Bernie Sanders Urges End to Federal Marijuana Ban

As the Republican candidates prepared to debate in Colorado, the land of legal marijuana, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont told an audience of college students in Virginia that “in my view, the time is long overdue for us to remove the federal prohibition on marijuana.”

At the event at George Mason University, which was live-streamed to about 300 college campuses around the country, Mr. Sanders spoke in ominous tones about climate change, a rigged economic system and a broken criminal justice system. But as the live stream “stopped streaming,” as Mr. Sanders’s website put it, he focused on an issue that was a crowd-pleaser to the young audience.

Mr. Sanders, who often gets big cheers on the campaign trail when he calls for the decriminalization of marijuana, said that states should have the right to regulate marijuana the same way that state and local laws now govern sales of alcohol and tobacco.

“That means,” he said, “that recognized businesses in states that have legalized marijuana should be fully able to use the banking system without fear of federal prosecution.”

Proposing to pay for rehabilitation for the abuse of harder drugs with revenue gained from a tax on marijuana, Mr. Sanders also said he saw a “racial component” to the millions of people imprisoned on drug charges and called the legal equivalence of marijuana and heroin “absurd.” It all reflected, he said, that the “criminal justice system is broken.”

The position represents a rare reversal for the intensely consistent candidate. Asked in a 1988 debate during a run for Congress whether he would abandon the war on drugs, Mr. Sanders said that legalization was tantamount to the nation telling poor people living in “ghettos” that “it’s perfectly O.K. for you to get high, for you to get strung out, for you to be separate from productive society.”

He added: “It reminds me very much as to what the British did to the Chinese in China when they ran that country. It was fine that you had millions of Chinese strung out on opium, nobody really cared, and it was to the advantage of the British.”