A reporter with a local CBS affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska quit her job on live TV Sunday night, dropping an f bomb in her announcement during a segment titled “Voting for easier access”. Charlo Greene said during the segment that she was leaving the station to run a pro-marijuana organization known as the Alaska Cannabis Club.
“Everything you heard is why I, the actual owner of the Alaska Cannabis Club, will be dedicating all of my energy toward fighting for freedom and fairness, which begins with legalizing marijuana here in Alaska,” Greene said on air. “And as for this job. Well, not that I have a choice, but f— it, I quit.”
The former reporter explained on crowd-funding site Indiegogo.com — where she hopes to raise money for marketing the pro-pot initiative — that she “just quit my news reporting job on live TV to announce that I am redirecting all of my energy toward helping to end a failed drug policy that has ruined the lives of far too many Americans.”
As for her former employer, Anchorage’s KTVA, they were not very pleased with the announcement. The station’s news director, Bert Rudman, apologized to viewers on the station’s Facebook account.
“We sincerely apologize for the inappropriate language used by a KTVA reporter during her live presentation on the air tonight. The employee has been terminated,” he wrote.
Alaska’s voters will have the opportunity this November to decriminalize marijuana. As the group Campaign to Regulate Marijuana says on their website, “On November 4, 2014, Alaskans will have the chance to vote on a ballot initiative that will end the harmful and ineffective policy of marijuana prohibition and replace it with a system in which marijuana is regulated and taxed like alcohol.”
If the referendum is successful, Alaska will become the third state to legalize marijuana in the United States. Voters in both Colorado and Washington state voted in favor of legalization during the 2012 election. Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level.
Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the Obama Justice Department will allow the Colorado and Washington laws to go forward without a federal challenge, although he has said that the Justice Department reserves the right to a federal preemption lawsuit. Holder outlined eight priorities where federal prosecutors will continue to prosecute individuals in states where the drug is legal: cases where the drug ends up in the hands of minors, revenue is distributed to a criminal enterprise, the drug is diverted to other states, and other circumstances (which you can read here).
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