By Alex Halperin // September 19, 2017
Enter “boastful black prince of Republican sleaze” into Google, and all the top results will be for Roger Stone. He’s had a hand in sordid incidents from Watergate through the Trump administration’s Russia morass. But last week the 65-year-old political consultant was in Los Angeles to promote one of his longtime pet causes: marijuana legalization.
But controversy has a way of following Stone around. Just days before he was booked to deliver the keynote speech at the Cannabis World Congress & Business Expo, the conference dropped him–due in no small part to a boycott by the Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA), which cited his history of “racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
Stone issued a rare apology, but when the conference didn’t take him back he came to L.A. and spoke anyway. “I’m prepared to work with anybody who wants to legalize cannabis,” he said this past Friday, to an audience of a few dozen curiosity seekers and conspiracy theorists, at a pot-friendly lounge downtown, while green rushers swarmed the convention center. Calling the war on drugs an “expensive racist failure” and a “bipartisan policy disaster,” he spoke as a representative of a group called the United States Cannabis Coalition. An organization, he said, that will soon launch a television ad campaign in favor of legalization. Stone’s message for the president: “If you want to make America great again, legalize cannabis.”
“You may not like me, you may not like my politics,” Stone said, “but you can’t [legalize] without Republicans.”
Until the recent boycott, the cannabis industry has kept its distance from partisan politics. While 30 states have legalized medical or recreational marijuana, it remains federally illegal. In theory, this means the president could crush it on a whim.
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by Alex Halperin // October 8, 2015
It was unusually warm for late September, but Buddie didn't seem to mind.
As the mascot for a plan to legalize marijuana in Ohio, Buddie has a superhero’s physique, a green bumpy head, and a winning smile. Despite the heat, the woman on Buddie duty stood in the Oval, the center of academic life at Ohio State, and posed for selfies with students, as campaign workers registered young Buckeyes to vote.
An operative named Nick Kish asked two giggly students if they’d heard of ResponsibleOhio, the political action committee behind a campaign that would deliver legal pot to the Midwest and a windfall to the investors funding it. Have they heard good things? Bad things? A bit of both.
"All the negative you’ve heard centers around us being a proposed monopoly, right?" Kish asked, then offered a perspective that anyone involved in Colorado’s legal marijuana industry would consider wildly misleading.
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