Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday that he is firmly “against legalizing marijuana,” putting him at odds with his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes.
Although McConnell noted that marijuana is “not in the same category as heroin,” he cautioned during an interview with a Kentucky radio station that legalizing the drug could “completely transform your society in a way that I think certainly most Kentuckians would not agree with.”
“I don’t think an answer to this, honestly, is to go in a direction of legalizing any of these currently illegal drugs,” McConnell said, according to a report in Roll Call. “This whole movement in various parts of the country is a big mistake.”
McConnell’s firm opposition to any talk of marijuana legalization came one day after Grimes expressed some openness to the idea.
“I’m in favor of having the discussion especially to reclassify the use of marijuana,” Grimes said in a radio interview Thursday, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. “We haven’t had a senator that’s even wanted to have those discussions though.”
A poll earlier this year showed that more than half of Kentuckians support legalizing marijuana for medical use. Still, the issue has not received the political attention in Kentucky that is has in other states actively grappling with measures to legalize the drug.
