Mount Kushmore may be getting it’s inaugural chiseling in 2016 …
Gary Johnson, former marijuana CEO and 2012 Libertarian Party presidential nominee, has officially entered the 2016 campaign — a little fact he announced on the Fox Business Network on Wednesday.
In order to play ball with Bernie and The Don, Johnson has had to step down as the CEO of Cannabis Sativa, a startup company that markets a variety of marijuana products.
We wish we could’ve been at that billowy couch sesh, when ol’ Johnson was feeling himself (and that Chernobyl Haze) to decide to throw his hat in the ring. “You could toootally be president, bruh,” he probably said to his bong.
Well, this is America damn it. Dream big, even if your dreams are THC-laden hallucinations.
In the ‘90s, while governor of New Mexico, Johnson garnered media attention for endorsing the notion of legalized marijuana, years before states like Colorado and Washington adopted such laws.
As you well know, weed is still largely restricted due to overriding federal laws. Johnson is known for his staunch attitude against the wildly unsuccessful War on Drugs, including the federal ban, which Johnson believes unnecessarily keeps prices artificially high.
“Every product manufactured in those states has to be grown, processed, and packaged in those individual states,” Johnson explained in a report by RT. “That is not the best scenario for the consumer.”
He believes the current state-by-state model limits the capacity of a free market model where costs would theoretically be driven down by national competition.
Having a pro-weed president would definitely have its perks if the perpetually stonewalling Congress actually worked towards anything beyond a looming government shutdown. Clinton was close, Obama at least turned a blind eye to the individual state decisions without federal intervention, but a full-blown White Widow House could do numbers for consumer quality and pricing.
In the last election, Johnson earned over 1.25 million votes, the first strong showing by a third party candidate since Ralph Nader (the Green Party’s 2000 nominee). Nader accumulated nearly three million votes in the 2000 presidential election.
Many people, especially Democrats, would complain that a third party pro-weed candidate like Johnson will only take votes from the Left and essentially just result in an inadvertent vote for [presumably] Trump. To put the numbers in perspective, in Johnson’s last presidential run (where he garnered 1.25 M votes) President Obama and former senator Romney received 65.9 M and 60.9 M votes respectively. Johnson would need more than triple the number of votes to do any real damage. On the other side of the token. But many other progressives would argue that any third-party run is healthy for a democratic society that has unfortunately evolved into a pathetically limited binary electoral process.
All that being said, he has almost no chance of winning, but that doesn’t seem to be Johnson’s primary objective if he were to receive the nomination.
"On my deathbed, I'm hoping that I look back and believe that I was the voice of reason in all this, regardless of how many votes I end up garnering," Johnson noted.
The guy is pro-weed on a federal level and he’s climbed Mt. Everest, which officially makes him more badass than most, if not all, of the candidates in the field.
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