We wake to a
changed nation. Right now the difference between America on November
7 and November 9, 2016, feels as profound as the soul-wrenching split
between September 10 and September 12, 2001. It’s a rent in the
fabric of time.
For those of
us focused on the issue of cannabis legalization, last night’s
ballot results came as a magnificent shock. Five states
considered legalization, four voted on medical cannabis.
All but one—poor Arizona—approved those measures. Almost nobody
saw that coming.
These states
have approved regulated legalization: California (39 million people),
Massachusetts (7 million), Nevada (3 million), and Maine (1 million).
These states legalized medical cannabis: Florida (20 million),
Arkansas (3 million), Montana (1 million), and North Dakota
(750,000).
Those states
represent a total population of 75 million people.
The passage
of regulated legalization in Colorado and Washington in 2012 felt
like a door opening, ever so slightly. The results of November 2016
blew that door off its hinges and into the next room.
Consider
this: One in five Americans now live in a state where cannabis is
legal for adults 21 and older. One in five.
As President
Obama remarked late last week:
“The
Justice Department, DEA, FBI, for them to try to straddle and figure
out how they’re supposed to enforce laws in some places and not in
others, they’re going to guard against transporting these drugs
across state lines – you’ve got the entire Pacific Corridor where
this is legal. That is not going to be tenable.”
No, that is
not going to be tenable. And unless the federal government decides to
deploy the DEA and the FBI against twenty percent of the American
population, federal prohibition will not stand. It cannot stand.
For eighty
years, science and common sense have argued against the
criminalization of cannabis. Now the American public stands against
it.
There is a
rational and relatively easy way for prohibition to end: Follow the
alcohol precedent.
In 1933, when
the United States decided it was time to abandon the failed
experiment of capital-P Prohibition, Congress proposed the 21st
Amendment. It was extremely brief. It read, in its entirety:
Section 1.
The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United
States is hereby repealed.
Section 2.
The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or
possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of
intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby
prohibited.
Section 3.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified
as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several
States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the
date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
The key to
repeal was Section 2: The amendment actually outlawed the importation
of liquor into any state—but only if that act stood in violation of
state law. It was a tricky bit of lawyerly wordsmithing, but it
worked. It allowed members of Congress to cast a vote outlawing
alcohol while actually legalizing it.
Cannabis
prohibition can end similarly. A measure in Congress that prohibits
cannabis, except in states that allow it, could give legislators in
anti-cannabis districts the political cover to cast a favorable vote.
Let the states handle it. Most already do.
Of course, we
wake up to a different America in another sense as well. The shocking
election of Donald Trump has sent world financial markets tumbling,
thrown 49 percent of the American public into a painful state of
despair, and made the entire planet’s future plans seem tentative
at best.
Many issues
are larger than cannabis. We know this. Here at , we work every
day to inform our readers, and hopefully some policymakers, about
cannabis politics, biology, history, and culture. This is the good we
can do. It’s not curing cancer, but we believe it’s helping to
make the world—not just our home nation—a more just, rational,
kind, and healthy place. We think we’re doing some good here.
Whether the
election of Donald Trump allows us, and cannabis advocates
nationwide, the chance to expand knowledge and understanding, and
give millions of people the freedom to medicate or consume as they
please, is impossible to say.
We will stay
here and keep fighting to provide the world with factual, trustworthy
information about cannabis. We will continue to chronicle the
struggle to expand freedom around the world.
As correspondent
Paul Roberts shuffled out of a Prop. 64 viewing party in Oakland late
Tuesday night, a medical researcher who supported the successful
measure ruefully watched Donald Trump’s image on a screen. “The
primary reason that recreational use in Washington, Colorado, Oregon,
and Alaska hasn’t been shut down by the federal government is that
the Obama administration has chosen to look the other way.”
“But,”
he said, darting a glance at Trump, “what happens with him?”
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