It induced a little bit of a sensation in 2014 when the editorial board of The New York Occasions revealed a six-part series urging the federal authorities to cease banning marijuana. Readers responded with greater than 15,000 feedback, professional and con (mostly pro). TV networks interviewed board members, and the big newspapers and magazines wrote articles concerning the collection. There have been cringe-worthy headlines concerning the editorial page going to pot. Twitter customers fantasized about Occasions opinion writers getting stoned.
The general tone of the response was: Wow, if the staid New York Occasions thinks hashish must be authorized, perhaps the federal authorities will lastly loosen up and observe swimsuit. Nevertheless it didn’t. No less than not till this week.
Shortly after the collection got here out, the Obama administration issued a detailed rebuttal, saying we had neglected the intense issues of dependancy and substance abuse that might end result from legalization. (Really, we didn’t overlook them; we simply disagreed with their evaluation.) And that just about summed issues up for the subsequent 10 years. Whereas 24 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for leisure use, the federal authorities by no means budged from its insistence that pot is a Schedule I drug, topic to abuse on the identical stage as heroin and LSD. It ranks even increased on the hazard record than meth, cocaine and oxycodone.
The editorial board urged the federal government to maneuver marijuana off the Schedule I record, and on Tuesday, a decade later, the Biden administration started the method of doing that. The Justice Department said it might suggest that hashish be moved to Schedule III, alongside different medication with a average to low potential for abuse and dependence.
That’s not the identical as legalization, which could be carried out solely by Congress, however it might ship a powerful message of cultural acceptance and may very well be of specific profit to the hashish business, which is at the moment hobbled by monetary restrictions associated to Schedule I that power it to be a largely money enterprise. It could additionally enable vital federal analysis to start on the substance’s results, and it would prod extra states to legalize or decriminalize.
Little doubt there’s some election-year politics at work right here, in a hope to impress youthful voters who’ve severe doubts about President Biden. However that’s the best way politics is meant to work. Finally the logical factor to do turns into the appropriate factor, even when takes a decade or so.