Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tells reporters that he would support a CBD oil bill with his signature, but remains opposed to any measure that would bring cannabis into his state. Governor Walker still thinks marijuana is a gateway drug.
He was visiting Western Technical College in La Crosse on Thursday, promoting his new budget package when he when as far as to link cannabis use with harder drugs, reports 1410WIZM.
“I do not, however, support measures that would open the door with legalized use of marijuana in state,” Walker said, “because law enforcement, increasingly, from one end of the state to another, from democrats as well as republican sheriffs, have told me, ‘Do not legalize marijuana, it is a gateway drug to other drugs.’”
Upset with the Governor’s resurrection of the debunked ‘gateway theory’, Clinton Gallagher wrote a letter to the editor of The Cap Times, a local media outlet for Madison, Wisconsin.
“We must stop allowing hypocritical vote-seeking politicians to refer to marijuana as the gateway drug when everybody that was once a teenager knows it’s alcoholic beverages that cause death and destruction, insidiously sanctioned by all who oppose legalization of marijuana,” he wrote.
It’s one of the most prominent arguments made in opposition to legalizing cannabis (that it leads to the use of harder drugs).
He’s not alone. Former U.S. Attorney General under the Obama administration, Loretta Lynch, once admitted that cannabis is not a gateway drug.
“When we talk about heroin addiction, we unusually, as we have mentioned, are talking about individuals that started out with a prescription drug problem, and then because they need more and more, they turn to heroin. It isn’t so much that marijuana is the step right before using prescription drugs or opioids,” she said. The realization came in a statement from a town hall in Kentucky last year.
Previously, Rep. Melissa Sargent introduced legislation that would have legalized and regulated the production and sale of marijuana to adults 21 and older. According to The Marijuana Policy Project, it also would have created a medical marijuana program for seriously ill residents of Wisconsin. The legislation failed to pass through the committee process and never received a floor vote.
The Wisconsin Law Journal reports that the Wisconsin state Senate approved a different CBD bill that would legalize the possession of cannabis (CBD) oil. If Gov. Scott Walker signs it, SB 10 would change state law to allow people to possess cannabis oil as long as they have a certification showing the substance is being used to treat a medical condition.
