From Politico: Marijuana vote poses November risk for Democrats
Democrats are taking an unprecedented gamble this month: voting to legalize cannabis at the federal level.
The MORE Act would remove the penalties for marijuana, erase some criminal records and create grant programs for people hit especially hard by the war on drugs.
(Featured image is “Flattened trees in Oso and along SR 530 after the March 22, 2014 landslide” by WSDOT and is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
I understand that while loosening marijuana restrictions is polling in the high 60s, low 70s, complete and total opposition to current policies and tightening things back up is polling as high as 8%.Report
But they didn’t just take marijuana off the Controlled Substances Act schedules and leave the rest up to the states. They left the door open for the FDA to jump into the regulation business, which seems inevitable. They charge a federal tax at a point in the supply chain where many states don’t charge a tax, which may require the states to restructure their own regulations. They don’t settle the interstate commerce questions. They don’t withdraw from the UN convention on narcotics, they simply put the US in direct violation of one of that treaty’s requirements. It looks to me like a “feel good” bill with a whole lot of unintended consequences down the road.Report
It’s an awful bill. 100%.
It’s an awful bill that is better than the status quo.
Even the worst case scenario of the bill not passing has the consequences of someone, somewhere, saying “well, maybe we could write a bill that could still let us get our beaks wet but might actually pass?”Report
Those horses aren’t going to race themselves.Report
Huh. Let’s see if this flips around in the next six weeks. It’s low-hanging fruit (and has obviously been low-hanging fruit since somewhere around 60% in the polling).
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Apparently Biden suggests that people convicted of marijuana use go to mandatory rehab.
This strikes me as vaguely inappropriate on the level of someone found having enjoyed a sixer on a Friday night be mandated to go to AA.Report
And now Schumer is vaguely on board, vaguely.
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