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*Whoopi Goldberg is urging New Jersey lawmakers to legalize pot.
“The View” co-host reportedly called a handful of state lawmakers on Friday, including Gov. Phil Murphy, to support a bill to legalize recreational marijuana in the state.
Goldberg also called upon several undecided female legislators in a bid to gain their support ahead of Monday’s vote on the bill, according to the New Jersey Star Ledger.
“She feels this is a great piece of legislation, and we can be a leader for the rest of the country,” Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle (D-Bergen) told the paper. “She was persuasive in her facts, but I also have unanswered questions that deal with behavioral health issues.”
Goldberg also wrote an op-ed about the matter that was published Friday in USA Today.
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NJ is set to vote on a marijuana legalization bill that has strong measures to reverse the damage of the War on Drugs.
I hope this bill passes & NJ can lead the nation on this. Marijuana legalization & social justice *must* go hand in hand. We can’t have one without the other.
— Sen. Cory Booker (@SenBooker) March 22, 2019
“As I have grown older, and questionably wiser, I have maintained a healthy relationship with marijuana,” Goldberg wrote. “I now use marijuana, through a vape pen, to relieve headaches from glaucoma.”
“For countless adults across New Jersey, myself included, marijuana has never been about getting high just for the sake of it,” she continued. “And, that’s something that lawmakers on Monday need to remember. The unhinged and dire doomsday prophecies of some simply have not come to fruition elsewhere, nor will they in New Jersey.”
Goldberg founded a cannabis company in 2016 that manufacturers edibles and skin care products called Whoopi & Maya.
Meanwhile, Huttle noted that organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the American Academy of Pediatrics do not support marijuana legalization.
“I am not concerned about adult cannabis,” she said. “It’s opening up the door to kids under 21, giving that credibility and releasing the stigma. That’s my main concern.”
Huttle said she could only be persuaded to vote yes on the bill if her constituents in Bergen County overwhelmingly urged her to do so, the report states.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, the New Jersey Democrat who is running for president, tweeted his support Friday.
Two of the Garden State’s black members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Donald Payne Jr., D-10th Dist., and Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-12th Dist., both reportedly endorsed the measure last week.
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