The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) was patting itself on the back with gusto last week in publicizing it is prosecuting alleged drug kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang upon his extradition from Mexico. The prosecution is a really big deal in the US government’s effort to win the war on drugs according to the assertions of several government employees in the DOJ press release.
Tag: legalization
Marijuana is still illegal under United States law, as it was before the waves through states to first legalize marijuana for medical use and then adopt, starting in 2012, “recreational marijuana” legalization. Faced with this expanding of respect for free choice, the US government has backed off in large part, scaling down its war on marijuana effort.
In October of 2022, I wrote about the underwhelming nature of President Joe Biden’s pardons for some people convicted of marijuana offenses. What Biden proclaimed was a big rollback in the war on marijuana was really much less. The same goes for the new effort by the Biden administration to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.
Earlier this month, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) related that its tabulating of state court actions across America has produced the estimate that, since 2018, state courts have expunged, or sealed, marijuana-related records from 2.3 million cases.
High taxes and extensive regulation can make doing business, including providing a quality product at a low price, difficult to impossible. It looks like the New York state government is about to demonstrate this fact, as have some other marijuana-legalizing state governments before it, with the roll-out of its recreational marijuana legalization.
In 2018, the United States Congress approved a farm bill, later signed into law by President Donald Trump, that included legalization of hemp farming. Hemp is a type of the cannabis plant that — unlike marijuana — cannot make you high because it has a low amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
A year ago this month, countrywide marijuana legalization was implemented in Canada. Also a year ago this month, the transition team of then-President-elect and current President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced marijuana legalization discussion was on the agenda of a trip to Canada by high-level Obrador administration members. Now, a year later, it looks like the Mexico national legislature is prepared to approve countrywide marijuana legalization soon, maybe even this month.
Next up, the United States government adopts countrywide legalization.
We have reached the point when over 90 million Americans live in states that have legalized marijuana and when legalization seems set to expand to more states soon. The United States government has already backed off from prosecuting and incarcerating people complying with either this recreational marijuana legalization that varies from state to state or with the medical marijuana legalization in place in many more states. This situation suggests a clear path to the US government adopting a national legalization policy in which it just butts out, leaving marijuana matters to state and local governments.