This year’s presidential election was a historic one for weed, with both major presidential candidates endorsing marijuana legalization for the first time ever. Kamala Harris said that she would legalize adult-use cannabis at the federal level. At the same time, Donald Trump announced that he was backing Florida’s Amendment 3, which would have legalized recreational weed in the state (despite majority support, the measure did not receive the required 60 percent voting threshold in the November election).
At this stage, federal legalization seems all but inevitable. Last May, President Biden directed the Department of Justice to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug, a move that would pave the way for legal medical use under federal law. The reclassification wouldn’t federally legalize recreational marijuana, but it would remove current barriers to medical research, and could affect how some licensed cannabis businesses are taxed.
Federal cannabis policy has stagnated for decades. No matter what politicians have said about their evolving stances on legal weed, cannabis prohibition has been cemented in place since the 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s administration designated marijuana alongside heroin and LSD as a drug with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse — despite Nixon’s private admission to aides and advisors that he knew it “wasn’t particularly dangerous.”
Nearly four decades after Nixon launched the War on Drugs, Barack Obama said during his first presidential campaign that medical marijuana was an issue best left to state and local governments. In 2013, in a move that activists hailed as a step toward ending prohibition, his Department of Justice issued the Cole Memorandum, which stated that federal marijuana laws would no longer be enforced at the state level. When Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Obama told Rolling Stone in an exit interview that he thought marijuana use should be treated as a public-health issue rather than a criminal one, saying, “If you survey the American people, including Trump voters… they’re in favor, in large numbers, of decriminalizing marijuana.”
H/T: www.rollingstone.com
