Doing business 'under the influence'.
Advocating marijuana legalization or backing it with financial support is one thing—it is advocacy of a political position on a pressing social issue—but being an actual out-and-out pot smoker is another. But it really doesn't seem to matter. Here are seven pot smoking CEOs that nobody has gotten around to firing:
1.Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg is the founder, CEO, and owner of Bloomberg L.P., the financial software, data, and media giant. As three-term mayor of New York City, he presided over tens of thousands of small-time pot busts, despite having famously answered a question about smoking pot with: "You bet I did, and I enjoyed it." NORML used those remarks as the basis for a full-page ad in the New York Times and ads on city buses, prompting Bloomberg to say he regretted those remarks, and that he was "a believer that we should enforce the laws, and I do not think that decriminalizing marijuana is a good idea."
2.Richard Branson. The afore-mentioned Branson not only wants to invest in marijuana, he says he smokes it with his adult son. In a 2007 interview with GQ, he told Piers Morgan as much, saying father and son had lit up during an Australian beach vacation. In that same interview, Branson revealed that he had learned the art of joint-rolling from none other than Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who should know how it's done.
3.Hugh Hefner. The Playboy magazine founder and octogenarian serial monogamist deserves kudos for being the first businessman to get behind pot legalization, donating $5,000 to help found NORML in 1970. Hef is still sticking to that position: “I don’t think there’s any question that marijuana should be legalized because to not legalize it, we’re paying the same price we paid for prohibition,” he said in 2010. But it wasn't just politics; Hefner liked what pot did for him: “Smoking helped put me in touch with the realm of the senses,” he told Patrick Anderson, author of High in America. “I discovered a whole other dimension to sex.”
more here:
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/seven-successful-ceos-smoke-pot?akid=13546.1117531.8SXmsK&rd=1&src=newsletter1043490&t=10
