Elon Musk has weighed in on the federal government’s efforts to release WNBA star Brittney Griner from Russian imprisonment and said the Biden administration should also release anyone else imprisoned for marijuana-related offences in the United States.
“Shouldn’t we liberate people in America if the president is fighting so hard to free someone who is imprisoned in Russia for some marijuana?”
In a Full Send podcast episode, Musk claimed.
He continued, “My belief is that individuals should not be in jail for nonviolent drug charges,” pointing out that there were others in jail in America for the same offences.
“Shouldn’t we free them too?” he questioned.
After a judge rejected Griner, 31,’s allegations that she unintentionally left a marijuana pen in her purse when she entered the country in February, she was found guilty on Thursday of smuggling drugs into Russia. She received a nine-year prison term.
President of the United States Joe Biden declared that he would work “tirelessly” to pursue “every possible avenue” in order to bring her and Paul Whelan, another American who is detained in Russia, home.
Viktor Boult, a Russian arms dealer and notorious felon known as the “merchant of death,” is being sought in return for the two Americans in a prisoner swap being negotiated by the State Department.
However, marijuana possession is still illegal at the federal level in the United States, and, according to the ACLU, marijuana arrests now make up more than half of all drug arrests made there.
The ACLU also discovered that 88 percent of the 8.2 million marijuana busts between 2001 and 2010 were for simple possession of marijuana.
Musk also mentioned in the podcast that regular marijuana drug tests are required for him and the rest of his team at SpaceX.
This was after Musk gained notoriety in 2018 for smoking a joint on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
To host Kyle Forgeard, group members Salim and Steiny, and Full Send President John Shahidi, Musk admitted: “I did get a lot of backlash because it’s still federally illegal.”
On the podcast, he stated that he had only had “one puff” four years prior and that he “finds weed’s not that useful for productivity.”
He said, “I do actually have to make the automobiles and the rockets work.”
However, Musk claimed that as a result of that appearance, he and his colleagues are now subject to routine drug testing.
Our rivals were like “SpaceX as federal government contractors, so “Why don’t you take action? Watch him arrogantly puffing on some marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast “Regarding the federal government’s plan to drug test members of his employees, Musk stated.
Tesla shares fell by 9% immediately following Musk’s participation on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Musk’s presence on the Full Send podcast coincided with criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris as a hypocrite on Twitter after she criticised Russian authorities for imprisoning Griner for nine years while, as a district attorney, she also sentenced others to time behind bars.
Harris tweeted on Thursday: “With today’s sentencing, Russia continues to wrongfully hold Brittney Griner.” Sher has to be released right away.
She continued by saying that she and Vice President Joe Biden “are working every day to reunite Paul Whelan and Brittney with loved ones who each miss them dearly.”
However, Twitter users pointed out that she had imprisoned thousands of people for marijuana-related offences while serving as San Francisco’s district attorney almost immediately after she posted her condemnation of Griner’s sentence.
According to Mercury News, Harris actually oversaw more than 1,900 marijuana convictions during her tenure as district attorney, and her office’s prosecutors found more defendants guilty of marijuana-related offences than did her predecessor.
Between 2011 and 2016, while Harris served as the attorney general of California, at least 1,560 people were imprisoned in California state facilities for marijuana-related offences, according to a 2019 investigation by the Washington Free Beacon.
As a result of a state-wide initiative to reduce state prison overcrowding and divert lower-level offenders to county jails, the number of low-level marijuana offenders sent to state prisons significantly decreased after 2011.
Harris has also previously expressed her opposition to the legalisation of marijuana.
In 2010, she co-authored a voter guide that actively opposed a ballot initiative for recreational marijuana use.
The San Francisco Weekly claimed that by 2014, while she was the state’s attorney general, law enforcement personnel working for the state’s Department of Justice had chartered a helicopter to scout possible marijuana patches to search without warrants.
They were employing the “open fields doctrine,” which permitted the destruction of any marijuana stand without a warrant after being observed from the air if it was not within the “curtilage” of a dwelling.
Harris truly didn’t support marijuana legalisation until 2018, when she was generally regarded as a presidential contender.