Reefer madness once again shades headlines in South Dakota and Minnesota.
Here in South DaCOVID--where the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported Wednesday South Dakota reaches new highs in COVID-19 hospitalizations, daily cases--Joe Sneve reported earlier in the week, Poll: South Dakotans narrowly favor legal marijuana in the state.
Also popular? The governor's handling of the pandemic, despite the climbing hospitalization and death counts, Sneve report Wednesday in Polling: South Dakotans like Noem's handling of the pandemic.
Sneve reported earlier this week in Personal freedom not part of Noem's thinking on legal pot in South Dakota:
Kristi Noem talks a lot about personal freedom while defending her hands-off approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first-term governor of South Dakota, though, doesn't support a libertarian approach to the use of drugs such as marijuana, which voters will decide whether to legalize for both medical and recreational use in next week's election.
Noem has said repeatedly during this campaign season that she opposes both Initiated Measure 26 (medical) and Constitutional Amendment A (recreational). And Friday during an interview with the Argus Leader at the Sioux Falls Convention Center, Noem said she opposes legalizing marijuana in any fashion because it would hurt South Dakota families in the long run.
"I ran for governor telling people that I wanted to build stronger families and create more opportunities for our kids, and i just don't see smoking pot as a gateway to helping people be better," the governor said.
But proponents of legal marijuana say that flies in the face of her repeated calls for less government involvement in people's lives amid the coronavirus pandemic. While Noem has championed personal responsibility during the pandemic, many of her fellow governors issued stay-at-home restrictions and mask mandates.
. . .Noem pointed to various studies linking marijuana use to mental health disorders like anxiety, depression and schizophrenia and said problems have arisen from marijuana use in places that have passed lax marijuana laws. She is appearing in advertising for No Way on A. . . .
While we don't agree with Noem about cannabis policy, we applaud her for being straightforward about it, for all her disordered thinking about masks.
Minnesota Republican own reefer madness
Her reefer madness is a far cry from the complete labyrinth Minnesota Republicans have created for Tuesday's election. Let's review the coverage.
At the Star Tribune, Briana Bierschbach report in Pot party candidate said GOP recruited him to 'pull votes' from Minnesota Democrat:
Four months before Legal Marijuana Now Party candidate Adam Weeks died in September, sending the pivotal Second Congressional District race into a legal tailspin, he told a close friend that he had been recruited by Republicans to draw votes away from Democrats.
In a May 20 voicemail message provided to the Star Tribune, Weeks told a longtime friend that Republicans in the Second District approached him two weeks before the filing deadline to run for Congress in the hopes he’d “pull votes away” from incumbent DFL Rep. Angie Craig and give an advantage to the “other guy,” Tyler Kistner, the Republican-endorsed candidate.
The recording, underscoring the intense battle in one of the state’s most competitive elections, has come to light just as the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner’s Office listed Weeks’ death as a result of substance abuse, caused by ethanol and fentanyl toxicity. The death was ruled as accidental.
The message, left on the answering machine of his friend Joey Hudson, indicated that Weeks planned to meet with some GOP operatives in May, but he did not identify them other than as “CD2 [Second Congressional District] Republicans.”
The Craig and Kistner campaigns declined to comment on the recording. Second District Republican Chairman Jeff Schuette said no one in his organization met with Weeks about running in the race but other conservatives in the district could have recruited him.
In the Second District race and other swing seats across the state, Democrats have accused GOP operatives of recruiting third-party candidates such as Weeks to siphon off votes that would otherwise go to Democratic candidates. Weeks, an organic farmer from Red Wing who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, publicly denied allegations before he died that he was running as a spoiler.
Privately, he was more open about the situation with friends and family — even if the campaign was taking a physical and mental toll. . . .
At Bring Me The News, Adam Uren put together a timeline of news reports on earlier reports of Minnesota Republican pot party recruiting efforts in Minnesota Republicans facing new claims they recruited legal weed candidates to run in swing races:
This is just the latest claim alleging Republicans in Minnesota have been encouraging candidates to run marijuana legalization campaigns in an effort to siphon votes for the DFL – which has itself expressed a willingness to legalize weed in Minnesota. This follows two pro-legalization parties achieving major party status in the 2018 elections, which meant they lost control over who could run under their banner.
MinnPost reported in August that there are marijuana candidates in several swing races in Minnesota who have little to no record of being involved in the legalization movement and who have links to the Republican Party.
The Minnesota Reformer meanwhile reported earlier this year that one of the pro-legalization candidates running in the tight 7th Congressional District was encouraged to run by a "youngish GOP operative." [Editor's note: that guy]
And in the wake of the report from the Star Tribune, Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka came under renewed scrutiny after the Minnesota DFL shared a recent Politico article that reported he had met with a legal weed advocate named Sammy McCarty and asked him to run as a third-party candidate in a swing state Senate District.
What followed in response to the DFL sharing the Politico story on Twitter was a remarkable exchange between Gazelka and McCarty, in which the latter alleged Gazelka said he would be "rewarded" if he ran for the Senate.
Several leading DFLers, among them House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler, have expressed a desire to make Minnesota the latest state to legalize and regulate the production and sale of marijuana, and should the DFL win the House and Senate on Nov. 3, it's likely to happen, with Gov. Tim Walz having already said he would sign off on such a bill.
After his tweet regarding Gazelka – about which he said he's "willing to go under oath" – McCarty tweeted that the "only shot" at legalizing marijuana and expunging criminal records for pot offenses "is straight-ticket Democrat." . . .
Read the exchange at Bring Me The News. Minnesota Reformer editor J. Patrick Coolican wrote in Wednesday's Daily Reformer Newsletter:
It may seem unrelated, but the Republicans' furious effort to prevent the counting of mail ballots is of a piece with Briana Bierschbach’s scoop in the Strib about the late Adam Weeks saying in a voicemail that local Republicans recruited him to run on a pot party ticket to siphon votes from DFL Rep. Angie Craig. Weeks has since died.
Reformer readers were not surprised by the story, because it follows our reporting from June, as well as smaller items in this space, in which it’s become quite clear there’s been at least a loosely organized effort by Republicans to get people to run on the pot parties’ line.
Even after Weeks assured me he was a changed man and that his candidacy was authentic, I published a photo of him at a big Republican bash this summer with a MAGA headband on.
We have a couple other examples of suspiciously Republican types running on pot party lines in state Senate races, including Jason Hoschette, Robyn Smith and Tyler Becvar.
Sammy McCarty says he was recruited by Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka to run on a pot party line.
(Gazelka took the extraordinary step Tuesday of taking to Twitter to deny it: “Not accurate. I told Sammy when he came to my office a dozen times about pot that if he was that passionate about recreational marijuana, he should run for office. It wasn’t behind the scenes, I tweeted it.” Ok, senator, but who recruited Hoschette, Smith and Becvar? Smith told me she was recruited by a Republican, but wouldn’t say who it was.)
The reason I tie the situation to the extraordinary effort to prevent the counting of ballots is because this too-clever-by-half pot party okey doke is the result of a total lack of confidence that voters like what you’re offering.
We agree. It's also a bit stunning to think that voters in South Dakota, now one of the most conservative states in the union, may just legalize recreational cannabis before the People's Socialist Republic of Minnesota's legislature manages to do so.
Holy smokes.
Related posts
- South Dakota governor signs industrial hemp bill
- Noem softens opposition to industrial hemp
- Will recreational pot be legal in South Dakota before farmers get to grow industrial hemp?
- Editorial review: South Dakota should learn to walk & chew gum with regard to industrial hemp
- Knowns & unknowns: SD Gov. Kristi Noem goes full-bore Donald Rumsfeld on industrial hemp
- Hemp: the weed with roots in Minnesota
- In 1937, industrial hemp was a thing in Winona, but reefer madness legislation killed the crop
- Representative Franson gets cosmic birthday present in today's industrial hemp news report
Photo: Cannabis leaf and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Via South Dakota Marijuana.
Comments