Biden can change the way we think about marijuana
As he has on so much else, President Joe Biden has evolved on the issue of marijuana as the years have passed and American society has changed. But maybe not fast enough, as the Daily Beast reports:
“Dozens of young White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign, or placed in a remote work program due to past marijuana use, frustrating staffers who were pleased by initial indications from the Biden administration that recreational use of cannabis would not be immediately disqualifying for would-be personnel, according to three people familiar with the situation.”
This is almost certainly not a crackdown directed by the president himself; the more likely culprit is institutional inertia, in which longstanding policies are slow to change even as the world outside the organization does.
But what it shows is that the federal government is in many ways still gripped by an anti-cannabis ideology that has more in common with 1936’s “Reefer Madness” than the real world of 2021.
It’s overdue for an overhaul. And Biden is just the man for the job.
We have an extraordinary mismatch between, on the one hand, what most Americans believe about cannabis and how many laws around it are rapidly changing, and on the other hand, the way employers, including the federal government and the White House, continue to treat it.
As a public, we’re moving toward consensus that marijuana is, if not for everyone, a drug that people should be able to use if they wish without fear of legal repercussions. In terms of consequences like addiction and violence, it’s far less dangerous than alcohol, which supports a legal industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
While as recently as the 1990s only a quarter of Americans thought marijuana should be legalized, that number has steadily risen; in a Gallup poll late last year, 68 percent said it should be legal.
A big part of the reason is that as time has gone on, more and more of the population have experience with it and know that smoking a joint won’t fry your brain like an egg.
Every year the federal government does a big survey on what drugs people have used, both recently and over their lifetimes. In the 2019 data, 49.2% of Americans over 18 said they had used marijuana at some point (and given that some people will be reluctant to admit that to an interviewer, the real number is almost certainly higher). Which of course includes people in every industry and walk of life, including politics.
There are now 15 states (plus the District of Columbia) where marijuana is legal for recreational use, and 36 states that have legalized medical marijuana. Legalization ballot measures have won overwhelmingly in red, blue, and purple states. The House passed a federal reform measure last year, and Senate Democrats say they want to do the same.
Perhaps most importantly, the heart of the anti-marijuana ideology – the idea that smoking it even once leaves an indelible mark on you as a moral reprobate, a dangerous criminal, or a potential traitor to your country – now strikes most Americans as preposterous.
Yet employer drug testing remains an incredibly large and lucrative industry, one that grew out of the “Just Say No” era in the 1980s. While it has declined somewhat in recent years, it’s still prevalent in workplaces across the country; according to this 2018 survey, 63 percent of employers used drug testing as part of screening for prospective employees.
That includes the federal government, where it’s as though J.Edgar Hoover wrote the regulations they still operate under, driven by the belief that anyone who ever smoked pot must be some kind of comsymp who might sell America out to the Reds.
Which brings us to Biden. If you asked the president whether he thinks that one of his staffers who used marijuana a decade or a year ago poses a risk to the public as they compile a report on soybean yields for an upcoming trade summit, I’m sure he’d say no. That’s despite the fact that he probably never smoked it himself, as someone who was already a practicing lawyer with a wife and child at home when the kids gathered at Woodstock in 1969.
But while he might not exactly be on the forefront of progressive thinking when it comes to changing views about cannabis, in the 2020 campaign it looked he was catching up.
While many of the other Democratic presidential candidates called for full legalization of cannabis, Biden was more cautious. He advocated removing federal criminal penalties, leaving the decision on legalizing it for recreational use to states, and moving marijuana from Schedule 1, which classifies it as “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” to Schedule 2, which would still classify it as dangerous but make research easier to conduct.
As on other issues, the “moderate” position Biden took represented a significant shift from the thinking of just a few years before. He may still be behind where most Americans are, but he’s moving in the right direction.
Which is why he has the credibility to create a change in White House policy, one that can be a model for the rest of the government and eventually private companies as well. He can say that he now understands that there’s no reason to assume that if someone has used cannabis in the past then they can’t do their jobs with competence and integrity.
The next step would be to say that not only should the White House stop asking about past marijuana use on its background check, it should drop testing for it altogether, especially since it’s legal in the District of Columbia and a test can show use that occurred weeks prior.
That would be a revolutionary thing for Biden to advocate. But he’s shown that he can change with the times, even in ways that surprise people, and he has a way of making his shifts seem eminently sensible. It’s time for him to do it again.