After a years long, near-unopposed and near-perfect victory parade through the West and the Northeast, cannabis legalization is now on a losing streak.<\/p>\n
And now that the movement-turned-industry is staring at obstacles apparently isn\u2019t prepared to solve, anti-legalization prohibitionists are capitalizing. For\u00a0once, they have an honest point<\/a>\u00a0that commercial cannabis can\u2019t honestly counter: legalization hasn\u2019t really been all that good for the people it promised to help the most.<\/p>\n New Jersey<\/a>\u00a0Gov. Phil Murphy\u2019s campaign promise to legalize recreational marijuana in his first 100 days in office is now more than 365 days overdue. After state lawmakers abandoned this year\u2019s proposed legalization scheme earlier this spring, legalizing in 730 days is no guarantee.<\/p>\n Next door, in\u00a0New York State<\/a>, an industry-friendly legalization proposal floated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo as part of his annual budget proposal was also ditched after a revolt in the New York State Assembly. Lawmakers of color watched other states legalize on promises of \u201crighting the wrongs of the drug war\u201d only to watch cannabis become a well-capitalized white man\u2019s game \u2014 and decided that they had had enough of empty promises and wanted a guarantee.<\/p>\n \u201cThey thought we were going to trust that at the end of the day, these communities would be invested in,\u201d said Assembly Leader Cheryl Peoples-Stokes in a March\u00a0New York Times interview.<\/a>\u00a0\u201cBut that\u2019s not something I want to trust.\u201d<\/p>\n Now\u00a0Illinois<\/a>\u00a0Gov. J.B. Pritzker is hoping he has the secret sauce. Like his counterpart in New Jersey, Illinois\u2019s first-term governor, sworn in this year, also promised to legalize marijuana on the campaign trail. Earlier this month, Pritzker\u2019s allies in the state legislature unveiled a proposal that would legalize possession of up to 30 grams of cannabis for anyone 21 or over, expunge low-level cannabis convictions, and also set up a low-interest loan program for people of color interested in joining the cannabis industry.<\/p>\n But as the Chicago Tribune reported,<\/a>\u00a0like his counterparts in New York and New Jersey, Pritzker \u2014 a hereditary billionaire whose also-wealthy relatives, scions to the Hilton hotels family fortune, helped fund Prop. 64 in California, one of the successful legalization ballot initiatives \u2014 is also having a tough time winning over lawmakers of color, who are also wary of legalization\u2019s overpromises.<\/p>\n Never one to waste a crisis, familiar faces like Smart Approaches to Marijuana, arguably the nation\u2019s most prominent anti-legalization group, have arrived on the scene. SAM is known for its willingness to lie or dial up outrage \u2014 last fall, Kevin Sabet, SAM\u2019s founder and director, told a Kentucky state legislature committee the old \u201cfentanyl in cannabis<\/a>\u201d fib \u2014 but for once they\u2019re right on.<\/p>\n As per the\u00a0Tribune:<\/p>\n Abu Edwards, national director for Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said the proposal benefits \u201cwhite men in suits who work on Wall Street.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThis is about creating a big business that African-Americans are not going to have the capital to get into,\u201d said Edwards, who is African-American. \u201cIt\u2019s not about a person smoking a joint, this about big corporate greed coming into our communities and benefiting off of addiction in our communities.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Well \u2014 and he\u2019s\u00a0mostly<\/em>\u00a0right! Cannabis isn\u2019t very addictive and certainly is not very addictive compared to other drugs. Nationwide, only 138,000 people sought help for cannabis use in 2015,\u00a0according to the National Institutes on Drug Abuse<\/a>; compare that to the estimated 2.5 million Americans\u00a0who have an opiate-use problem.<\/a><\/p>\n But it\u2019s hard to argue the \u201cbig corporate greed\u201d point. Consolidation and corporatization is absolutely happening. Former House Speaker John Boehner, who hated weed until he realized he could make money off of it, is selling cannabis stock tips and taking huge fees to lobby Congress. The point is particularly hard to argue in Illinois, where several existing big-time medical-marijuana companies\u00a0have been lobbying Prtizker<\/a>\u00a0to get first and only dibs in the recreational market.<\/p>\n Pritzker appears to get it. His proposal has the automatic expunging of past offenses, which is a step up from states like California, where jurisdictions like San Francisco had to hire coders to write algorithms to do the expunging. And some kind of equity program for entrepreneurs baked into the bill is also an improvement. Will it work? Remains to be seen, but in the meantime, the cannabis industry has absolutely given its opponents an opening. It\u2019s not just and it\u2019s not equitable, and it needs to address this in a hurry if it wants to be taken seriously \u2014 and resume its once inevitable-looking winning ways.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you think the cannabis industry can ever be fair?<\/p>\n The post What Cannabis Legalization Opponents Have Right<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
After a years long, near-unopposed and near-perfect victory parade through the West and the Northeast, cannabis legalization is now on a losing streak. And now that the movement-turned-industry is staring at obstacles apparently isn\u2019t prepared to solve, anti-legalization prohibitionists are capitalizing. For\u00a0once, they have an honest point\u00a0that commercial cannabis can\u2019tContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,216,1051,119,215,3584,5454,319],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35452"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35452"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35453,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35452\/revisions\/35453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: What Cannabis Legalization Opponents Have Right<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"