October 13, 2017 02:22 PM UTC

Colorado Christian U To GOP: Hands Off Weed Money!

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• by: Colorado Pols

Ernest Luning of the Colorado Springs Gazette follows up on one of the week’s more curious local political stories, a fundraiser for the GOP’s Senate Majority Fund 527 attended by members of the budding (pun) marijuana industry–an interesting change-up for a party that includes Attorney General Jeff Sessions, far and away the biggest threat to legalized marijuana in its short history.

As as suspected in our previous mention of this, Colorado Christian University, which fancies itself as the leading moral arbiter of the Christian conservative ecosphere in our state, is not happy with Republicans consorting with reefers! Though they claim the Senate GOP’s fundraiser is not the reason they’re sounding off:

In a stern letter to state lawmakers, the president of Colorado Christian University and the director of the school’s conservative think tank on Thursday called on legislators to refuse campaign donations from the marijuana industry, saying the legalized drug “has devastated Colorado by nearly every metric.”

“It has come to our attention that state legislators are accepting campaign donations from the marijuana industry. As educators and researchers, we hope this is not the case. Marijuana has devastated Colorado by nearly every metric and we are particularly concerned about marijuana’s health impact on youth,” CCU President Dr. Donald Sweeting and Centennial Institute director Jeff Hunt wrote.

“Colorado Christian University asks that you audit your donations for any money given by the marijuana industry and donate those funds to marijuana youth prevention and recovery organizations. We are happy to meet with you to discuss marijuana’s devastating impacts on Colorado. We look forward to your leadership on this issue and your work to make Colorado a better state for its citizens and especially its young people,” they concluded.

GOP Senate President Kevin Grantham’s sock-in-mouth response:

“More power to them,” Grantham said. “I think they will continue to be a good friend to us while continuing to lead that charge against some of the more destructive qualities of marijuana in Colorado. But as far as the other aspects of this, the donations, etc., that will be up to individual members what they want to do.”

As you can see, the question is not morally ambiguous to Jeff Hunt of CCU’s Centennial Institute like it appears to be with Senate President Grantham. For Hunt, taking money from the marijuana industry is little different from taking money from an organized crime cartel. But could you imagine Grantham saying it’s “up to individual members” whether they want to take money from Al Capone?

And before you flame us, yes, we know the legal marijuana industry has nothing whatsoever in common with organized crime. That’s the point of legalization. We’re just trying to illustrate how passionate the opponents of marijuana legalization are, viewing it as an historic and devastating rollback of almost a century of illegal drug prohibition in this country. Marijuana industry cash is much more of a political problem for Republicans than Democrats–for whom legal marijuana carries little to no moral stigma among their base. Legality of marijuana under state but not federal law supplies all the pretext necessary for opponents to rage against marijuana with the same zeal they had before it was legalized. Legal in Colorado or not, it’s still “a sin.”

With all of this in mind, might the Senate Majority Fund think twice about spending that freshly-raised marijuana cabbage? And if they don’t…will they answer to a higher authority?