Endorsement Harris, Part 2 of 2: Cannabis (Marijuana) Policy

Endorsement Harris – Part 2 of 2:
Cannabis (Marijuana) Policy

Advancing the Rescheduling Process is a Critically Important Achievement of the Biden-Harris Administration

Harris Reduced Arrests as San Francisco DA, and Supports Legalization

Trump's Seeming Tolerance for Cannabis Law Reforms May Have Less to It Than Meets the Eye

This statement is published by Drug Reform Coordination Network, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that maintains the StoptheDrugWar.org web site and associated publications. A copy of this statement is available online here.

Part one of our endorsement addressed human rights, social cohesion and rule of law.

Harris-Walz campaign Instagram post

Drug policy reform is an issue with support across a range of the political spectrum. Since our organization's founding we've sought common cause, cultivated much-valued friendships, and forged alliances with good people of all kinds. These alliances remain important to us, and those friendships remain precious.

Our issue, however, as well as our organization, do not exist in a vacuum. As our mission statement expresses, while working for health and justice by seeking to end prohibition and its excesses, we also strive to positively impact related issues. As our statement of political approach notes, societies evolve, and this is a time of special challenges.

After Donald Trump's 2016 election, we decided we would observe the incoming president's job performance with an open mind, be prepared to give credit if he did anything good, but also speak plainly about how we view his presidency and the state of affairs in our country.

That led our organization in 2017 to declare our opposition to the now former president. Today we note the stark warnings of the 1,000+ members of National Security Leaders for America, and of numerous former Trump administration officials, who believe another Trump presidency could be catastrophic. We are proud that a member of NSL4A addressed a recent street event we organized, footage online here.

Kamala Harris, when in the US Senate, in 2019 was the lead sponsor of the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act of 2019, a broad legalization bill with social justice measures. She has called for marijuana legalization again during her presidential campaign. Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has a consistent pro-reform record for cannabis, and supported the passage of marijuana legalization in Minnesota as governor.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump have argued that Harris as District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California presided over arrests and prosecutions for marijuana. Some Trump supporters have emailed us with this claim.

Without doubting the sincerity of those of our supporters who believe this, the facts nevertheless show this to be a case of selective application of facts. Our longtime friend and colleague Chris Conrad, who served on a cannabis advisory committee convened by Harris as DA, offered a detailed account of Harris's history on the issue in California on The Daily Kos.

The most important bottom line from Conrad's report is that Harris as DA sought their proposals for how to reduce arrests and advance the issue, given the legal constraints she faced, which included not being able to simply tell police what to do with a law that remained on the books. The cannabis arrest rate during Harris's tenure continued the decrease that had begun under her fiercely anti-drug war predecessor, Terrence Hallinan, then bounced back up when she was no longer DA.

Before going into what we view as a critically important achievement of the Biden-Harris administration – rescheduling of cannabis – we note that another belief held by cannabis-friendly Trump supporters is that he supports legalization and reform, based on the fact that his administration did not shut down the state-legal cannabis industry.

Many reformers were indeed worried that Trump could move against state legalization systems. At our organization, despite having great concerns about the incoming president following his election, did not actually predict that he would do that. It seemed more likely again after the appointment of strongly anti-legalization former Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, and the revocation by Sessions of the helpful Cole Memo. We were afraid that DOJ under sessions would issue asset forfeiture letters en masse to landlords renting to state-legal cannabis businesses, the most efficient way for the government to shut them down if they wanted. But that didn't happen.

It may actually almost have happened, it turns out. Sessions intended to shut down the cannabis industry, according to insider reports. But after he recused himself from the DOJ investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Sessions fell into bad graces with President Trump, and no longer had the political capital to do anything except what Trump and his inner circle most wanted. That was for Sessions to implement certain anti-immigrant policies Trump wanted from DOJ, including family separations. Sessions' anti-cannabis agenda thereby fell off the radar.

We acknowledge not having full sourcing for this account of things. And the closely Trump-connected "Project 2025" agenda does not reference cannabis. It does, however, call for shifting direct management of the Office of National Drug Control Policy from career drug policy officials, who might be receptive to suggestions made by "woke nonprofits," to direct political appointee oversight.

Trump has recently expressed support for Florida's marijuana legalization initiative, as well as the Biden rescheduling move. But Trump says a lot of things. Given the staggering degree of corruption Trump has displayed in the past, throughout his life and during his time as president, we suspect that how it plays out may depend on who pays him.

We turn to the headline issue of this endorsement, cannabis rescheduling. In October 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services, at President Biden's direction commenced a review of how cannabis is classified under the US Controlled Substances Act. Currently cannabis is still in Schedule I, allowing for no federally legal marijuana use (outside very specific and occasional exceptions), and not recognizing medical value for the substance.

HHS went on to recommend Schedule III. After that the Drug Enforcement Administration – where cannabis rescheduling has traditionally been stopped – supported the recommendation. The process continues to unfold.

Schedule III will achieve a half-century old goal of the drug policy reform movement; and will exempt the state-legal cannabis industry from 280E, a debilitating anti-crime tax which applies to substances listed in Schedules I and II. On its own, it won't legalize even medical marijuana, however. There are risks as well, including the possibility that FDA will invoke its regulatory powers in ways we might disagree with, or that don't work well for plant-based substances that have countless varieties.

Despite those limitations, the significance of rescheduling has not always been fully acknowledged, and that is unfortunate. While it's true that rescheduling doesn't end criminalization of cannabis, for example, it is expected to reduce the extent and severity with which criminalization gets applied.

Ethan Fallon, former Assistant Attorney General in the District of Columbia who serves as Counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee member Alex Padilla, during a webinar organized by the UC Berkeley Cannabis Research Center, laid out a wide range of changes that rescheduling would bring about. Rescheduling, Fallon said, would reduce the penalties applied for possession, distribution and use of cannabis, under several criminal statutes and regulations.

The ways this would happen, according to Fallon, include reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences that are tied to different schedule levels, as well as to reducing the penalties triggered through sentencing guideline calculations. Among other things, possession would go from a felony punishable by up to a year of incarceration, to a misdemeanor.

Fallon also believes rescheduling would lead to fewer federal law enforcement actions against businesses and users; increased review and expungement for cannabis convictions; and fewer people being subject to collateral consequences that block access to benefits or professional licensing, consequences that can drastically affect the trajectory of a person's life.

These changes won't occur in isolation from other federal and state laws that are on the books. And so we acknowledge that the number of people they will end up helping in practice, is harder to calculate.

It has also been claimed that 280E reform is a change that only helps business, e.g. a good thing but one that leaves out social justice. In its effect, that is not the case. One need not accept any and every claim made by business about what they need, to understand that the circumstances in which businesses operate, also affects their workers. And circumstances that harm businesses, do so to small businesses most of all.

280E, which creates effective tax rates going upwards of 70%, has placed much of the industry in a state of long-term unprofitability, and often of negative profit. This has led many businesses large and small to have to lay off workers, and in some cases to shut down.

While doing research on another issue facing the cannabis industry, namely armed robberies of state-legal cannabis stores, we observed another problem affecting workers, which is likely to relate to 280E as well as to other high costs imposed on the industry. What we noticed is that robberies are the most common in the western part of the country, where the industry is its oldest and most cash-poor. This suggests small businesses paying the 280E tax are not able to spend as much on security as they need to protect themselves consistently.

An aside on this topic: The most commonly-discussed driver of armed robberies targeting cannabis stores is the sector's high reliance on cash. Our study linked above confirms that cash is a important factor. The SAFE Banking Act seeks to address the industry's difficult access to financial services, although its direct impact on electronic payment transactions (the source of the cash) may be less than people are hoping for.

At SAFE's first Senate hearing last year, an anti-legalization witness claimed, without offering evidence, that normalized banking access for cannabis would lead to state-legal stores being used to launder illicit fentanyl profits. Needless to say, persons engaged in money laundering are likely to prefer to use less highly scrutinized vehicles than state-legal cannabusinesses, which have entire state agencies devoted to scrutinizing them. That, however, did not prevent the fact-free US Senator and vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, from repeating the baseless claim.

Cannabis rescheduling is a critically important achievement of the Biden-Harris administration – an achievement with limitations but also benefits, and that will contribute to the achievement of further reform.

We believe Trump's lawlessness, encouragements to violence, and tactical exploitation of social divisions including racism, are bad for drug policy; and that his very limited comments supporting some of our sought for reforms are unconvincing. We endorse Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice President of the United States.

If you're a US voter but haven't voted yet, please go vote! If you're not sure of your voting location, or whether you're eligible and registered to vote or still can register, two sites where you can look up information are https://canIvote.org and https://www.rockthevote.org.

There's also still time left to volunteer for the Harris campaign, at the time we're sending this email: Phonebanking to swing state households is going on for several more hours.

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