Donald Trump is considering reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
At a $1m-a-plate fundraiser at his New Jersey golf club earlier this month, Trump told attendees he was interested in making such a change, the people, who declined to be named, told the newspaper.
The reclassification, to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I controlled substances and make it a Schedule III drug, was proposed by the Biden administration, but not enacted. The change would make it much easier to buy and sell marijuana and make the legal multibillion-dollar industry more profitable.
The guests at Trump’s fundraiser included Kim Rivers, chief executive of Trulieve, one of the largest marijuana companies, who encouraged Trump to pursue the change and expand medical marijuana research, the report said.
During Trump’s first term, two Soviet-born Republican donors, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, directly appealed to Trump for help with their plan to sell marijuana in states where recreational use was legal. Audio of the 2018 dinner, which was secretly recorded by the two men, revealed that Trump was skeptical, telling the two men that he believed marijuana use “does cause an IQ problem; you lose IQ points”.
In the same conversation, the Ukrainian-born Parnas first suggested to Trump that he should remove the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and shared a false rumor that the diplomat was badmouthing the president by “telling everybody, ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached.’”
Parnas and Fruman later helped Rudy Giuliani search for dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine, before being indicted and found guilty of campaign finance violations, for secretly using a Russian oligarch’s money to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns and committees, including Trump’s, in pursuit of favors for their planned legal marijuana business.
Reuters contributed reporting
