Rick Perry says Texas Won't Legalize Marijuana

On February 23, Texas Governor Rick Perry said on CNN that Texas won’t be joining the growing list of states working to legalize marijuana.

During Sunday’s State of the Union show, Governor Perry gave a quick and firm “no” to CNN’s Candy Crowley when she asked her guests about legalizing pot.

Perry noted that Texas hasn’t just been standing at status quo with its pot laws, though. “What we’ve done in the state of Texas is we’ve started looking at adjusting the penalties of criminal use of marijuana. We’ve seen our prison populations go down,” Perry said.

“The idea that a kid has one marijuana cigarette and you send him to prison, where they can learn to really be a hardened criminal, is not thoughtful public policy,” the Texas Chief said.

Crowley had with her three other governors, Mike Pence (R, IN), Jay Nixon (D, MO), and Dannel Malloy (D, CN). All were in town for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association.

The other three governors agreed with Perry that the states should be taking the dead on marijuana laws, not Washington.

This isn’t the first time that Perry warned against jumping too quickly onto the pot legalization bandwagon.

During a drug panel at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Perry said he didn’t want to join the pot “parade.”

“I think the fact is it is very important for science to keep playing a most important role in this before we jump to some conclusion, before we run out and get in the front of a parade that is going somewhere because we think it is where the public opinion is,” he said.

Perry’s goal is to decriminalize pot, not to legalize it.