On Thursday afternoon in the White House, US President Donald Trump signed a highly anticipated executive order softening America’s cannabis laws.
The order directs his attorney general to fast-track downgrading cannabis from Schedule I – the same category as heroin and LSD, with no recognised medical value and a high potential for abuse – to Schedule III, loosening some of those restrictions, but stopping short of legalising it on a federal level.
“We have people begging for me to do this, people that are in great pain for decades,” Trump said, citing the plant’s medical benefits.
Critics, especially on the American right, are disappointed, while liberalisers say it doesn’t go far enough.
“Going to Schedule III is not going to end the criminal trade in cannabis, it is a primarily symbolic half-measure,” Eric Sterling, former counsel to the US House Judiciary Committee, told The i Paper.
“I fear if this gets tied up in litigation… President Trump will attempt to claim the mantle of a marijuana reformer, and nothing will end up being accomplished.”
Before entering the political arena, Trump expressed a rather liberal opinion on the drug debate, calling for the legalisation of all illicit substances. But as President he has taken a notably hard line, deploying warships off the Venezuelan coast to purportedly fight drug trafficking, and branding fentanyl – an extremely potent opioid blamed for America’s devastating overdose crisis – a “weapon of mass destruction.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr speaks alongside Trump during an event for an executive order reclassifying marijuana as a schedule III drug (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)But he is rather more relaxed about cannabis, in line with the opinions of the American public: according to an October Gallup poll, nearly two thirds of Americans would like to see marijuana legalised, including 85 per cent of registered Democrats and 40 per cent of Republicans. Since 1996, the ban on cannabis has gradually been lifted on a state-by-state basis. Weed is now fully or partly legal in some 40 out of 50 states, often for medical reasons, and the industry enjoys an influential lobby: federal records show two large marijuana firms contributed over $1m (£747,125) to Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January.
Last year, Trump backed an ultimately failed referendum to legalise pot in Florida.
“Two words: Golf buddies,” quipped Kevin Sabet, founder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM).
“In reality, the President appears to be listening to friends out in Florida who are invested in the business or may get relief from CBD [cannabidiol] creams. I think he also might be looking at the numbers and think that they might lift his, even though we know that people do not vote based on marijuana policy.”
“Among his base, and the law enforcement agencies that he claims to be an ally of, there’s much less support for marijuana legalisation,” added Sterling.
The Great Smokey Cannabis Company’s shop on the Qualla Boundary in Cherokee, North Carolina one of America’s biggest shifts in drug policy for years. (Photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP via Getty Images)“They are resistant to it, so it’s been a classic battle for the mind of Donald Trump.”
However, the order’s significance should not be overstated.
“I anticipate some folks are going to try and oversell the implications of rescheduling, and I don’t want folks to think that they have newly created rights; they don’t,” Cat Packer, a cannabis expert at the Moritz College of Law and a member of the Drug Policy Alliance, told The i Paper.
Rather, Packer explained, in practice the move will mainly affect businesses. Businesses involved in Schedule I substances are ineligible for certain tax breaks since, as far as the federal government is concerned, they are formally illicit drug traffickers.
“And so if marijuana is moved to Schedule III, that particular provision of the tax code will no longer apply,” she said. “And so that’s why there are lots of folks who are in the industry who are very supportive of this particular change, at least when it comes to their tax deduction and how they’re treated under federal law.”
Federal legalisation, on the other hand, would entail removing marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act altogether and regulating it not unlike alcohol and tobacco. This is what Democrat lawmakers are pursuing through the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, currently making its way through Congress, which will also expunge criminal records for cannabis and establish a fund to help individuals and communities adversely impacted by the war on drugs.
Smoking cannabis at Dazed Cannabis dispensary in New York City, where it is legal for adults over 21 (Photo: Adam Gray/ Reuters)But legal weed has not been without its problems. For example, there have been concerning reports of children ingesting cannabis-laced sweets, while inconsistent state and federal enforcement has kept the business profitable for organised crime.
“We are witnessing a surge in child poisonings, a significant increase in healthcare emergencies, a strong correlation with mental-health crises and suicide, and a persistent, violent illicit market that undermines the rule of law,” said Sabet.
“Wide social acceptance of any drug – and marijuana, sadly, has gained wide acceptance thanks in large part to a campaign of normalisation by the industry – cannot and should not be a basis for federal and state policy. That has to be based on the best available evidence and science, all of which outlines what a massive public-health danger weed is.”
Packer and other reformers, however, counter that a lawful, regulated market is better than a black market, which is wholly unregulated.
“There are tools and policy levers that are completely unavailable when we’re talking about a system of prohibition where we’re just banning things, which we know doesn’t actually prevent folks from having access,” she said, citing for example strict ID checks on customers.
In the UK, non-medical cannabis is currently a Class B drug, with growing or distribution punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment (though in practice, minor violations rarely end in jail time). Although a few Labour politicians such as the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, support cannabis reform, the core of the party does not. Unsurprisingly, neither do Reform or the Conservatives. Only the Green Party, rapidly building momentum under Zack Polanski, and the Liberal Democrats openly back drug reform.
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“It is hard to say, but the UK political class appears far more resistant to reform than in the US,” Niamh Eastwood, executive director of legal advice charity Release, told The i Paper.
“There are groups across the country pushing for reforms and working solely on cannabis… However, compared to the US, there is not yet a clear national coalition of groups working towards legalisation — although the annual 4/20 gathering in Hyde Park is more popular than ever. Support for reform continues to grow, as shown by polling indicating that a majority of the public now support decriminalisation and/ or regulation.”
According to a November YouGov poll, over half of the British public felt cannabis should be either decriminalised (ie criminal penalties removed) or legalised entirely, while just over a third believed the ban should remain in place.
Niko Vorobyov is a freelance journalist and the author of Dopeworld
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