From Politico's Nightly newsletter:
HIGH MAINTENANCE — Americans have few regrets about the country’s decade-long cannabis legalization experiment. The freshest evidence arrived last week when Ohio became the latest state to endorse legal weed, meaning just over half of Americans now live in states where anyone at least 21 years old can legally possess the drug.
The creeping expansion of legalized marijuana isn’t likely to stop there — there are two potential developments on the horizon for 2024 that could further entrench the country’s radical shift on cannabis policy.
The latest Gallup survey shows that a record 70 percent of Americans now believe marijuana should be legal – more than 20 points higher than in 2012, when voters in Colorado and Washington state became the first to embrace full legalization.
A lot more Americans are consuming weed too. Just over 40 million adults reported using marijuana in the last month — or about 16 percent of the U.S. population — according to the just released 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. That’s a more than 50 percent jump from five years earlier, when just under 10 percent of adults reported past-month use.
This embrace of weed legalization endures despite significant problems that have arisen with the emergence of a quasi-legal industry that’s slated to take in $35 billion this year — and with sales expected to double again by 2030.
Most notably, the promise of a safe, regulated market usurping the entrenched underground network of drug dealers has proven elusive. In many states — particularly California and New York — the illicit market remains dominant, with little fear of punishment for people flouting the law.
Even more disturbing, criminal syndicates — often with ties to foreign countries like China and Mexico — have exploited legal markets to camouflage their operations and run massive illicit weed farms in states like Oregon, Oklahoma and Maine. Those cartels have been tied to grisly murders and allegations of human trafficking.
There have been some signs of backlash. In March, Oklahoma voters overwhelmingly rejected recreational legalization, with every county in the deeply conservative state voting against the measure. That marked a rejection of the state’s freewheeling medical market, which at one point had more than 14,000 licensed weed businesses — far more than even California — and earned it the unlikely moniker of ‘Tokelahoma.’
Weed referendums have also gone down to defeat in Arkansas, South Dakota and North Dakota in recent years.
But all signs suggest that there’s no stopping weed legalization at this point. Florida is likely to vote on recreational legalization next year, although the referendum must survive a legal challenge before the state Supreme Court. If the ballot measure passes — no easy feat, since it will require support from 60 percent of voters — it would mean another 22 million Americans live in a state where adults can legally possess marijuana. Pretty much all of the country’s biggest weed companies have planted a flag in the Sunshine State in anticipation of it eventually embracing full legalization.
Even more significantly, the Biden administration has begun the painstaking process of changing the classification of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act. Ever since the landmark drug law was enacted in 1970, marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I drug — the same category as heroin — meaning it’s deemed to have no therapeutic uses and a high potential for abuse.
In August, the Department of Health and Human Services — after conducting a scientific review — recommended that marijuana be moved to Schedule III. The Drug Enforcement Administration is now tasked with making the final decision, with that likely to come in the first half of next year.
While state marijuana markets would remain illegal at the federal level if it ultimately is moved to Schedule III, that would still mark the biggest change in federal drug policy in half a century.
If even Joe Biden — an octogenarian, old school drug warrior with a history of substance abuse problems in his family — is embracing looser restrictions on weed, the times truly have changed. |
