Mother Jones

Early last year, John Baucum, the political director of a group called Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition (RAMP), cornered Sen. Ted Cruz at a GOP event in Houston. Cruz, a former Texas prosecutor who talks the talk on states’ rights, had criticized the Obama administration for declining to prosecute Colorado pot growers. Baucum wanted to point out the disconnect: “It sounded like you were making an argument against federalism,” he recalls telling Cruz.

Perhaps his comment got Cruz thinking, because last week, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, Cruz reversed course on pot: “Look, I actually think this is a great embodiment of what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called ‘the laboratories of democracy,'” he told Sean Hannity during the Republican go-to event, where RAMP had a table set up. “If the citizens of Colorado decide they want to go down that road, that’s their prerogative.”

On the heels of CPAC, state representative David Simpson, a Republican from East Texas whom RAMP had lobbied heavily, introduced a new bill that would abolish dozens of state marijuana statutes, essentially legalizing pot in the Lone Star State. “I don’t believe that when God made marijuana he made a mistake that the government needs to fix,” Simpson wrote in the Texas Tribune. “The time has come for a thoughtful discussion of the prudence of the prohibition approach to drug abuse.”

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