{"id":56485,"date":"2022-08-11T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-11T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2022\/08\/11\/just-what-is-joe-bidens-marijuana-policy\/"},"modified":"2022-08-11T08:45:19","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T16:45:19","slug":"just-what-is-joe-bidens-marijuana-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2022\/08\/11\/just-what-is-joe-bidens-marijuana-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Just What Is Joe Biden\u2019s Marijuana Policy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s unfair and inaccurate to say that\u00a0nobody<\/em>\u00a0likes President Joe Biden. After all, his disapproval rating is \u201conly\u201d 55.6% according to the most recent FiveThirtyEight analysis\u2014but that\u2019s cold comfort. Along with the increasing number of Democrats so disenchanted that they think Biden should only serve one term, it\u2019s undeniable that the forty-sixth president has also deeply disappointed and angered drug-policy reform advocates, as well as most anyone connected with the marijuana legalization movement and\/or the cannabis industry.<\/p>\n

All this was true before last Thursday, when WNBA star and erstwhile\u00a0Russian league player Brittney Griner<\/a>\u00a0was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison, her punishment for the cannabis oil cartridges discovered in her luggage at a Moscow airport during a February search.\u00a0In a statement<\/a>, the president condemned the situation as \u201cunacceptable\u201d and demanded Griner\u2019s release\u2014and then was greeted by an avalanche of blowback from cannabis advocates.<\/p>\n

They\u00a0(rightfully) pointed out<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0you can still receive a lifetime prison sentence for cannabis possession<\/a>\u00a0in America, and that\u00a0beyond a throwaway one-line quote in July<\/a>, Biden hasn\u2019t done anything to advance federal cannabis policy reform in his 18 months in the White House.<\/p>\n

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Dear President Biden: Free Brittney Griner but equally free all the men & women who should be free if marijuana laws in the US were retroactive. https:\/\/t.co\/TA2OBzC0NS<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jake Paul (@jakepaul) August 4, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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President Joe Biden condemned a Russian court’s nine-year sentence for American basketball player Brittney Griner over cannabis vapes\u2014but advocates are asking why he’s not doing more to free marijuana prisoners in the US despite campaign pledges to do so.https:\/\/t.co\/2GghECVcbO<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/Zx9n7nGC2x<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Tom Angell \"🌳\"\"📰\"\u24e5 (@tomangell) August 4, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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Biden: U.S. Won\u2019t Rest Until Brittney Griner Returned Home To Serve Marijuana Possession Sentence https:\/\/t.co\/jZCW29rgGO<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/25R4ykxLoT<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 The Onion (@TheOnion) August 4, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

But is it fair to hate on Joe Biden for not breaking the Constitution (and opening himself up to hostile Supreme Court challenges) for not legalizing cannabis, something\u00a0law experts recently told Cannabis Now<\/a>\u00a0he almost certainly cannot do?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe not, but at the same time, observers contacted for this article struggled to identify a coherent White House drug-policy reform policy\u2014and could name several setbacks and disappointments that preceded any Griner-related hypocrisy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Less Talk, More Action Needed<\/h4>\n

In July, six progressive US senators\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0the president to start moving on granting promised clemency to nonviolent cannabis prisoners\u2014and by the end of the month,\u00a0all the White House could muster<\/a>\u00a0was some version of, \u201cWe\u2019re working on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not getting what we need at the federal level, at all,\u201d said Justin Dye, chairman and CEO of dispensary chain Schwazze, which has locations in Colorado and New Mexico. \u201cI think the Biden Administration and the Democrats had a real opportunity over the last two years to get something done and win over a number of voters in favor of cannabis\u2014and they didn\u2019t do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

And when the White House\u00a0has<\/em>\u00a0done something on weed, it\u2019s usually bad. Lobbyists and members of activist circles in Washington D.C. pointed out some unforced errors, such as purging the White House of low-level staffers\u00a0who committed the crime of honest and copped to smoking cannabis<\/a>\u00a0on questionnaires during his first few months in office\u2014and then following that up with a 2022 directive discouraging employees from even owning stock\u00a0in publicly-traded cannabis companies.<\/a>\u00a0All that makes some wonder whether Biden even truly wants to decriminalize, and whether that wasn\u2019t just a campaign line cooked up to shut up progressives whose preferred candidates endorsed legalization.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes he really believe in decriminalization? Nobody really knows,\u201d said one national-level observer, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A Familiar Stalemate<\/strong><\/h4>\n

At the same time, expecting Biden to solve the legalization question is to fail Civics 101. After all, making and changing laws (that would include the Controlled Substances Act)\u00a0is Congress\u2019s job<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re waiting for Congress to put legislation on his desk\u2014after all, that\u2019s the way things are supposed to work,\u201d said Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association. NCIA advocates for smaller businesses, and has been waiting in vain for the Senate to pass a version of the banking reform bills that have repeatedly passed the House of Representatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine a world in which that isn\u2019t signed into law,\u201d said Smith, who added that in most worlds\u2014including ours\u2014even modest cannabis policy reform would be an enormous nonpartisan win.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For that familiar stalemate, Smith and others blame the intractable United States Senate more than the White House. And anyone keeping score would note that compared to President Donald Trump, whose first attorney general, former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, put the industry on red alert with vague threats to prosecute state-legal businesses, Biden\u2019s approach has at least been lawful neutral.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He hasn\u2019t interfered with state-legal businesses; he hasn\u2019t sent federal law enforcement after anyone obeying state law; and legalization continues to spread across the United States without any federal interference.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Biden has indeed thus far failed to\u00a0fulfill a campaign promise<\/a>\u00a0to decriminalize marijuana and failed to free federal cannabis prisoners (though how many\u00a0federal<\/em>\u00a0cannabis prisoners there are is unclear;\u00a0as WeedWeek found<\/a>, it\u2019s probably way less than 40,000; most people in trouble for marijuana in America are punished under\u00a0state\u00a0<\/em>law, which federal decriminalization would likely not affect.)<\/p>\n

Maybe pinning hopes on Biden to legalize cannabis by fiat was naive and wishful thinking. Other observers have said that when confronted with a full plate of COVID-19, an infrastructure bill, climate change, and military conflicts in Afghanistan and now Ukraine, Biden simply does not have the time, energy or ability to make strides on cannabis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCriminal justice reform is not a place where the president is going to try to spend political capital,\u201d as Andrew Sidman, a political science professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice,\u00a0told PolitiFact.<\/a><\/p>\n

Joe Biden would not be the first president to fail to deliver on a campaign promise. Guantanamo Bay is still open and there isn\u2019t a wall separating Mexico from the United States, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Still, if Joe Biden does have a clear idea what he wants to do on the extremely popular issue of federal cannabis legalization, he is doing a tremendous job keeping it a state secret\u2014and, unless it\u2019s \u201cdo nothing,\u201d he\u2019s also not getting it done.<\/p>\n

The post Just What Is Joe Biden\u2019s Marijuana Policy?<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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It\u2019s unfair and inaccurate to say that\u00a0nobody\u00a0likes President Joe Biden. After all, his disapproval rating is \u201conly\u201d 55.6% according to the most recent FiveThirtyEight analysis\u2014but that\u2019s cold comfort. Along with the increasing number of Democrats so disenchanted that they think Biden should only serve one term, it\u2019s undeniable that theContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":56486,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,13039,5290,8751,65,81,14846,3332],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56485"}],"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=56485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56487,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56485\/revisions\/56487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}