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Why Gary Chambers Smoked Weed In A Campaign Ad To Flip A Louisiana Senate Seat

This article is more than 2 years old.

If you’re like most Americans, you’d never heard of Gary Chambers, Jr., a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Louisiana, before you saw a video of him smoking weed on Tuesday.

A clip of the besuited social-justice advocate puffing a blunt while rattling off the country’s shameful arrest statistics for 37 seconds—the time it takes for yet another American to be arrested for marijuana possession, according to the ACLU, with Black men like Chambers four times more likely than whites to be busted—posted to his YouTube and Instagram accounts Tuesday made national news.

If it was a stunt, it was a very serious stunt.

The ad delivered Chambers’s eight-day old campaign to unseat Republican Sen. John Kennedy, a staunch conservative and Donald Trump loyalist, the earned media most politicians see only after a scandal. And as the first major-party Senate candidate to not only publicly admit to using cannabis but to show himself doing so, Chambers is trying to draw Americans’ attention—not just to cannabis, and how using the drug should be more normal than knocking back a beer, but to Louisiana, and the grand political opportunity there.

“How do we get the country to pay attention to Louisiana?” he said. “How do we get people to see?”

Louisiana is 33 percent Black, yet there there has not been a Black person elected to statewide office in Louisiana since Reconstruction. The state has demographics near identical to those of Georgia, where Democrats flipped two Senate seats a year ago. Louisiana also has a dismal list of metrics: at near the bottom of the 50 states in education, crime, environmental degradation, health, and economy.

Louisiana also has 3.1 million registered voters; Kennedy won election in 2016 with only 536,204 votes. Louisiana has a Democratic governor; Louisiana has progressive urban centers like New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

All this adds up to an opening, Chambers said in a phone interview on Tuesday. If the same resources and attention lavished on Georgia a year ago can now turn to Louisiana, Kennedy is vulnerable.

“We need the Democratic party to pay attention to Louisiana the same amount as Georgia,” he said. If he had to smoke pot in a park for D.C. insiders to take notice, so be it. “I smoked a blunt, and now everyone’s talking,” he said.

A relative political newcomer, Chambers finished a surprising close third in an open primary for a seat in Congress last year, narrowly missing the two-person runoff. That campaign attracted celebrity donors including Hollywood stars Susan Sarandon and Milla Jovovich, according to campaign finance records, who were drawn to Chambers’s broadly progressive politics: raising the minimum wage, healthcare reform, and—yes—drug policy reform, including marijuana legalization.

“The party needs to lean on the president and get him to deschedule,” he said. “I would be a U.S. senator who would support that.”

But though more than two-thirds of Americans embrace adult-use legalization, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other top Senate Democrats are pushing legalization on Capitol Hill, there’s still a very real stigma against actually using the drug.

Barack Obama copped to his Choom Gang days forty years ago, but nobody else in Washington in recent memory will go anywhere near cannabis—not when discussing their past, and not when cameras are rolling. And that’s hypocrisy, Chambers said.

“I know a bunch if politicians who smoke weed as well as business people,” Chambers said. “Somebody’s gotta go out there and do it. It’s not so controversial.”

It’s also not very illegal. Louisiana has had a limited medical-marijuana program in place since 2019. Cannabis possession has been decriminalized in the state since August, with the maximum penalty for holding 14 grams or less a $100 fine.

New Orleans—where Chambers and his campaign team filmed the video—went one further, reducing the potential penalties for cannabis smokers to a violation of the city’s tobacco-smoking regulations.

Those same rights, Chambers noted, aren’t enjoyed by people living in nearby Texas or Alabama, where possession is still a misdemeanor, according to NORML—meaning smokers can be arrested, but also meaning smokers can be stopped and searched, with cannabis often the pretext for police encounters that can turn violent.

Fixing that, and legalizing cannabis nationwide, may require fixing major obstacles in Washington like the Senate filibuster rule that’s currently bottling up President Joe Biden’s efforts to pass two voting-rights bills.

All that would be easier to do if there were 60 senators who supported legalization as well as guaranteeing the right to vote. And all that is what Chambers is banking that people will stop and focus on after they’ve noticed him smoking weed.

“There’s a passage in Scripture: take the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” he said, quoting from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. “What we hope is that this moment makes people pay attention to Louisiana, and see it not as a lost cause, but a golden opportunity.”

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