Legal & RegulationsArticle02 May, 2022

Federal marijuana legalization is stopped in its tracks

Public opinion, states, and even the GOP have come around to the idea of legal weed. So how hard is it to finally get done?

Part of the Drugs Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

It has been nearly a decade since the first time a majority of Americans supported legalizing cannabis. Two years ago, that number reached a record high, according to Gallup, with 68 percent supporting marijuana legalization — a number that has held steady since. That same year, as the coronavirus pandemic engulfed the country in March 2020, medical marijuana businesses were declared essential, allowing them to remain open along with pharmacies and grocery stores. It was a triumph for legalization advocates. As the New York Times reported, it was “official recognition that for some Americans, cannabis is as necessary as milk and bread.”

Cannabis is one of the fastest-growing industries in the US; sales of adult-use and medical marijuana products hit $25 billion in 2021 and, by one Wall Street estimate, could reach $100 billion by 2030. Eighteen states have legalized cannabis for adult use, and another 19 currently have at least a comprehensive medical marijuana program. As of 2020, one in three Americans lived in a state with access to legal marijuana, according to Politico, and that number is quickly growing as the East Coast catches up with the West — last year, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia all passed adult-use cannabis laws, joining Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Rhode Island lawmakers are expected to approve a legalization bill this month.

However, under the federal Controlled Substances Act, marijuana remains classified as a Schedule 1 illegal drug with no medical uses, on par with heroin and LSD. The Drug Enforcement Agency strictly limits marijuana cultivation for research, frustrating scientists who are unable to investigate its medical benefits and risks under current regulations.

Rescheduling marijuana for research was an oft-repeated promise of President Joe Biden’s campaign, along with a pledge to decriminalize the use of cannabis and grant clemency to people with federal marijuana convictions.

But after more than one year in office, Biden’s promises remain unfulfilled — and a January YouGov poll of 1,500 people showed that more than half of Americans believe that the Biden administration has made little to no progress advancing marijuana reform. The administration even screened staffers for marijuana use last year, dismissing several incoming candidates because they revealed they’d used cannabis during background checks for positions in the Biden White House. Just this month, employee conduct guidelines were updated to potentially deny security clearance to people who have invested in cannabis companies. All in all, the Biden administration seems to be pretty anti-weed.

Critics of legal marijuana cite the potential for confusion among law enforcement agencies keeping up with evolving regulations, concern about minors gaining access to the drug, a potential drop in property values, and more for maintaining marijuana’s status as an illicit drug. (Though it looks like legal cannabis can actually increase property values.)

Legal cannabis, however, also presents a tremendous financial opportunity, and despite federal inaction, the industry is growing fast; a report from the cannabis website Leafly shows there are more than 428,000 full-time jobs in the cannabis industry, with a 33 percent increase in jobs just last year. Even so, the fallout from the lack of federal legalization is felt by many sectors of society: Medical research is stalled, prisoners are languishing in jails, small businesses are going under without access to federal banking, and big cannabis companies face stiff challenges in raising money to stay afloat as long as marijuana is illegal under federal law.

However, as more states move to decriminalize and legalize cannabis, and as the economic benefits of a legal marijuana industry become apparent, it seems likely that we’ve passed the point of no return on the road to federal legalization. So why hasn’t the federal government been able to unify to enact cannabis legalization nationwide?

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