Ralph Northam in The Washington Times

On Drugs: We spend $67 million a year enforcing our marijuana laws

A: Yes. I announced a criminal-justice reform package, and one of the things at the top of the list was to decriminalize marijuana. There are far too many individuals who are being arrested and locked up for that. We spend $67 million a year enforcing our marijuana laws. African Americans are 2.8 times more likely to get picked up and arrested and put in jail for smoking marijuana. So, that's a top priority of mine.

As a doctor, that step of decriminalizing marijuana needs to take place so that we can look at using marijuana for medicinal purposes. I led the fight two years ago to use what we call cannabidiol. It's an oil that comes from marijuana, and we use it in intractable epilepsy, which are seizures. There are a lot of potential uses for marijuana medicinally. To be able to decriminalize it and then use evidence-based medicine to move forward--that's very important.

On Immigration: Support driver's licenses for illegal immigrants

Republican Corey Stewart slammed Northam's stance as "blatant disregard for the law." Ed Gillespie said, "Virginia plain and simply should not give legal identification to illegal immigrants."

The issue surfaced when Northam was asked where he stood on a proposal to grant temporary driver's licenses to people who can't receive a permanent one because of their immigration status. "We need to make sure that we have immigration reform for this county, we make sure that we have a pathway to citizenship in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and we need to make sure that people have access to driver's licenses," he said. A total of 12 states allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, according to a breakdown of state laws from the National Conference of State Legislatures.