 1992 remarks sound not unlike a recent statement by Sen. Ted Cruz’s office regarding his history using marijuana.
“Teenagers are often known for their lack of judgment, and Sen. Cruz was no exception,” a Cruz spokesman told the Daily Mail. “When he was a teenager, he foolishly experimented with marijuana. It was a mistake, and he’s never tried it since.”
What has changed, however, is that such personal disclosures are beginning to lead to substantive discussions of policy, rather than just informing voters of a candidate’s character.
President Obama, who was forthcoming as a candidate about his past marijuana use, has de-prioritized enforcement of federal marijuana laws in states that have legalized the drug, and this week included as part of his budget funding for the District of Columbia to implement its own voter-approved legalization.
Now, the discussion appears likely to continue among presidential candidates.
In a July interview with CNN, Hillary Clinton permitted herself a moment of “radical candor” on the topic, in which she vouched approval for medical marijuana “under appropriate circumstances.”
“But I do think we need more research because we don’t know how it interacts with other drugs,” she added.
Clinton went a step further, however, throwing her tentative support behind states taking the initiative to legalize marijuana.
“On recreational, states are the laboratories of democracy,” Clinton said. “We have at least two states that are experimenting with that right now. I want to wait and see what the evidence is.”
The example set by Washington and Colorado, where marijuana has been legal for more than a year with relative success, has changed the political debate surrounding the drug, says Taylor West, deputy director at the National Cannabis Industry Association.
“You now have people on both sides of the aisle willing to talk about this as something that should be left to the states,” West said. “That’s encouraging.”
But there is a long way to go.
“Do I expect Hillary Clinton come out and embrace legalization? No, probably not,” West said. “You’re seeing that the politicians on this issue have lagged far behind on public opinion, and they will probably continue to play a bit of catch-up.”
