Two candidates signaled to liberalizing standards about cannabis in the United States on Wednesday—one expected, one a little more shocking. In the latter case, Senator Ted Cruz offered, in the midst of the GOP debate, to purchase CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla “some famous Colorado brownies.”
In the meantime, across the country in Virginia, Senator Bernie Sanders called for the federal government to remove its prohibition on cannabis. However Sanders has long called for decriminalization, and he took a step further in remarks at George Mason University Wednesday.
“The time is long overdue for us to take marijuana off the federal government’s list of outlawed drugs,” he stated. “In my view, states should have the right to regulate marijuana the same way that state and local laws now govern sales of alcohol and tobacco.”
What’s intriguing about Sanders’s proposition is that it is at once radical and at the same time would simply approve much of what’s already happening throughout the United States, where states have already started liberalizing laws without waiting for Washington’s approval, and voter support for marijuana legalization is currently well past the 50-percent mark.
Sanders’s call was applauded by marijuana campaigners, and it’s the most powerful statement any presidential candidate in this race has made on the issue of legal marijuana. Hillary Clinton also has not suggested removing marijuana from the federal schedule of substances.
As The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham documents, removing the federal ban on getting lifted would have a major effect on how “canna-business” works. Marijuana shops and distributors normally can not get access to financial institutes, even in states where pot is legal because the banks are wary of falling afoul of federal laws. (A great Planet Money episode goes into more detail on all the complications.) Marijuana businesses would be able to apply for tax breaks, as well.
On a regulatory level, lifting the federal ban would allow people to conduct research into the effects of marijuana, which are not completely understood, to expand. And it would help taxpayers put away a nice stack of money since the Drug Enforcement Agency would terminate its expensive and generally ineffective marijuana-eradication program.
In some shocking ways, though, de-scheduling marijuana would just make federal law match the current reality in many places—after all, recreational use is already allowed in Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska, as well as D.C. Currently, these states and the ones that allow medical marijuana to exist on a shaky middle ground with the federal government. As of this past year, the DEA is also not supposed to be raiding medical-marijuana providers, though a federal judge recently reprimanded the agency for doing so anyway.
Even as federal laws describe a regime that doesn’t really exist anymore, even more states are taking up legalization. An amazing 17 more states are likely to vote in 2016.
Sanders is often accused of standing in favor radical policies, and he will report that when Americans are polled on specific concerns, majorities tend to side with him on matters from taxation to family leave.
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