While Jeff Sessions continues to pressure lawmakers into lifting legal weed protections and unleash the full force of the war on drugs on states with voter approved medical or recreational marijuana legislation, Trump’s Secretary of Energy, and failed presidential candidate Rick Perry took to the White House podium and expressed his support for state-approved legal weed as a state’s rights issue – even though the former Texas governor is still firmly against legalization.
According to the diligent C-SPAN consumption of MassRoots’ political honcho Tom Angell, Perry fielded a question at Tuesday’s press briefing about the climate-change fighting Obama-era Clean Power Plan that Trump is set to scrap as a jumping off point to speak about state’s rights and legal weed protection.
“I thought that Colorado was wrong in allowing for the use of marijuana, which they’ve decided to do. But that’s their call,” Perry said on Tuesday. “I will defend that right robustly. That ought to be their call.”
So while the man who took his cabinet job without knowing what it actually entailed supports doing away with global warming standards because of state’s rights, at least he’s also pro weed, right?
Without any power in his job description to actually do anything to support legal weed, or, presumably, the influence to knock Sessions off his anti-cannabis high horse, Perry’s comparison of scraping federal climate change Clean Power regulations to state cannabis laws is a bit of a stretch for the Republican politician.
It may be the first time a member of Trump’s cabinet has voiced support for legal weed since Sessions’ public fear-mongering began, but it is important to remember that Perry is still staunchly anti-cannabis and, despite the continued social and financial success in legal weed states, believes that legal weed states will eventually end up regretting their progressive decisions.
“I think they will look back and they will find that it was a huge error that they made.” Perry said in a radio interview during his failed run for President. “But I’m going to stick with the founding fathers rather than picking and choosing which [state laws] I want to defend and which ones I don’t.”
You can watch Perry’s entire press conference and the rest of his Clean Power Plan legal weed deflection below.
