Trump sends mixed message on pot
Marijuana industry pushes ahead despite an unclear future
America’s marijuana inDENVER dustry isn’t sure where President Trump and his attorney general stand on marijuana, but it is forging ahead with expansion plans anyway.
Cannabis businesses are hiring new workers, leasing new space and pushing across state borders. And regulators are drafting rules that will give access to legal recreational pot to tens of millions of adults.
The stakes are high: This is a job-generating industry that cannabis data firm New Frontier Data estimates could be worth $2.3 billion within three years.
“Far from the punchline of a joke, these are real people and real lives,” said Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, a Boulder Democrat who recently co-founded the prolegalization Congressional Cannabis Caucus.
The nation’s marijuana industry expanded rapidly under President Obama, whose administration laid out Justice Department priorities for targeting drug dealers. In short, the Obama administration said it would leave companies alone in states where voters approved recreational pot if the states took solid steps to keep marijuana away from kids and profits away from drug cartels.
Medical marijuana is reserved for people who have a doctor’s recommendation to use it to alleviate specific symptoms, while states that permit recreational use allow any adult to buy marijuana.
In states with licensed cannabis stores, it’s easy to forget those businesses sell a plant that remains an illegal Schedule 1 controlled substance under federal law. Federal prosecutors, if they choose, could easily arrest tens of thousands of people who have state licenses to grow and sell the drug, or even anyone walking out of a pot shop with a purchase. But they haven’t.
Trump’s administration might take a different tack, but so far, it has delivered conflicting messages. Last month, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the Justice Department would not use federal laws to prosecute medical marijuana users, in part because Congress has already banned it from doing so. But he drew a distinction between medical and recreational use.
“I do believe you’ll see greater enforcement” of federal laws against recreational marijuana use, he said. Then, in the same news conference, he suggested the matter wasn’t settled and referred reporters to the Justice Department for comment.
Shortly after, Attorney General Jeff Sessions seemed to suggest in a speech there’d be stricter enforcement in states with recreational marijuana. Members of Congress, including Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Cory Gardner, RColo., have said Sessions has privately reassured them that is not the case.
The whiplash from the shifting positions jostled the market. Marijuana stocks tracked by Viridian Capital Advisors had risen steadily all year — up about 25% — until the day Spicer spoke. Then, in the hours after his press conference, 80% of those marijuana-related stocks dropped. The next day, it got worse: 92% of the stocks dropped, said Viridian, which provides financial and data analyses to the cannabis industry.
Those stocks have now largely recovered, said Scott Greiper, Viridian’s president: “I think the industry is very comfortable operating in a harsh, uncertain environment. It’s just what we’re used to.” Viridian tracks the movement of 50 publicly traded cannabis companies that either are worth more than $10,000 each or see trading volume of $20,000 daily.
Decriminalizing marijuana has widespread support.
Voters in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia have approved laws allowing adults to grow and possess small amounts of recreational pot, though not every state has a functioning marketplace.
And a Quinnipiac University poll released last month found 71% of Americans would oppose efforts to enforce federal marijuana laws in those eight states. The poll also found 93% of voters support allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes, and 59% support making it legal for all purposes.
Many marijuana businesses had hoped Trump would at least maintain the Obama-era attitude, if not relax restrictions even further in a nod to states’ rights, job creation and personal liberty. On the campaign trail, Trump said he’d respect state laws that permit recreational pot.
Troy Dayton, CEO of the ArcView Group, which offers cannabis industry investment services and research, said the pot business also plays into Trump’s “America First” policy.
“This would be a really huge missed opportunity if we let other countries get ahead of us in something that is really ours to lose,” Dayton said. “The question is whether we want these to be American jobs — do we want these to be American companies, or do we want Canada and Germany and Colombia to take that market share?”
“Far from the punchline of a joke, these are real people and real lives.” Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, a Boulder Democrat who recently co-founded the pro-legalization Congressional Cannabis Caucus