California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) might have helped lead the push to legalize marijuana in the state—but that advocacy didn’t exactly come from a place of extensive personal experience. In fact, beside a “complicated” trip to the Grand Canyon involving cannabis, Newsom’s THC teetotaling was so “rigid” in his youth that even his father poked fun at him.
During an interview with Politico, and in a recent memoir he’s been promoting, the governor recognized that he became a somewhat unlikely champion of marijuana reform given his nearly lifelong abstinence. But when he considered the harms and waste of the drug war, he decided to make it part of his political legacy to advance the issue, in part by backing California’s Proposition 64 in 2016 to enact adult-use legalization.
“During my last term as lieutenant governor, it occurred to me that if I wanted to shape matters beyond the reach of my office, I needed only to grab the levers of California’s initiative process,” he wrote in his new book, Young Man In A Hurry. That included supporting Proposition 63 to place restrictions on large-capacity gun magazine clips and require background checks to buy ammunition, as well as Proposition 64 to end marijuana prohibition.
“Californians who had no idea what I did for a living were now referring to me as the ‘guns and weed dude,’” Newsom, who was one of the first high-profile politicians to endorse legalization even years before voters chose to enact the reform, wrote.
With an expansive email list that became “one of the largest political databases in the country,” the then-lieutenant governor recruited experts to help draft a white paper “making the case for legalizing cannabis” and then convened a blue-ribbon committee “to help raise funds and gather signatures.”
“Our messaging for both propositions appealed to common sense,” he said. “California already had been the first state to legalize the medicinal use of cannabis two decades earlier. Why not take it one step further?”
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