Senator Cory Booker walked into a cannabis conference in Washington, D.C. and went straight for the jugular.
Justice, he told the room, starts with descheduling.
Booker appeared at the Cannabis Capital & Policy Summit, a one-day event in the nation’s capital produced by IgniteIt in partnership with the U.S. Cannabis Roundtable. The crowd was packed with CEOs, investors, policy experts and regulators, all trying to read the federal tea leaves in real time.
Booker’s appearance and remarks at the summit were first reported by IgniteIt.
On stage, Booker did not bother with soft landings.
“Justice is descheduling, we all know that. That’s what the right thing to do is: to deschedule,” he said. “But I will accept any progress over no progress.”
Then he sharpened the contrast.
“The idea that heroin and meth are the same as cannabis defies all science and reality,” Booker said. “And so to have it scheduled 1, have it the same schedule as these much more severe substances that we all know the consequences can be for our communities, is absurd.”
Also read: California’s Adult-Use Cannabis Law ‘Failed Small Farmers,’ State Treasurer Says — Time to Start Over
The senator also reached back to the presidential debate stage, remembering the night he joked about Joe Biden’s platform on marijuana.
“I still remember I was standing next to Joe Biden and I said, ‘You know, Mr. Vice President, I looked at your marijuana laws that you’re putting forward in your campaign platform, and I have to say, respectfully, I think whoever wrote that platform plank must have been high when they did it,” Booker said. “Everybody in the auditorium laughed. My mom didn’t. She’s like, ‘Do not accuse the Vice President of the United States of being high.’ My mom was not pleased.”
The room in D.C. laughed too, but Booker did not stay in joke mode for long. He came back to a theme that runs through a lot of his work: the idea that the country shares more than its politics admits.
“I have been consistently fighting this battle for a long time,” he said. “I don’t care, Republican or Democrat. By the way, I think most of the problems in this country, the lie that we tell, is that they are left or right. No, they are not. We agree on so much more than we disagree with.”
Also read: Why California’s Treasurer Says the State’s Adult-Use Cannabis Law Is a Failure
He called out what he sees as a deeper problem.
“The savagery of our tribalism, unfortunately, I think it is a delusion that undermines the truth,” Booker said. “The truth is that we are a nation that has common pain, but our politics don’t serve us to come together around a common purpose. This [cannabis] is an area where we have a common purpose.”
Booker’s appearance was one of the headline moments of the summit, and this is only a small part of what he said in Washington. High Times is reviewing the full remarks and the conversations around them, and will publish deeper reporting and analysis on his comments, the rescheduling fight and what this kind of speech at a capital markets event really signals for the industry.
More coverage from the D.C. summit is coming soon.
Photo: Shutterstock
