Last week, President Joe Biden delivered a truly historic moment. During the State of the Union address, he mentioned cannabis in what was, best I can tell, the first time a president has said anything remotely pro-cannabis during that speech.
"No one should be jailed for using or possessing marijuana," Biden said during the speech to the assembled members of his Cabinet, both houses of Congress and most of the Supreme Court justices.
A tweet from the president's account saying the same thing has been liked over 104,000 times as of Monday. (The tweet sent from his account just two minutes prior, addressing the climate crisis, has less than 6,000 likes, for comparison.)
That's a very big statement, and it's clearly popular. It's something to take seriously, though it may be a bit premature to get excited just yet.
Biden has been slowly and steadily transforming his views on cannabis since winning election in 2020. During that year's campaign, in a very crowded Democratic primary field, Biden was the lone candidate who did not come out in favor of legalization.
As president, Biden has come to embrace cannabis. In fall 2022 he announced that his administration would look into the legal status of cannabis at the federal level, a process that is still ongoing. He also announced that he would be pardoning people convicted for simple cannabis possession at the federal level.
Those pardons impacted an estimated 6,500 people. A big number, but a drop in the bucket when it comes to the total number of people in the United States with nonviolent cannabis convictions.
Biden could have done more, but he stopped short after an impactful but largely symbolic move. Now he's saying that, if we take him at his word, he thinks more needs to be done.
What he says is big, no doubt, but what he does can be bigger.
But first he has to overcome resistance from throughout the government, including his own White House.
Reporting from the Wall Street Journal found pushback on Biden's push from officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration — they're literal narcs, so that's not surprising.
But just days after his State of the Union remarks, Biden's own administration released a budget proposal that, according to Marijuana Moment's analysis, would maintain Washington, D.C.'s prohibition on cannabis sales, despite the fact that D.C. voters legalized cannabis nearly a decade ago. ♦
