candidate Jo Jorgensen

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Dr. Jo Jorgensen.

COURTESY PHOTO

Libertarian Jo Jorgensen has never smoked pot

But she would still defend your right to do it in her longshot bid for president

In the Libertarian Party, presidential candidates don’t pick their running mates; instead, they’re chosen by delegates at the nominating convention in a separate vote. This year’s presidential ticket resulted in the odd- couple pairing of D r. J o J orgensen, an academic from S outh C arolina, and J eremy “ S pike” C ohen, a podcaster prankster who promises “a Waffle House on every corner” and to fund time travel research to kill baby Adolf Hitler.

“ All I can say is that I was the one who was nominated for president,” J orgensen says, diplomatically, when asked about her running mate’s more out- there ideas. “ And so I’m not campaigning on any of those things. I do have a different platform, and so that’s the one that I’m pushing.” Metro T imes caught up with her before a campaign stop in D etroit.

That platform is that “ government is too big, too bossy, too nosy, and too inB y Lee DeVito

trusive,” J orgensen says. “ And the worst part is they usually end up hurting the very people they try to help.”

In a political system where D emocrats and R epublicans dominate, third- party candidates like J orgensen, who made a campaign stop in D etroit on M onday, have their work cut out for them — and especially this year, with the coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest in the streets, and the all- consuming contest between President D onald Trump and D emocrat J oe Biden, which has been cast as no less than a battle between authoritarianism and democracy, the top issues of the day. E arlier this year, U .S . R ep. J ustin Amash of Grand Rapids briefly considered seeking the Libertarian Party nomination after defecting from the R epublican Party and becoming the lone Libertarian in C ongress, but backed out after just three weeks, citing the “ extraordinary challenges” of 2 0 2 0 .

J orgensen, however, remains undeterred.

“The path of course is very difficult, but I still say somebody has to run,” J orgensen says. “ We have to get the word out there. And so many people are realizing that the two parties just aren’t working.”

F our years ago, the Libertarian Party ran a high-profile ticket featuring two former R epublican governors, G ary J ohnson of N ew M exico and William Weld of M assachusetts. It wound up being the Libertarian Party’s most successful presidential run to date, earning nearly 4 .5 million votes nationally. (F or perspective, Trump and C linton received more than 6 0 million votes each, while the G reen Party’s J ill S tein earned just 1 .4 million votes.) The Libertarians did so well in M ichigan in 2 0 1 6 that the party qualified to hold a primary in the 2018 governor’s race — the first time that a third party did so in almost 5 0 years.

The margin between Trump and C linton was just some 1 0 ,0 0 0 votes in M ichigan, meaning that third- party voters got plenty of blame for helping Trump win. E ven Bill G elineau — who helped campaign for J ohnson in 2 0 1 6 and won M ichigan’s Libertarian Party gubernatorial nomination in 2018, where he came in a distant third — told us earlier this year that he was going to put his party aside and vote for Biden in N ovember. “ It’s not because I don’t believe in the party — I worked my ass off for people in the Libertarian Party — but the fact that M ichigan is going to be a critical state,” he says. “ I believe that Trump is a clear and present danger.” (Amash, meanwhile, has endorsed J orgensen.)

S till, J orgensen thinks there’s an appetite for a third choice this year, claiming that most of her campaign’s volunteers have come from outside the party. Trump, she says, appealed to many because he was an outsider who promised to cut spending, balance the budget, and bring our troops

home. “ And he did none of that,” she says. “ And so what I would like to say is that for all the people who wanted a true outsider, I’m that outsider. I think people do deserve a choice, and right now they don’t have much of a choice between Trump and Biden.”

Of course, plenty of Biden supporters will say there is a clear choice, and point to Trump’s move to fill the S upreme C ourt seat vacated by the late R uth Bader G insburg as proof that liberal third- party voters should have just pinched their noses and voted for C linton; even if you don’t love a particular candidate, you have to look at the four- dimensional chessboard. But J orgensen believes the D emocratic Party deserves to be critiq ued.

“ The D emocratic Party that I grew up learning about in the ’6 0 s was against the war, and they were for free speech, and they basically thought that people should be making their own decisions,” she says. “ And that’s not the party of today. The party today is very pro- war. And of course they don’t believe in free speech.” J orgensen says she wants to “ turn America into one giant S witzerland, armed and neutral.”

S he also points to the D emocratic Party’s slow, reluctant acceptance of gay marriage as an example of a lack of leadership and principles; they accepted it only once the popular culture did. “ Both Hillary C linton and Barack Obama said that gay marriage should be illegal,” she says. “ I don’t for a minute think that they agreed with that, but they’re just going after the votes. They’re not standing up for what’s right.” Another issue that she thinks that the Libertarian Party has long been ahead of both major parties is the right to use marijuana — neither Trump nor Biden have come out strong in support of cannabis, despite the fact that the majority of states have legalized it, and most voters support it.

S o has J orgensen ever smoked pot — and did she inhale?

That gets a laugh out of the self- described “ goody- two- shoes.” (“ The nice thing about me running for president is I have no dirt,” she says.) “ I somehow managed to get through high school and college in the 1 9 7 0 s without ever having tried marijuana,” she says, adding that she got a graduate certificate in drug and addiction studies. “ What I do is I tell people that my drug of choice is bourbon, which is actually more dangerous than marijuana. I tell people that the only way marijuana kills you is if a bale of it falls on your head. However, I think that we should be able to be free to use whatever drugs we choose. And so I choose to use the more dangerous drug of bourbon.”

N evertheless, J orgensen says she would remove marijuana from the federal list of controlled substances on her first day in office.

“ I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘ Well, I don’t use drugs, so I don’t care about the drug issue,’” she says. The problems associated with drugs — violence, crime — “ aren’t drug problems; those are prohibition problems,” she says, adding that cannabis is a safer alternative for pain relief than the opiates that so many Americans have become addicted to.

We admit, it almost feels silly to be asking about pot in the middle of a pandemic that has completely upended life around the world. But J orgensen believes there is a Libertarian solution to the pandemic, as well: S he says Trump could have used his emergency powers to streamline the F D A and approve more C OV ID - 1 9 tests; then, the U .S . could have avoided much of the long economic shutdowns by implementing a large government- run mass testing program, as other countries have done.

R egarding the Black Lives M atter protests against police brutality, J orgensen agrees that the problem is institutionalized racism, a problem made worse by the federal government militarizing police departments with weapons and tanks. “ Instead of having the kind of community with the beat cop who knows everybody’s name, now instead what you have is kind of an usversus- them mentality,” she says.

“ If you look at, for instance, R osa Parks, the heroic Black woman who refused to sit on the back of the bus, a lot of people don’t realize that was a government- run, government- owned bus,” J orgensen says. “ And 6 0 % of the bus ridership at the time were Blacks. What if U ber were to discriminate against 6 0 % of their customers? They would go out of business, as well they should. But the government doesn’t go out of business — the government can discriminate without any accountability, just like with J im C row laws, just like with redlining, S o we’ve got the government who has basically set up this broken system.”

D espite the Libertarians’ gains in 2 0 1 6 , we’re not sure 2 0 2 0 is the year to make the case for a smaller government and a free market, with the push for reopening the economy making the U .S . the top coronavirus hotspot in the entire world. S o we have to ask: K nowing that the Libertarian Party faces a long shot, does J orgensen have a preference as to who will win — Trump or Biden?

“ N ot really,” she says. “ Because both of them want to spend our money. Both of them want to make decisions for us. N either one wants to bring the troops home.”