A large majority of Americans – 70%, according to the latest Gallup poll – support the legalization of marijuana, and this sentiment is particularly strong among younger voters. Gallup found that 79% of young people aged 18 to 34 believe marijuana should be legal, compared to 64% of adults aged 55 and older. Similarly, a Pew Research Center survey found that support for legalization was inversely related to age. It makes sense, then, that President Joe Biden, who has generated little enthusiasm among Americans of any age group, would seek to motivate young voters by touting his support for “marijuana reform.”
The problem for Biden, a longtime drug warrior who now presents himself as a reformer, is that his position on marijuana is far from repealing federal prohibition, which is what most Americans say they want. His outreach efforts have clumsily obscured this point, as illustrated by a video that Vice President Kamala Harris posted on X (formerly Twitter) earlier this month.
“In 2020,” Harris writes in her introduction, “young voters showed up in record numbers to make a difference. Let’s do it again in 2024.” The video highlights “the largest investment in climate action in history,” the cancellation of “$132 billion in student debt,” “the first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years,” and $7 billion grant dollars for historically black colleges and universities. Then Harris says this: “We changed federal marijuana policy, because no one should go to prison just for smoking weed.” This gloss is misleading in several ways.
Biden hasn’t actually “changed federal marijuana policy.” His two big moves in this area were mass pardons for people convicted of simple possession under federal law and a directive that could soon lead to removing marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a supposedly reserved category to drugs with a high potential for abuse. and no recognized medical uses that cannot be used safely even under the supervision of a doctor, to Schedule III, which includes prescription drugs such as ketamine, Tylenol with codeine, and anabolic steroids.
Although Harris, echoing Biden, claims that “no one should go to prison just for smoking weed,” this rarely happens. Biden’s pardon, which excluded people convicted of growing or distributing marijuana, did not free a single prisoner and applied to a small portion of possession cases, which are generally prosecuted under state law.
When he announced the pardon in October 2022, Biden noted that “criminal records for marijuana possession” create “unnecessary barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities.” But his graces do not remove those barriers. They do not result in the expungement of marijuana records, which is not currently possible under federal law. The certificates that pardon recipients can obtain may carry weight with landlords or employers, but there is no guarantee that they will.
Biden’s pardon also did not change federal law, which still treats simple possession of marijuana as a misdemeanor punishable by a minimum $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. So people can still be arrested for marijuana possession under federal law, even if they are unlikely to serve time for that crime (which would be true with or without Biden’s pardon). The pardons announced by Biden on October 6, 2022, applied only to crimes committed “before the date of this proclamation.” When he expanded the pardon to December 22, 2023, that became the new deadline.
Marijuana use can still disqualify people from federal housing and food assistance. Under immigration law, marijuana convictions still pose a barrier to admission, legal residency and citizenship. And cannabis users, even if they live in states that have legalized marijuana, are still prohibited from possessing firearms under 18 USC 922(g)(3), which applies to any “unlawful user” of a ” controlled substance”.
The Biden administration has doggedly defended the latter policy against Second Amendment challenges in federal court, where government lawyers have likened cannabis users to dangerous criminals and “lunatics.” What’s worse, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, which increased the maximum prison sentence for gun-owning marijuana users from 10 to 15 years and created a new potential charge against them, which at the same time way can be punished up to 15 years late. bars. This is the same law that Harris touts as “the first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years.”
In short, Biden has neither “decriminalized”.[d] marijuana use” nor “automatically delete[d] all convictions of marijuana use,” as Harris promised on the campaign trail. Both of these steps would require congressional action that Biden has done little to promote.
What about reprogramming? A recent survey commissioned by the Coalition for Cannabis Scheduling Reform, Marijuana moment reports, found that “voters’ impression of the president increased by a net 11 points” after being informed about the “implications of the rescheduling review initiated by the president.” This included “an 11-point shift in favorability among young voters between 18 and 25,” who “will be critical to his re-election bid.”
But let’s not get too excited. Since the rescheduling has not yet occurred, it is also not true that Biden has “changed federal marijuana policy” in this area. And assuming the Drug Enforcement Administration moves marijuana to Schedule III, as the Department of Health and Human Services recommended last August in response to Biden’s directive, the practical impact would be limited. The rescheduling would facilitate medical research and allow state-licensed marijuana suppliers to deduct business expenses when filing federal tax returns, which is currently prohibited under Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code.
Even after rescheduling, however, marijuana businesses would remain criminal enterprises under federal law, making it difficult for them to obtain financial services and putting them at risk of prosecution and asset forfeiture. For businesses that serve recreational consumers, prosecutorial discretion is the only protection against that risk. Cannabis users would still not have the legally recognized right to own guns, and people working in the cannabis industry would still face other disabilities under federal law, including dire consequences for the lives of immigrants. Rescheduling would not even make marijuana legally available as a prescription medicine, which would require approval of specific products by the Food and Drug Administration.
In other words, in response to overwhelming public support for marijuana legalization, Biden has made modest moves that leave federal prohibition largely intact. While he doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally erase marijuana, he also can’t support legislation that would do so. Why not?
During the 2020 campaign, Biden echoed seven decades of anti-pot propaganda, saying he was concerned that marijuana could be a “gateway” to other, more dangerous drugs. “The truth is that there hasn’t been enough evidence to establish whether or not this is a gateway drug,” he said. “It’s a debate, and I want a lot more before we legalize it nationwide. I want to make sure we know a lot more about the science behind this… It’s not irrational to do more scientific investigation to determine, which we don’t have done in a meaningful enough way, whether or not there are things related to whether it’s a gateway drug or not.”
After Biden took office, his press secretary confirmed that his thinking had not changed. “He talked about it during the election campaign,” he said. “He believes in the decriminalization of the use of marijuana, but his position has not changed.”
Biden’s rationale for opposing legalization is the same line of argument that Harry J. Anslinger, who headed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, began making in the early 1950s after retracting his oft-repeated claim according to which marijuana causes homicidal madness. “More than 50 percent of the young ones [heroin] addicts started smoking marijuana,” he told a congressional committee in 1951. “They started there and moved on to heroin; they took the needle when the thrill of marijuana was gone.”
Anslinger reiterated this point four years later when he testified in favor of harsher penalties for marijuana-related crimes. “As we debate marijuana,” one senator said, “the real danger is that marijuana use will lead many people eventually to heroin use.” Anslinger agrees: “That’s the big problem and our big concern about marijuana use, which ultimately, if used over a long period, leads to heroin addiction.”
Since then, a great deal of research has examined this issue, which is complicated by confounding variables that make the distinction between correlation and causation elusive. However, Biden believes that “more scientific investigations” will reach a definitive conclusion. If he won’t support legalization until we know for sure whether marijuana is a “gateway drug,” he will never support legalization.
The seemingly reformed drug warrior’s intransigence on this issue presents an obvious challenge to Harris, a late advocate for legalization who is trying to persuade like-minded voters that Biden is likable. Marijuana moment reports that Harris’ staff recently reached out to marijuana pardon recipients, “seeking assurances that the Justice Department’s certification process is proceeding smoothly and engaging in broader discussions about cannabis policy reform.”
According to Chris Goldstein, a marijuana activist who was pardoned for a drug possession conviction in 2014, the vice president’s men understand this. Goldstein was “surprised by how up-to-date and kind everyone was,” he said Marijuana moment. “His staff really knew the difference between rescheduling [and] programming, and they were interested in talking about it.”
No doubt Biden understands the difference, too. The problem is that he supports the former but not the latter, which he rejects for Anslinger reasons. Cheerful campaign videos can’t mask this reality.