In a statement issued August 31, former President Donald Trump said he supports the legalization of ‘personal amounts of marijuana’ in Florida while calling on the state Senate to ‘prohibit’ its use in public spaces.
(LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump is continuing to moderate on social issues.
In a Truth Social post published this past weekend, the former president, who is a resident of Florida, expressed support for a ballot proposal that would legalize marijuana in the Sunshine State.
“In Florida, like so many other states that have already given their approval, personal amounts of marijuana will be legalized for adults with Amendment 3. Whether people like it or not, this will happen through the approval of the voters, so it should be done correctly,” Trump wrote Saturday.
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While touting his “law and order” platform, Trump further added that “someone should not be a criminal in Florida, when this is legal in so many other states. We do not need to ruin lives [and] waste taxpayer dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.”
Trump proceeded to call on the Florida state legislature, which is dominated by Republicans 83-36 in the House and 28-12 in the Senate, to “responsibly create laws that prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat run cities.”
Trump’s post comes at the same time he was forced to issue a clarification of his opposition to Amendment 4, a Florida ballot proposal that would enshrine abortion-on-demand by overturning the state’s six-week abortion ban and allowing unrestricted abortion up to “viability,” which is usually set at around 24 weeks’ gestation, as well as permitting abortion up to birth for so-called “health” reasons
After pro-lifers decried Trump for stating that six weeks is “too short,” his campaign quickly issued a statement saying he “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida, he simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short.”
In an interview with Fox News the next day, August 30, Trump admitted that he will vote no on the amendment, which he criticized for allowing the “ridiculous situation” of abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy.
Kamala Harris’ campaign has accused Trump of “brazen flip flops” on marijuana. In a statement, they argued that “as President, his own Justice Department cracked down on marijuana offenses,” such as “withdrawing guidelines to limit prosecutions of marijuana offenses that were legal under state laws” and for “removing medical marijuana protections.”
In 2019, Trump helped pay for an ad campaign warning about the drug’s side effects. His Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar also advised against marijuana legalization.
Trump’s pivot on the issue suggests he may be seeking to peel off young and minority voters from Harris, who, despite being in favor of the drug now, was attacked by Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 presidential primary over it. During a debate, Gabbard accused Harris of putting “over fifteen hundred people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
In 2022, voters in Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota rejected ballot measures that would have legalized recreational marijuana, which has been linked to cognitive decline and has long been considered a gateway drug that leads to more dangerous narcotics usage. Nineteen states plus the District of Columbia allow recreational use of marijuana at present. Thirteen states have banned it outright.
In April 2024, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration under Joe Biden announced it was easing restrictions on marijuana by reclassifying the drug from a more restricted Schedule I substance to the lesser Schedule III category.
