Facebook co-founders give $170K to cannabis vote

Two Facebook co-founders have donated $170,000 to the campaign to legalise cannabis in California, ahead of a November 2 vote on the measure.

Sean Parker (above) has donated $100,000 to a group backing Proposition 19 - otherwise known as the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act – while Dustin Moskowitz has given $70,000 in total.

Although neither of the pair are still with Facebook, they retain considerable stakes in the company, which is now worth an estimated $33.7bn.

The latest poll suggests Proposition 19 is likely to be approved by voters, with 52 per cent in favour and 41 per cent against.

Parker first shot to fame in 1999, at the age of 19, when he set up Napster, the music sharing website that was subsequently shut down due to massive copyright violations. In 2004, he advised Mark Zuckerberg on developing Facebook, and became the company's president in 2004 after its incorporation.

Parker is played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, the recently released movie about the history of Facebook. In it he is portrayed advising Zuckerberg, the company's founder, to ditch a friend from the site. In reality, Parker, reportedly something of a party animal, was forced out of Facebook in 2005 after his arrest for cocaine, although he was never charged.

Moskowitz, who was Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard before the pair dropped out to work full time for Facebook, left the company in 2008, but he retains a six per cent stake.

A spokesman for the pro-legalisation group Drug Policy Alliance, said: "[Parker] is a member of the generation that really gets it. We think he's pivotal to the future of drug policy reform in the country." ·