Drug War Issues
Politics & Advocacy
Legendary country music singer and avowed marijuana user Willie Nelson and his Teapot Party have endorsed the pro-legalization presidential bid of Republican candidate Gary Johnson, the Johnson campaign announced in a press release Tuesday. The endorsement came after Nelson and Johnson met last week and marks the Teapot Party's first foray into presidential politics.
They should have quit messin' with Willie! Now, he's mobilizing the weed-lovin' masses. (Image via Wikimedia.org)
Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, could use the help of some non-traditional GOP primary voters that Nelson could help deliver. The conventional wisdom gives him only an outside shot at the nomination, with the nomination poll aggregator Real Clear Politics not even including him on its lists of candidates declared and undeclared.
Johnson made his effort official last month, declaring his candidacy at the New Hampshire State House. Johnson has made a critique of drug prohibition a central tenet of his platform and is straightforwardly calling for marijuana legalization. As he put it during last week's Fox News Republican presidential candidate debate: "I advocate legalizing marijuana -- control it, regulate it, tax it."
That works for Willie and the Teapot Party, a phenomenon that began last fall after the Red Headed Stranger's most recent encounter with the pot police and now boasts 66,000 Facebook members. Marijuana legalization is its goal.
"The purpose of the Teapot Party is to vote in people who believe in what we do and vote out the ones who don't," said Nelson.
And Gary Johnson wins his first celebrity endorsement.
(This article was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)
Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
Comments
Legalize It and Vote
Marijuana is the safest drug with actual benefits for the user as opposed to alcohol which is dangerous, causes addiction, birth defects, and affects literally every organ in the body. Groups are organizing all over the country to speak their minds on reforming pot laws. I drew up a very cool poster featuring Uncle Willie for the cause which you can check out on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/01/vote-teapot-2011.html Drop in and let me know what you think!
If politicians would only listen1
IiF POLITICIANS WOULD ONLY LISTEN TO "WE THE PEOPLE". But even when the people vote some of these idiots still try to enforce their own BS. Such as the lady who was defeated in Ma. the people voted to approve MMJ she fought the implementation of the law then she ran for senator, she lost bad, but still thinks she was right. The "Drug War" was began by ;Lies, knowing this why not stop the lies and legalize??
Yes;Â stop the lies and
Yes; stop the lies and legalize!
As laudable as the attempt at reducing the consumption of any recreational or addictive substance might be, by attempting to reduce temptation, prohibitionists also remove choice and therefore eliminate the possibility of the individual choosing between right and wrong. Instead, the 'right' choice is imposed, thus replacing personal (and civic) virtue with the impossible-to-enforce 'virtue by fiat'. Granted, certain drugs, or even particular sports and sexual practices, may have the potential to cause self-harm, but to curtail a persons unalienable rights, including the right to compromise one's own health, is to embark on an un-ending and descending spiral towards the assured destruction of our economy and cherished, civic institutions.
Prohibitionists often express the belief that the resulting suffering and mayhem that their policy engenders is in no way connected to the basic and erroneous mechanism being used, but that they simply haven't been granted sufficient governmental powers, i.e., the removal of even more of our basic individual rights and freedoms for these sadistic, sociopathic perverts to do their work successfully.
It's quite possible, that many of the early Prohibitionists did not intend to kill hundreds of thousands worldwide or put 1 in every 32 Americans under supervision of the correctional system. Nevertheless, it may now be reasonable to claim, that our Latter-Day Sadomoralist Prison-for-Profit Prohibitionists don't care. They don't care that, historically, the prohibition of any mind altering substance has never resulted in anything else but mayhem and chaos. They don't care that America has the highest percentage of it's citizens incarcerated of any country in the history of the planet. And they don't care about spawning far worse conditions than those they claim to be alleviating. These despotic imbeciles are actually quite happy to create as much mayhem as possible, after all, it's what fills their prisons and gets them elected. Which is why it's no surprise, that when asked if they support torture, prohibitionist, GOP Presidential candidates rush to raise their hands. http://www.drugwarrant.com/2011/05/torture-and-drug-policy/
Here's what the UK Economist Magazine thinks of us: "Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little" http://www.economist.com/node/16636027
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