• Biden will be joined by PA Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman at a Labor Day parade next week.
  • Fetterman's campaign says he plans to ask Biden to "finally decriminalize marijuana."
  • Marijuana decriminalization is broadly popular, and Biden has piled up a series of political wins recently.

President Joe Biden is planning a visit next Monday to Pittsburgh, where he is expected to be joined by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in the city's annual Labor Day parade.

And Fetterman — the Democratic nominee for US Senate this year — will pressure Biden on "the need to finally decriminalize marijuana," according to a campaign spokesman Joe Calvello.

 

In a lengthier statement released Monday afternoon, Fetterman took it a step further, urging Biden to use his executive authority to deschedule marijuana "prior to his visit to Pittsburgh" by removing the drug from its current Schedule I classification — which is reserved for drugs that have "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."

"It's long past time that we finally decriminalize marijuana," said Fetterman. "This is just common sense and Pennsylvanians overwhelmingly support decriminalizing marijuana."

In response to the campaign's initial statement, Rachel Tripp, communications director for Republican Senate nominee Mehmet Oz, called Fetterman a "man-child."

"Marijuana and freeing murderers - exactly what you'd expect from a man-child cobbling together policies through a haze of smoke in his parents' basement," she wrote on Twitter.

Last week, that same communications staffer faced criticism after telling Insider that Fetterman "wouldn't have had a major stroke" if he "had ever eaten a vegetable in his life." Fetterman had a stroke in late May and left the campaign trail for about three months.

"I don't want to hear any bullshit coming out of Dr. Oz's campaign trying to conflate decriminalizing marijuana with seriously harmful crime," said Fetterman in the statement. "Are we supposed to believe that neither he nor any members of his staff have ever used marijuana?"

The Oz campaign didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. 

Fetterman has made support for legalizing marijuana a key part of his platform. The campaign also pointed to a listening tour on marijuana legalization that the lieutenant governor conducted in 2019, after which Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced his support for the idea.

Polling shows that nearly 70% of Americans support legalizing marijuana — including a slight majority of Republicans. And Biden pledged to decriminalize marijuana during the 2020 presidential campaign.

And fresh off the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the cancellation of some student debt, many progressives and supporters of Biden are calling on him to "do weed."

 

Read the original article on Business Insider