A few months ago I got an email from a disgruntled reader who took offense at one of my opinion pieces. Apparently, he didn’t like my negative view of the Trump administration and the many kooky people in important positions — people like Jeff Sessions as attorney general, who can have a huge negative effect on the cannabis industry; Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier and cheerleader for the oil industry, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency; Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development (and cornball surgeon), who has gigantic paintings in his house of himself with Jesus; and Betsy DeVos, who has no qualifications whatsoever to lead the Department of Education and has no experience in public education either as a student, a parent or an employee.
The list of nut jobs in positions well above their abilities goes on and on — and of course, this includes the president, who steadfastly refuses to show his tax returns, openly admitted to assaulting women and can’t be trusted to tell the truth about even the most mundane subjects.
Remember, the president won by cobbling together a coalition of “haters”: African-American haters, Mexican haters, woman haters, Hillary Clinton haters, gay haters, Jew haters and liberal haters were all pulled together with unemployed white guys who didn’t understand that their jobs in coal mining and manufacturing were lost to robots and technology, not Mexicans and environmentalists.
It was a cynical strategy that worked. And, not unlike Trump University and Fox News, it was primarily aimed at the gullible and those who apparently were not particularly good at spotting a snake oil salesman.
So what’s my point? Simple: The president is a dishonest sleaze bag with no scruples who has made a career of selling his tacky brands to whomever he can fool.
The cannabis industry had better brace itself for trouble. If Trump sees any kind of advantage to going after the legal cannabis crowd, he will. No amount of scientific evidence or will of the people in states that have legalized it will stop his assault if there are votes to be gained by targeting an industry that is much more left-leaning than alcohol, tobacco and or gambling.
My advice is to get out and help the politicians who are friends of the cannabis industry. It matters on many different levels. It matters to the cannabis industry; it matters if you care about democracy and the rule of law; it matters if you care about women, minorities, gays or immigrants; it matters if you care about science and global warming. And finally, it matters if you’re just not happy with a dishonest crook leading our country.
I’d love to stick to warm and fuzzy subjects like where to invest money in the legal cannabis space, how to make THC-infused barbecue chicken and the latest news of “revolutionary” ways to ingest THC, but the fact is, the Trump Administration is undoubtedly the greatest threat ever to our democracy, and learning how to get stoned with a suppository is low on my list of priorities.
Greg James
Publisher