Yes we cannabis
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, more neurotic nerd than chilled-out pothead, knows this much: As New York joins 16 other states (in which 43% of Americans live) to legalize adult-use cannabis, federal laws classifying marijuana as a dangerous narcotic and barring its interstate transport cannot stand.
Consider: Thanks to the egregiously out-of-date federal Controlled Substances Act, it will soon be legal to light up in both New York and New Jersey, yet a Salem County pot farmer won’t be allowed to sell his product to a Brooklyn retailer. Imagine if you could only drink beer brewed in your own state, from hops grown in your own state, when you bellied up to the bar.
Nor can a marijuana owner get a line of credit from most banks, since financial institutions are barred under federal law from facilitating illegal activity. Instead, they have to seek out capital from makeshift funding sources that inevitably wind up charging higher interest.
Even those worried that legalization might drive far more people to smoke to excess should back this reform. If the Drug Enforcement Administration finally stops listing cannabis as a Schedule I substance — which asserts, like heroin and ecstasy and LSD, it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse” — the feds could finally help create national standards for testing, labeling and marketing of the stuff. That’s especially important at a time when the cannabis now available is far more potent than it was a generation ago, a little like absinthe displacing beer.
More than two-thirds of Americans support ending cannabis prohibition and repairing the many harms it has visited on the Black and Brown Americans disproportionately arrested, prosecuted and locked up for crimes related to using and selling it. You don’t have to be an enthusiastic member of the new marijuana majority — President Biden is allied with many Republicans in resisting legalization — to believe that Washington must stop being at loggerheads with states choosing to swim with the tide.