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June 28, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
46:48
'Marijuana Legalization: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, And Where We Are Going'

Deputy Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Paul Armentano takes the stage at the Ron Paul Institute's Houston conference on the drug war. Get your tickets to the next Ron Paul Institute Conference - in August in Washington DC - here: RonPaulInstitute.org/conference

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Time Text
Ron Paul's Influence 00:02:08
Thank you very much for that introduction, Adam.
I want to thank Ron Paul and the Ron Paul Institute for inviting me to be here.
And I also want to invite, I want to applaud John for those tremendous remarks before me.
It's going to be a very difficult act to follow.
Now, you heard a lot earlier from one of the earlier speakers about Ron Paul's 1988 campaign.
I was not old enough to vote in that presidential campaign, but I certainly remember it.
And that was one of the first times that I remember the narrative, the discussion about drug legalization really coming to the forefront.
And you have to remember, as was emphasized in the mid-1980s, in the late 1980s, it was nearly heretical to hear that sort of talk at that time.
And that narrative made a tremendous impression upon me.
It arguably set in motion the professional career that I've had for the last two and a half decades working in drug policy with an emphasis on marijuana policy reform.
So again, I really want to thank Ron Paul for taking that stance at that time because I'm sure I was among of many young people that were influenced by his words.
So I was asked today to talk about marijuana and talk about a little bit about where we've been, where we are, and more importantly, where we are going.
Now, as was said, I'm the deputy director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
I have had an affiliation with NOMAL going back to 1994.
So I have seen a fairly seismic shift in both the public opinion, but also the cultural, political, and legal landscape that has occurred since that time.
And I'm going to talk to you about that today.
Mainstream Reporting on Cannabis 00:12:49
NORMAL, for those of you who may not know, advocates for changes in law so that the responsible private use of marijuana by adults is no longer subject to either criminal sanction or civil sanction.
Our mission is to legalize the responsible use of marijuana by adults, serve as an advocate for those who are consumers of cannabis and are passionate about this issue, and to assure that there is a safe above-ground market for which marijuana can be obtained as opposed to a criminal black market or an illicit gray market.
We define principles of responsible use.
They include use largely by adult only, prohibitions on driving, respect for the set and setting during which one may use cannabis, resisting abuse or understanding the differences between use and misuse of marijuana, and respecting the rights of others.
And our advocacy is essentially a three-pronged approach.
We deal quite often with media outreach and public outreach.
We engage in legislative advocacy through crafting legislation, for lobbying in favor of legislation, also doing state initiatives and ballot initiatives.
And we have a legal defense action litigation team as well, consisting of lawyers all throughout the country.
So to really understand where we are now, I think it's important to know where we've been.
And the reality is in America, we have not always lived in an environment where cannabis has been criminalized or prohibited.
Oftentimes, when we talk about the legalization of cannabis or the movement to legalize cannabis, I think it's important that we call it the movement to re-legalize cannabis.
Because again, our national experience with criminalization goes back only about 100 or so years.
Prior to that, Americans lived fairly harmoniously with the cannabis plant.
That all changed, however, in the early 1900s.
Around that time, in different pockets of America, marijuana use became largely associated with different ethnic groups.
And depending on what region of the country we're talking about, that played a significant role with regard to which ethnicities marijuana was tied to.
So in the American Southwest, it was not uncommon to see marijuana negatively tied to use by Mexicans, whereas in the southeastern part of the United States, marijuana use was typically associated with the use by African Americans.
In California, interestingly enough, marijuana use was stigmatized due to its supposed association with the Hindu community.
And there were some other regions of the country, like in the Northeast, where marijuana didn't particularly carry a stigma with different ethnic groups, but was eventually outlawed for other reasons.
Notably, Massachusetts outlawed cannabis simply because of the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act and a belief that now that certain drugs that formerly had been legal by prescription were now largely illegal, they stamped down on marijuana, thinking that users of those former drugs would substitute marijuana in their place, and they wanted to get ahead of the curve.
But again, Massachusetts was the exception.
In most states, when you look at the language and you look at the narrative, when you look at the legislative debate that was taking place prior to the state prohibition of cannabis, it tended to revolve around themes involving race, particularly use by Mexicans or African Americans, and this notion that when these ethnicities used marijuana, it essentially made them crazy.
And not just temporarily, but permanently crazy.
We have state testimony here from the legislature in Texas going back in the early 1920s.
It says, all Mexicans are crazy and the stuff that makes them crazy is marijuana.
Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the FBN, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, essentially America's first drug czar, was fond of making this narrative, traveling the country and espousing this narrative.
He said, most marijuana consumers in the United States are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers.
Marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes.
Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.
This is a news clipping from the New York Times that I dug up when I was involved in writing the book Marijuana is Safer, So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?
I think this embodies what the mainstream reporting of that time was as it pertained to cannabis.
This is from 1927.
This is a story about allegedly a Mexican woman and her entire family becoming permanently insane because they grew cannabis in their window box and ate some of the leaves.
This excerpt says, a widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the marijuana plant.
There is no hope for saving the children's lives.
I don't know what they ate, but it certainly wasn't marijuana.
And this excerpt really exemplifies where the scientific community was at the time.
This is a review paper taken from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1933.
Again, I dug this research article up when doing research for my book.
The author said, if marijuana use is continued, the inevitable result is insanity, which is absolutely incurable and without exception, ending in death.
So again, this was the narrative, not just from a handful of bigoted politicians, not just from some members of law enforcement, but from the scientific community, from the media community.
This was the narrative at the time.
This was not just a potentially dangerous drug, but arguably the most dangerous drug known to mankind.
So not surprisingly, this sort of narrative ultimately yields results.
And it wasn't before too long before state legislatures said, you know, we've got to do something about this terrible drug called marijuana.
And while most historians point to 1937 and the passage by Congress of the Marijuana Tax Act, this is the beginning of cannabis criminalization, that is not the proper starting point.
Because like with most issues, Washington, D.C. did not lead the charge for marijuana criminalization.
They followed the lead of the individual states.
And the individual states were well ahead of the curve.
Beginning with 1914 and the state of Massachusetts, quickly followed in 1915 by the state of California.
State by state, lawmakers began outlawing marijuana, decades before the federal government ever got involved in the marijuana prohibition business.
In fact, between 1914 and 1933, the majority of U.S. states, 33 of them at that time, had already passed state statutes outlawing the use of marijuana.
So it's hardly a surprise that in 1937, the federal government simply rubber stamps what the overwhelming majority of the country had already done and passes at that time the marijuana tax act, which didn't necessarily outright criminalize the possession of marijuana per se.
The government thought that was an overreach of its power.
What it did do was make it criminally illegal to possess marijuana without also possessing a tax-issued stamp from the federal government.
And since the federal government was incredibly stingy about issuing those tax stamps, it was therefore almost impossible for one to comply with the law.
Thereby, the upshot was marijuana possession was all but illegal in the United States.
Ironically, one of the only groups to formally speak out before Congress with regard to the debate and ultimately passage of the Tax Act was the American Medical Association, who recognized well over 100 years ago that marijuana, even at that time, had a long history as a medicine and that by outlawing it federally, it was going to have an adverse effect on the patient community.
Ultimately, however, that is what happened.
And by 1942, cannabis was removed from the pharmacopoeia.
Now, interestingly, in 1944, the mayor of New York City, Fieral LaGuardia, Says, you know, there's a lot being said about marijuana, but there's really not a whole lot of research or science that has been done as it pertains to marijuana and its impact on users and its impact on society.
In fact, at this time, the most recent report or scientific discovery that had been done with regard to cannabis was the Indian Hemp Report in 1894.
So there's essentially been a 50-year vacuum where nobody had particularly studied cannabis.
So Fiorella LaGuardia said, We're going to commission a report.
We're going to see what all the fuss is about.
And in 1944, they issue the LaGuardia report, which is among the first systemic scientific reviews of cannabis and its effects.
And not surprisingly, the scientific findings of this report differ greatly from what the ongoing narrative is at that time.
The report says marijuana is not a determining factor in the commission of major crimes.
Juvenile delinquency is not associated with the practice of smoking marijuana.
The use of marijuana does not lead to morphine or heroin or cocaine addiction.
Back before there was the notion of the gateway theory, it was called the stepping stone theory in the 30s and 40s.
And the LaGuardia reports that it was nothing to it even back then.
They said the publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marijuana smoking is unfounded.
Not surprisingly, and you'll see this trend continue decade after decade, the findings of the LaGuardia report were largely ignored.
And not just for history, but they were ignored at the time of its publication.
Pundits, law enforcement, politicians were not interested in hearing the facts about cannabis.
And that's something that has not particularly changed.
So if we fast forward about another 20 years and we get to the Nixon administration, Richard Nixon had this notion that it might be a really good idea to bring marijuana into the fold of the overarching culture war.
And he publicly said that his administration was going to make marijuana public enemy number one.
But this campaign, this war, wasn't on the marijuana plant per se.
It was really about a war focused on the groups of Americans who were stereotypically associated with the use of marijuana at that time.
That's why Nixon's domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, said the Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people.
You understand what I'm saying?
We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
That's what Nixon's war on marijuana was about.
Why Nixon Declared War 00:14:58
That's what most wars on drugs are about.
So shortly after Nixon declares this campaign where marijuana is public enemy number one, Congress follows suit and passes the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
This is a terribly important piece of legislation because this is the federal governing body of legislation with regard to drugs and drug prohibition today.
The CSA places virtually all controlled substances in one of five distinct schedules or classifications.
Notably, there's two exceptions.
Alcohol and tobacco are not classified under the Controlled Substances Act.
But most other controlled substances, be they illicit or prescription drugs, are included under the CSA.
The CSA, as I said, has five schedules.
The most restrictive and prohibitive schedule is Schedule I. By definition, a Schedule I drug must meet three specific criteria.
It must possess the highest potential for abuse of any drug in the CSA.
It must lack accepted safety under medical supervision.
In other words, it would be too dangerous to administer this drug in a hospital setting by a doctor.
And it must possess no currently accepted medical use in the United States.
If a drug does not meet all three of those criteria, under the Act, it must be scheduled in some other category other than Schedule I. Marijuana was placed by Congress as a Schedule I drug in 1970 when this Act was passed.
I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone in this room that it remains in Schedule I today.
In other words, Congress continues to believe or mandate that cannabis fits all three of those criteria.
In fact, in an environment where now 33 states by statute authorize the medical use of cannabis, the federal law still mandates that cannabis is without accepted medical use in the United States.
This is an untenable, flat earth position.
What's interesting is that Congress is somewhat honest when they pass the CSA in 1970, when they admit, you know, we really don't know a whole lot about marijuana.
We know a lot of people are using it in this society, but we really haven't studied marijuana very much.
And if you go to PubMed, which is the repository for all peer-reviewed scientific papers published anywhere in the world, and you do a keyword search on marijuana, you'll find that prior to 1970, there's fewer than 400 scientific papers specific to marijuana.
So it's true, at that time, Congress was making a decision based on fewer than 400 scientific papers.
Today we have over 30,000.
But apparently, those additional 29,900-plus papers are nowhere near as persuasive as these first 400 papers were that were published prior to 1970 because they haven't resulted in any change in the scheduling.
But Congress admits it didn't know a lot.
So they said, we're going to place cannabis in Schedule I, but this is arguably going to be a temporary classification.
Because another thing that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 did was it commits, it appoints a blue ribbon presidential commission to study cannabis and its effects in American society.
This is known as the Schaefer Commission.
This is the only presidential blue ribbon commission we've ever had in this country to study cannabis.
There's never been another one.
And the Schaefer Commission in 1972 comes back to President Nixon, comes back to Congress with its findings.
And neither Nixon nor Congress are pleased at all with what the Schaefer Commission has to say.
Because the Schaefer Commission says neither the use of marijuana, or neither the marijuana user nor the drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety.
We should de-emphasize marijuana as a problem.
The existing social and legal policy is out of proportion to the individual and social harm engendered by the use of the drug.
So in other words, they said, look, marijuana isn't harmless.
But the criminalization of marijuana and the penalties in place for those who violate marijuana laws does far more greater danger to society than the use of marijuana.
This is a disproportionate public policy response to behavior that at worst is maybe of public health concern, but it shouldn't be a criminal justice matter.
Again, this is 1972.
The Schaefer Commission concludes, and they chose to write this in all caps for emphasis, not me.
The Commission recommends the following changes in federal law.
Possession of marijuana for personal use should no longer be an offense.
It's considered somewhat progressive and radical now that we have half a dozen or so Democrat presidential candidates running for 2020 who have come to this position.
What the hell is radical about that?
This position has been out there.
This was recommended to Canada to Congress almost 50 years ago.
Casual distribution of small amounts of marijuana for no remuneration or significant remuneration and not involving profit should no longer be an offense.
This is the classic definition of what we call decriminalization, where marijuana, the plant itself, remains criminal, but the possession of small quantities of marijuana or transactions involving small quantities of marijuana do not rise to the level of an arrestable criminal offense.
They would be treated with civil sanctions like a fine, no arrest, no jail, no criminal record.
Again, I'm well aware that Texas is right now, your legislature is having a very volatile debate about this policy.
This policy that was first recommended to be undertaken nationwide 50 years ago is apparently a very radical idea for the state of Texas today.
Now, not surprisingly, just like the LaGuardia Commission was rejected and the Indian Hemp Commission of 1894 was rejected, the Schaefer Commission goes straight in the trash as well.
And in fact, the Nixon administration says we're going to double down on how serious we take marijuana.
In fact, we're going to do our own dog and pony hearings known as the Eastland hearings, and we're going to say, ignore everything you heard in the Schaefer Commission.
But something interesting happens.
A number of state legislatures say, hey, wait a minute, Congress may be rejecting these recommendations, but our states think this makes a lot of sense.
So beginning with Oregon in 1973, they used the Schaefer Commission as a roadmap to enact their own statewide decriminalization laws.
And a dozen states between the years 1973 to 1978 decriminalize this simple possession of marijuana.
And not just stereotypically blue-leaning states.
Mississippi decriminalizes marijuana during this period of time.
Nebraska decriminalizes marijuana during this period of time.
Ohio doesn't just decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.
They decriminalize three ounces of marijuana during this time, making it a $100 fine.
These statewide decriminal policies remain in effect today.
That is one of the most powerful statements of the success of these changes in policies, because even during the dark ages of the 1980s and the war on drugs, Zeitgeist, that took place there, none of these states that chose to decriminalize marijuana in the 1970s chose to reverse course and recriminalize marijuana during the 1980s.
None of them, including Mississippi, including Nebraska, including Ohio.
They all said these policies are working for us.
We're not going to change them.
Now, it was mentioned earlier, there's not a whole lot to get excited about between about 1980 and the early 1990s, but that all changes in 1996 when the voters in California do something really radical.
They go to the ballot booth in November of 1996 and they pass Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act.
This legalizes for the first time the possession and use and cultivation and dispensing of marijuana for medical purposes.
And it sets off a wave of medicalization initiatives throughout the country.
In response to California voting Prop 215 into law, the federal government commissions the National Academy of Sciences to look into the science surrounding cannabis and the potential medical benefits of cannabis.
The same benefits that in the run-up to the Prop 215 vote, the federal government said didn't exist at all.
And much to the chagrin of the federal government, the National Academy of Sciences comes out not once, but twice with reports making it clear that cannabis possesses therapeutic efficacy, that it possesses a safety profile that is in line with other medications.
And they say there's conclusive and substantial evidence that cannabis is effective in the treatment of various diseases, such as the treatment of chronic pain, nausea as an appetite stimulant, and in the treatment of multiple sclerosis.
Again, a statement, a finding of fact that is entirely inconsistent with the existing federal scheduling of cannabis.
And then starting in 2012, we have two states, Washington and Colorado, on the same night for the first time, regulate, legalize the adult marijuana use market.
In 2013, the Obama administration responds to these two state policies by saying it issues a memo to its U.S. attorneys that say as long as these markets are well regulated and there does not seem to be much diversion of cannabis from these markets to surrounding states, we're going to take a hands-off approach.
We're largely going to let these states do as they please.
In 2018, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions comes into power and he says to hell with that.
He rips up the Cole memo, but he does not issue any separate or new guidance.
So in many ways, the Cole memo, while it doesn't exist, the federal government in many ways continues to behave as if it does.
And since that time, other states also have gone to the ballot box and they have legalized the adult use market as well, 10 states in total.
So where we are now statutorily, we've got one out of five people that living in America live in a state where the adult use of marijuana is legal.
We have 33 states where the use of medical marijuana and the distribution of medical marijuana is legal.
Many of these state programs have now been in place for more than two decades.
And we have 14 states where the possession of marijuana is still decriminalized.
It is not legal, but individuals who violate the law are simply subject to minor fines as opposed to a criminal arrest, criminal record, and threat of jail.
And we know that decriminalization is either going to take effect later this year or is pending in other jurisdictions.
New Mexico passed decriminalization earlier this year.
It takes effect on July 1.
North Dakota passed a partial decriminalization law earlier this year.
It will take effect on August 1st.
I don't think the outcome in Texas is actually going to be, I'm not as hopeful today as I was when I put these slides together a few weeks ago with regard to the potential for decriminalization in Texas.
We also had the first change in the federal law as it pertains to the cannabis plant took place in December of last year when the 2018 Farm Subsidy Bill was passed.
And for the first time, it redefined traditional industrial hemp as a plant separate from cannabis.
And it said that industrial hemp would no longer be defined or governed by the Controlled Substances Act.
So essentially it was descheduled.
It is no longer under the authority and control of the federal government.
And it said products derived from the industrial hemp plant are no longer under federal control either.
Interestingly, not 24 hours later, the FDA stepped in and said, well, we're a federal agency and these products are certainly under our control and we have no idea how we're going to regulate them and it'll likely take years before we figure it out.
So that's where we stand now.
So why are we seeing these radical changes in the last few years in marijuana policy?
Well a good place to start is to see the fact that public opinion has changed dramatically, largely in the last decade or so, to the point where now two-thirds of this country say they believe that marijuana should be legal, a fairly shocking change from the low levels of support we had just 20, 25 years ago.
Why are we seeing these shifts in public opinion?
And I think there's a number of reasons why.
Public Opinion Shifts 00:15:20
Support for marijuana policy or marijuana policy reform is becoming less and less of a partisan issue among the public.
Among politicians, this remains a hyper-partisan issue, unfortunately.
But among the general public, whether you're Democrat, Independent, or you self-identify as Republican, majorities of all of those political affiliations say we support legalizing marijuana.
Again, that change has not taken place to actual elected officials.
Unfortunately, at the state and certainly at the federal level, this remains largely a Democrat-led issue with Republicans opposing.
It also is largely an age-based issue, particularly when we look at Congress.
There is much greater strength and support for marijuana policy reform at the federal level, regardless of political affiliation, simply if you're younger than 50 years old.
But if you're over 50, over 60 years old in Congress, you might have a D after your name like Diane Feinstein.
It doesn't mean you're not a drug warrior.
So we're seeing this generational shift as well that I think is going to continue.
We see that among those ages 18 to 34, over 8 in 10 say that marijuana ought to be legal.
Those between the ages of 35 and 49, 70% say that marijuana should be legal.
I don't think that support's going to wane as these individuals get older.
This is, I think, a very big deal.
We have so many people in this country that now have first-hand experience with marijuana.
According to CBS, over half of the country says, yeah, I've used marijuana at some point in my life.
It gets much harder for the federal government to convince people to deny experiences that are their own reality.
The federal government can say marijuana is horrible.
It does A, B, C, and D.
But if over half the people have used marijuana they didn't experience that's not their experience, it's going to be hard to persuade them.
The internet.
You see a significant spike in support for marijuana policy reform beginning in 1994.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this is aligned with when the internet starts becoming in more mainstream and in more homes nationwide.
Because prior to the internet, it was very hard for those with divergent opinions about the drug war to get their message out there.
Prior to the early 1990s, the only messaging you ever heard about marijuana came from police, it came from politicians, and it came from very high-profile public ad campaigns from DARE and from other groups that all said marijuana was terrible.
The internet allowed other voices to be heard, and it allowed those that wanted to understand and study marijuana to do so from the confines of their own home and to do it anonymously.
I don't think we can underestimate the significance of that development.
The popularity of medical marijuana clearly has shifted broader positions, the way people think about marijuana in general.
And we know that medical marijuana has tremendous public support.
Over 90% of Americans think a doctor should be able to legally authorize medical cannabis to qualified patients.
Americans have simply grown more skeptical of anti-marijuana messaging, as I said earlier.
And marijuana law reform is now attached to a number of broader social justice issues.
We see marijuana policy reform as parts of broader discussions about criminal health reform, about health reform in general, about how we should treat people who have past criminal records, about how we ought to interact with the environment.
Marijuana is a part of all of these hot button issues now.
And most importantly, marijuana legalization has shifted in recent years from theory to practice.
This isn't something now that professors may discuss in the halls of Dartmouth.
This is happening in the real world.
One out of five Americans live in jurisdictions where marijuana is legal.
We don't have to scratch our head any longer and wonder what might happen if we legalize and regulate cannabis.
We can look to Colorado, we can look to Oregon, we can look to Washington, we can look to Nevada and say this is what happens when we legalize marijuana.
We see the tax revenue benefits.
We see the job creation.
Now this doesn't mean again, like I said, that marijuana is not without some risks.
And the people in those states, the people, the majority of voters voting for these changes in policies are aware that there's risks.
They don't want a Wild West free-for-all.
That's why they want to see cannabis regulated.
They understand that regulation does a better job mitigating the risks of cannabis than does criminalization, which often simply compounds those risks.
And I think this is really important.
The gloom and doom predictions of our opponents simply haven't come to fruition.
Why do you think our opponents have lost credibility in the last few decades?
Well, they've lost credibility because they said if you legalize marijuana, all these terrible things are going to happen.
We're still waiting for those terrible things to happen.
We know these terrible things aren't happening.
We know that legalization is not having adverse effects on overall crime.
It's not having adverse effects on health and safety.
Youth use of marijuana isn't skyrocketing in these states.
It's actually going down.
These states aren't rife with traffic accidents due to marijuana.
Traffic safeties largely remain the same in these states.
Crime hasn't gone up.
It's gone down in these states.
And we know this, both based on the data coming from these states that's being generated that tells us this, but Americans know this inherently.
And the reason I say that is because I showed you that chart earlier that shows in the era of legalization since 2012, public support for marijuana legalization has gone up exponentially.
That would not be happening if marijuana legalization in these states were not a success.
If our opponents' claims were coming to fruition, then support among the public and support by those who live in these states for marijuana policy reform would be going down.
They'd be reversing course.
They'd be saying, we made a terrible mistake and we need to recriminalize marijuana.
But just as none of those initial states in the 1970s that decriminalized marijuana then ever reversed their course because they knew decriminalization was preferable to criminalization, none of these legal states have reversed course either.
In fact, more and more states are joining them and public support is only getting stronger.
So where are we going?
Well, as I mentioned, our support is growing even among non-traditional supporters like those over the age of 65, where support now is about 50%, up from about 30% just some years ago.
We're having more support among women.
In fact, many polls now show majority support among women.
That was not the case only a short time ago.
And Republican-leaning voters, maybe Republican-leaving voters as well, but certainly Republican-leaning voters are becoming more open to the idea of legalization.
There's also this notion that this seems to be one of the few points where the American public really understands and supports federalism.
We see that about seven in 10 voters support this concept of federalism when it comes to marijuana policy.
They say, look, even if the federal government doesn't want to come around to this policy change, they ought to leave the states alone and let the states do what they want.
And a majority of Republicans hold that position as well.
So for future statewide reform efforts, we have legalization efforts pending in Connecticut.
Hawaii has a decriminalization bill that is now before the governor.
Illinois is having a heatly contested legalization debate right now.
Nebraska has a legalization bill that has been filed for the 2020 ballot.
New Hampshire has legalization before its legislature.
It's passed the House.
It's getting stalled in the Senate.
New Jersey's legalization initiative is going to go to the ballot in 2020 now that the legislature has punted on the issue.
New York has a pair of legalization bills before its legislature.
As I've mentioned, Texas has both an ongoing debate about medicalization and decriminalization that's taking place right now.
Wisconsin's debating decriminalization and putting that measure to a ballot proposal.
When we go to the ballot, we win.
You're going to hear a lot of talk from our opponents that say support for legalization is waning.
It's waning right now because New York State couldn't get it done legislatively.
New Jersey couldn't get it done legislatively.
Look, if we had to wait for legislatures to amend marijuana policy, we'd still be in the dark ages.
Over half of the medical marijuana laws in this country were passed by initiative.
Nine out of the ten adult use legalization laws were passed by initiative.
Very rarely do we put an initiative on the ballot, ask voters to decide on liberalizing marijuana policy.
Very rarely do they say no.
They almost always say yes, regardless if it's a red state or a blue state.
This is just some polling from some states where this is a hotly contested issue.
In New Hampshire, 68% say they want legal marijuana.
In New Jersey, it's 62%.
In Texas, 61% of voters say they want legal marijuana.
Not decriminalized marijuana, legal marijuana.
In Wisconsin, 61%.
Pennsylvania, 59%.
Louisiana, 55%.
I could do this for literally every state in America.
We have a number of different federal reform efforts that are pending before Congress.
The ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act is one of a number of bills that simply removes cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act.
It deschedules cannabis, leaving the decision of how best to regulate cannabis up to the individual states.
There are a number of different versions of this legislation.
We have some piecemeal legislation that's pending, such as legislation surrounding banking.
As I'm sure plenty of you know, even in legal states, the industry cannot legally work with banks.
They are federally, federal banks, banks are discouraged under federal regulations from having relationships with any parties who work in the cannabis industry.
A whole lot of members of the House think that's ridiculous.
In fact, over a quarter of House representatives are signed on to this bill that would amend the federal banking laws so that at a minimum, these transactions that are taking place in a majority of states now are not all cash transactions.
There's the Marijuana Justice Act that again removes marijuana from Schedule I.
It provides different inducements for states to reform their own marijuana laws.
There's the States Act, which is a little different.
The States Act continues to say marijuana federally is illegal.
It simply carves out an exemption.
It says that if there are states that want to set their own marijuana policies, they can do so.
But the federal government's not changing the way we classify marijuana or the way we deal with marijuana.
So things like marijuana banking would still be illegal under the States Act.
People in the veteran affairs community whose doctors cannot now legally write them a medical marijuana recommendation, even if they're in a legal state.
That doesn't change under the States Act.
None of these things change unless marijuana is descheduled under the federal law.
And that's why we are far less excited about things like the States Act and the Banking Act when we realize that bills like H.R. 1588, sponsored by Tulsi Gabbard, would simply make all those ancillary bills moot because it would remove marijuana from the CSA.
That's ultimately what needs to be done.
The Trump administration, when they do talk about cannabis, which isn't often, tends to send a lot of mixed messages.
You may have heard from Senator Corey Gardner who says, oh, I talked to Trump behind the scenes and he supports the States Act.
I don't know if he supports the States Act or not.
It's possible he might.
But we also know that the Trump administration has said that if you have any involvement in marijuana, that means by inherently you lack moral character.
We could deny you citizenship in the United States if you have any prior relationship with marijuana.
We know that a DHS September 2018 memo says that if you want to travel to the United States on business, say from Canada, Canada, which has a legal marijuana industry, Canada which legalized medical marijuana, if, for instance, you are a representative of a legal business in Canada that works with marijuana, DHS says we don't have to let you into the United States.
In fact, we're not going to let you into the United States.
You work with marijuana, even though in your jurisdiction it's legal to do so.
So we have all sorts of schizophrenic messages coming from the Trump administration.
When the last budget was signed, there was a provision that said the federal government cannot spend any federal funds.
The Department of Justice cannot spend federal funds to target individuals in states who are compliant with their marijuana laws.
Trump signed that budget into law, but he issued a signing statement specific to that provision, making it clear that the President of the United States does not feel he's obligated to abide by that specific provision.
So to wrap up, marijuana legalization is not inevitable.
The Fight for Freedom 00:01:27
You may hear it is, but believe me, I've been doing this work for two and a half decades.
It is not.
These sort of societal and legal changes only occur when advocates are passionate, when we remain vigilant, and when we're engaged in the political process.
And to echo the sentiments that were said earlier, this effort's really only tangentially about cannabis, the plant.
It's really all about freedom.
It's about freedom from government overreach.
It's about freedom to decide what we can and can't ingest in the privacy of our own homes.
It's about freedom from a police state.
It's about being free from suspicionless drug testing.
It's about being free from civil asset forfeiture and dog searches.
It's about the freedom to choose how we medicate and how we recreate.
And ultimately, it's about the freedom to possess autonomy over our own bodies and over our own minds.
The government shall not infringe upon that.
That is what this fight is ultimately about.
I'm encouraged so many of you have taken the time and made the effort to help people like me fight this battle and succeed in this battle.
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