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Cannabis Green Light
“We are clearly on the path to decriminalizing marijuana. You know it’s going to happen, we are on a glide path now,” said former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who served under President Barack Obama. “We need to move marijuana from Schedule I so research can be done,” he said. “It is classified now on the same level as heroin is, and clearly that is inappropriate.”
In the midst of a discussion about drug laws in the United States, the former top legal official in the nation revealed that he is in favor of drug reform, such as “doing away with” mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses, and he approves of the increasingly common leniency for nonaddictive substances like marijuana.
Holder’s progressive stance is what allowed the state-legal cannabis industry to sprout. Following the successful legalization effort in Colorado and Washington in 2012, the Department of Justice (DOJ) was required to determine how the federal government would react. Indeed, the marijuana being sold and grown in those two states was still illegal in the eyes of the federal government, and the DOJ could have chosen to crush opposition and enforce federal law by banning weed in Colorado and Washington.
Instead, Eric Holder’s office released what would be known as the Cole Memo, named after James Cole, Holder’s Deputy Attorney General. The memo gives guidance to all legal officials throughout the United States regarding how they should enforce marijuana laws. Holder’s DOJ chose leniency and a hands-off approach, electing to grant states the right of self-determination.
This highlights the importance of a good Attorney General. When President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, came into power, he overturned the Cole Memo. Instead, states have had to rely on an amendment on appropriation bills, today known as the Blumenauer-McClintock-Norton-Lee amendment, which has been repeatedly passed by Congress since 2014 to block the DOJ from using funds to interfere with state laws regarding cannabis—a flimsy protection that does not change cannabis statutes and needs to be renewed every year. Sessions’ successor, William Barr, went on to abuse DOJ powers to attack the legal cannabis industry due to personal animosity against it, which led to a call for impeaching Barr.
Merrick Garland Could Decriminalize Cannabis
Once Donald Trump lost reelection, Barr was replaced by current Attorney General Merrick Garland, who now holds immense sway over the federal government’s stance on cannabis. As such, senators have addressed an open letter demanding that Garland tackle cannabis reform personally.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker allege that Garland could simply wave away the criminalization of marijuana with existing DOJ powers in a letter addressed to him earlier this month. “Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA), the Attorney General can remove a substance from the CSA’s list, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Decriminalizing cannabis at the federal level via this descheduling process would allow states to regulate cannabis as they see fit, begin to remedy the harm caused by decades of racial disparities in enforcement of cannabis laws, and facilitate valuable medical research,” the letter reads. “You can act now to decriminalize cannabis.”
“He [President Joe Biden] declared that ‘nobody should be in jail for smoking marijuana.’ This position is in step with the vast majority of the country: approximately 91% of adults in the United States believe that cannabis should be legal,” the senators continue, pointing out truthfully that every day spent without cannabis reform is a day when Biden failed to address a key campaign promise. The executive branch has the power to deschedule cannabis without congressional approval. Garland requires a medical examination from the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) (currently Xavier Becerra), and only from the HSS secretary, in order to initiate the decriminalization of marijuana.
Under President Obama, then-Attorney General Eric Holder protected states’ rights, but he did not attempt to further cannabis reform, which earned Holder a great amount of criticism from activists and the cannabis industry. Now, after he left the seat of power, Holder explains that “drug policy is all about the politics,” saying that no official wants to embrace broad cannabis reform because they fear “to be seen or labeled as being soft on crime,” Holder said.
In their call to action, Sens. Warren and Booker requested a clear answer from Garland “no later than Wednesday, October 20.”
