Who's on the Ballot: Heavily favored Democratic incumbent Kamala Harris, who laughs nervously in the face of marijuana legalization, and Ron Gold, the Republican who takes it very seriously.
Who Stands to Benefit: California's marijuana industry, forces seeking to privatize schools, people who like the death penalty.
Marijuana makes people do strange things. The cannabis cause has led dreadlocked Santa Cruz hippies to warmly embrace libertarians like retired U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (whose pledged destruction of the Environmental Protection Agency might have shocked the tree-huggers, had Paul ever been elected or had the weedheads ever bothered to read his entire platform).
Ron Gold knows this. Which is why the long-shot Republican candidate for California attorney general — the pro-death penalty, anti-teacher-tenure alternative to heavily favored Kamala Harris — can count on votes even from veterans of the gay rights movement (whose marriages Gold would have sought to keep illegal by defending Proposition 8, as Harris declined to do).
Harris is partially responsible for this. President Barack Obama's "best-looking attorney general" gave a nervous laugh as her answer to the question of California eventually legalizing marijuana, something many see as inevitable in California in 2016.
That laugh-track is now front and center in a campaign ad for Gold, who says that legalizing marijuana is a serious issue and would be one of his top priorities as the state's top law enforcement officer (and, if elected, the highest-ranking Republican in California).
Gold is embracing weed full-bore. In addition to making weed legal and ensuring the state's marijuana industry could reach its billion-dollar potential and turn a profit (something dispensaries can't do under current state law), Gold says he'd also petition Obama to release federal marijuana prisoners.
"Marijuana is the key singular issue in this campaign," Gold tells SF Weekly at a campaign stop hosted by Oakland marijuana trade school Oaksterdam University.
At least it is for him. On almost everything else Gold stands for, "I have to hold my nose," says retired Castro District high school math teacher David Goldman, who marched with Harvey Milk for gay rights in the 1970s. But Goldman is also active with the Oakland-based Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform, the successor to the committee that put failed legalization effort Prop. 19 on the ballot in 2010. So he's voting for a Republican for the first time in his life.
This election cycle, there isn't much else for California's cannabis supporters to like. On his way to cruising to re-election, Gov. Jerry Brown said in a March interview that "potheads" might ruin California's competitive edge. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is California's most-prominent pro-pot politician, but his office is mostly ceremonial. So if voters want to voice dissatisfaction with progress on drug policy, their only option next month is going for Gold.
Sometimes one issue is enough.
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