Trump’s New Attorney General Pick Opposed Legalizing Medical Marijuana In Florida

Only hours after embattled former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) withdrew his name from consideration for attorney general, President-elect Donald Trump announced that former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) would be his new pick for the nation’s top law enforcement role.

Compared to Gaetz, who has widely known pro-legalization stance on marijuana—and had even vowed to “go easy” on the cannabis industry if he got the job—Bondi’s record on the issue is far less pro-reform.

As Florida’s AG, for example, Bondi opposed efforts to legalize medical marijuana.

While serving in the top state law enforcement role, from January 2011 to January 2019, she occasionally waded into other cannabis-related issues. In at least some of those instances, she was defending laws passed by the legislature, which is generally standard practice for attorneys general.

In 2018, for example, Bondi as attorney general filed an appeals brief in state court defending the legislature’s ban on smoking medical marijuana, with her office citing “harms to patients and those exposed to secondhand smoke” as “ample reasons to exclude smoking from the statutory definition of ‘medical use.’”

The judge in that case, however, ultimately found that the state’s medical marijuana amendment “recognizes there is no right to smoke in public places, thereby implicitly recognizing the appropriateness of using smokable medical marijuana in private places consistent with the amendment.” Smoking was later added as an approved form of delivery for medical cannabis patients under a push from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) administration.

Kim Rivers, CEO of the medical marijuana company Trulieve, which bankrolled a marijuana legalization initiative that failed to pass this month, said of Bondi on social media Thursday: “I think she is a great pick!”

Rivers noted that Bondi’s opposition to smokable marijuana, for example, was “following [then-Gov. Rick Scott’s (R)] direction on that at the time.”

To be fair, she was following the Governor’s direction on that at the time, in that role. I think she is a great pick!

— Kim Rivers (@rivers_kim) November 21, 2024

Asked, “Are we cooked?” by a user whose profile picture is a cannabis leaf, Rivers replied: “Not at all.”

“I have always known her to be straight forward and very fair,” Rivers said. “She is passionate about ending the opioid crisis and did great work shutting down pill mills in Florida. She is an advocate for safe, regulated markets and I believe she will bring the same energy to end the fentanyl issues our country is facing.”

During Trump’s first term in office, however, Bondi served on the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which issued a report that expressed concerns about marijuana legalization.

“The Commission acknowledges that there is an active movement to promote the use of marijuana as an alternative medication for chronic pain and as a treatment for opioid addiction,” it said. “Recent research out of the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse found that marijuana use led to a 2 ½ times greater chance that the marijuana user would become an opioid user and abuser. The Commission found this very disturbing.”

In 2018, Bondi’s office issued an emergency rule allowing the CBD drug Epidiolex to be made available in the state following the pharmaceutical’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It was reportedly the first time Bondi used her powers as AG to deschedule a drug, though at that point in her career she’d already added 133 other chemical compounds as scheduled substances.

And while Bondi strongly opposed a 2014 medical marijuana measure that went before voters, she was largely quiet the following year, as the Florida Supreme Court was reviewing a ballot initiative that would eventually legalize medical cannabis in the state in 2016.

As for the 2014 effort, Bondi pushed back against that proposal, saying it “would make Florida one of the most lenient medical-marijuana states”—a claim PolitiFact rated “mostly true.”

Though Bondi didn’t go out of her way to block the subsequent legalization effort, she told reporters at the time that she still opposed it.

“Based on the Court’s decision in 2014, I have not filed a legal challenge to the current amendment,” she said at the time, “but my concerns with it are the same.”

One of Florida’s most outspoken advocates for cannabis reform, trial lawyer John Morgan, previously criticized Bondi in her role opposing medical marijuana as attorney general.

“She knows about as much about constitutional law as my Jack Russell terrier does,” he said at the time.

This isn’t the first time Bondi’s name has come up as a possible Trump pick for AG. During his first term, in 2018, following the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Bondi’s name was floated as a possible replacement.

At the time, Nancy Smith of Sunshine State News characterized Bondi’s opposition to cannabis as pragmatic.

“As committed as she’s been to taking down Florida’s pill mills and cracking down on the illegal use of prescription drugs generally, Bondi is not so ideologically committed to keeping marijuana illegal that she won’t stand down in the face of overwhelming public opposition to her position,” Smith wrote, at that point weighing the possibility that Bondi might be named Trump’s drug czar. “She and others who opposed the 2014 amendment filed more than 200 pages in legal briefs then, while in 2016—nothing.”

By contrast, Gaetz—who was Trump’s initial pick for AG before withdrawing on Thursday—was seen as far more favorable to marijuana business interests.

He was among the only GOP members of Congress who voted for a Democratic-led cannabis legalization bill, and he did so twice. He also backed other more modest reforms such as marijuana industry banking access.

Trump’s decision to select him for the attorney general role took many, including congressional colleagues and insiders, by surprise. But for marijuana stakeholders, it was a welcome choice in the sense that it signaled state cannabis markets would likely continue to see a policy of non-interference from the federal government and that Biden administration’s plans to reschedule marijuana would proceed despite the White House changeup.

While Bondi doesn’t represent a legalization opponent on par with Sessions, who was an outspoken critic of cannabis use broadly, she’s a far cry from the cannabis-friendly nominee that Gaetz was.

Meanwhile, before President Joe Biden (D) hands control of the White House back to Trump, dozens of Democratic members of Congress this week urged him to to expand on his executive clemency work in the final months of his term. The lawmakers cited the president’s past marijuana pardons as an example of his ability to provide “life-changing” relief to Americans.

With Biden nearing the end of his time in office, Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) led a group of colleagues in a letter to the president on Wednesday, urging him to take advantage of these last weeks to exercise his authority to “reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system, and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration.”

Other signatories of the letter to Biden include Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO), Troy Carter (D-LA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and more. Organizations backing the call to action include LPP, ACLU and JustLeadershipUSA, among others.

Meanwhile, Biden also recently discussed his administration’s cannabis actions and reiterated his belief that criminalization over minor marijuana offenses is an outdated policy during a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s (CBCF) 2024 Phoenix Awards Dinner.

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