Democratic Prez hopefuls Sen. Hillary Clinton (New York), Sen. Barack Obama (Illinois), former Sen. John Edwards (North Carolina), and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson each said last week that they oppose downgrading pot penalties that would eliminate the prosecution and imprisonment of casual tokers, reports NORML. In response to a question crafted by the Philadelphia, Penn. chapter of NORML and presented to MSNBC’s Tim Russert for a debate at Drexel University, all four candidates said they would not favor pot decrim for adult users – of the assembled Democratic candidates, only Sen. Chris Dodd (Conn.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) said they support decriminalization. “We’re locking up too many people in our system here today,” Dodd said. “We’ve got mandatory minimum sentences that are filling our jails with people who don’t belong there. My ideas is to decriminalize [pot], reduce that problem there,” he continued. “We’ve gone from 800,000 to 2 million people in our penal institutions in this country.”
This article appears in November 2 • 2007.