Joe Biden is not, apparently, courting the American pothead contingent. The former Vice President and (somehow) current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President announced his "Justice" policy today, and sandwiched along with some decent proposals (e.g., end all incarceration for drug possession, eliminate the death penalty, end cash bail, and release prisoners facing long sentences for some non-violent crimes) there is this:
Decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions. Biden believes no one should be in jail because of cannabis use. As president, he will decriminalize cannabis use and automatically expunge prior convictions. And, he will support the legalization of cannabis for medical purposes, leave decisions regarding legalization for recreational use up to the states, and reschedule cannabis as a schedule II drug so researchers can study its positive and negative impacts.
He's right about one thing: No one should be in jail for smoking weed. But then he fucks it all up by favoring cannabis decriminalization instead of federal legalization. This would allow states to continue legalizing recreational weed on their own, and while many of them are choosing to go forth (at least 11 states and counting have legalized recreational weed and another 21 have legalized medical), it would still penalize people in some back-assward states that decline to legalize recreational cannabis.
By leaving this up to the states, each individual state can come up with its own rules and regulations. This is the situation we have now, and while it's obviously a huge improvement over the total prohibition weed, it's still not ideal. It's not unlike rules governing alcohol, which are widely inconsistent from county to county and state to state. In Alabama, for instance, you can't buy beers over 16 ounces so growlers and 40s are out. In Pennsylvania, you can't buy beer or wine at the grocery store. In parts of Minnesota, stores padlock all the regular beer coolers late at night and only sell beer with low alcohol by volume.
Without federal legalization, states where the politicians oppose cannabis—and there are still a lot of them—will have no reason to ever legalize weed. This will harm consumers who can't access regulated legal weed markets, and it'll mean that the black market continues to thrive. This already happens, as anyone who's bought a vape pen stamped "This product is illegal outside the state of California" outside the state of California can attest, and it means that states who refuse to legalize cannabis won't get any of the revenue that comes along with the recreational market. And that revenue is not insignificant. Washington state alone brought in nearly $320 million in legal weed money in 2017.
Joe is trying, I'll give him that, but when it comes to cannabis, he's far behind the 19 other candidates who've called for legalization. There is, however, one other candidate running for President who has also declined to endorse federally legalizing this plant, and it's one I doubt Biden (or any Democrat) wants to be compared to: Donald Trump.
