Legal Marijuana Now candidate Dan Vacek has lofty goals for Minnesota.
“My dream would be quality public education from preschool through postgraduate,” said Vacek.
Lowering the cost of higher education is also on his checklist, a subject close to his heart ever since struggling to put himself through the University and St. Paul’s Hamline University in the early 1980s.
The upcoming election will be the Ramsey County caseworker’s fourth consecutive bid for U.S. Representative, the first three as a Grassroots Party member. In each attempt he gathered three to four percent of the vote, the most of any other minor party candidate. Bruce Vento, the incumbent, received 50 percent in 1996.
The main tenant of his campaign platform, as his party name states, is the legalization of marijuana.
“It’s a budget issue,” he said, citing the hundreds of millions spent nationwide to combat marijuana use and imprison non-violent drug offenders. And, “it’s a compassion issue,” he said, since seriously ill people need marijuana for its medicinal qualities.
A self-named populist, Vacek said he wants to cut back corporate welfare and take Republicans off their “rampage.”
If elected, the House seat will be his first elected position.