Donald Trump has signalled that he will vote in favour of legalising marijuana for personal use in his home state of Florida, ahead of a ballot on the issue in November.
The Republican presidential nominee wrote on his Truth Social platform that voters are highly likely to approve the measure “whether people like it or not” and therefore “it should be done correctly”.
The former US president’s stance puts him at odds with other senior Republican figures, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has argued that legalising recreational cannabis use would “be bad for quality of life”.
Medicinal marijuana was made legal in Florida in 2016.
Cannabis for both personal and medical use is legal in 24 US states, according to the Pew Research Centre. A further 14 states have legalised medical marijuana.
Trump said: “Someone should not be a criminal in Florida, when this is legal in so many other states.
“We do not need to ruin lives and waste taxpayer dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.”
The proposal is one of a number of amendments Florida residents will vote on in November at the same time as the US chooses its new president. Trump is running against incumbent vice-president and Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris.
On legalising marijuana for personal use, Trump said that there would need to be rules in place to “prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat-run cities”.
Mr DeSantis has claimed that making cannabis legal for recreational use “would turn Florida into San Francisco or Chicago” – both cities in Democrat-run states.
Marijuana was legalised in Illinois 2020 and between January and July this year, cannabis sales reached more that $1bn (£760m), according to state government statistics.
In California, where personal use was legalised in 2016, marijuana sales reached $4.4bn last year.
However, it is not clear how those figures compare to black market sales of cannabis which, according to some, still thrives.
Legalised growers and sellers have to get permits and pay tax, which can prove costly and risk making their cannabis more expensive.
“The black market is very pervasive and it is definitely larger than the legal market,” Bill Jones, the head of enforcement for California’s Department of Cannabis Control, told US broadcaster NPR earlier this year.
Trump has already caused some confusion about a different amendment that will be on Florida’s ballot in November. On Friday he said he would vote against a measure in Florida that would protect abortion rights, after facing backlash from conservative supporters.
Abortion is banned in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy – the amendment proposes expanding that to 24 weeks. Trump had initially signalled support for the proposal.
His campaign later claimed he had not said how he would vote in ballot, simply that he thought that the six week period was “too short”. The following day, Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago estate is in Palm Beach, Florida, said he would be voting “no”.
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