President Joe Biden on Thursday announced he’s pardoning all Americans who’ve been convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law, coming closer to keeping a 2020 campaign promise to try to get the drug decriminalized a little more than a month before the midterm election.
The executive action will benefit 6,500 people with federal convictions from 1992 to 2021 and thousands of others charged under the District of Columbia’s criminal code, according to senior administration officials. Elaborating on the number of people affected, officials said “there are no individuals currently in federal prison solely for simple possession of marijuana.”
Thousands of additional people who are residents of the District, which is subject to federal law, could also be pardoned, officials said. Others affected could be those arrested in places such as airports and federal parks, which are under federal law enforcement jurisdiction.
“As I said when I ran for president, no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana,” Biden tweeted in an unusual video statement. “It’s legal in many states, and criminal records for marijuana possession have led to needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. And that’s before you address the racial disparities around who suffers the consequences. While white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates.”
His action before the consequential midterm elections, in which Democrats are vying to maintain control of the House and Senate, could be viewed as a move to energize voters, particularly younger voters.
When asked about the timing of the executive action, administration officials only said that Biden’s been “clear that our marijuana laws are not working.”
Biden said Thursday he’s urging governors to do the same for individuals with state convictions, which administration officials said account for the vast majority of possession-related convictions.
He’s also requesting Health and Human Services Secretary, Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland expeditiously review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. Currently, marijuana is classified as a “Schedule 1” drug — along with LSD, ecstasy and heroin — under the Controlled Substances Act, which Biden said Thursday “makes no sense.”
“Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs,” Biden added.
Biden’s faced pressure from his own party this year to take more decisive action, as recent elections have shown Americans’ views on legalization have changed.
In the 2020 cycle alone, four states approved ballot measures to legalize the sale and possession of cannabis for adult use. An analysis from FiveThirtyEight found a majority of registered voters in all 50 states favor making marijuana legal.
This past summer, a group of lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote a letter to Biden, Garland and Becerra urging them to deschedule cannabis and issue pardons to all individuals convicted of nonviolent cannabis-related offenses.
Biden, while slower to embrace marijuana reform than many of his Democratic colleagues, pledged on the 2020 campaign trail to decriminalize cannabis use and expunge prior convictions.
Senate Democrats this year also finally released their long-awaited marijuana legalization proposal, which would lift the federal prohibition and allow states to determine how they want to regulate marijuana. But the legislation faces an uphill battle in the 50-50 chamber, where 10 Republicans would need to support it, and Senate leadership has yet to announce when the bill will be brought up for a vote.
“Members of Congress have been working on this issue,” Biden administration officials said Thursday. “But that effort has stalled and we’re almost at the end of the Congress. So the president has been considering his options and he’s now taking executive action to address the country’s failed approach to marijuana.”
Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson claimed Biden’s move was to score political points.
“The President, in his announced policy on marijuana, has waived the flag of surrender in the fight to save lives from drug abuse and has adopted all the talking points of the drug legalizers,” Hutchinson said. “Biden is simply playing election-year politics and sacrificing our national interest to win votes.”
Meanwhile, advocacy groups are welcoming the announcement.
“We commend this important and necessary step to begin the process of repairing the harms of prohibition and look forward to working with Congress and the administration to develop policies that would ultimately solve the underlying problems in our outdated cannabis policies,” Aaron Smith, Co-founder and CEO of the National Cannabis Industry Association said in a statement.
The Drug Policy Alliance said it was “thrilled” by Biden’s decision, which they called “incredibly long overdue.”
“Many of the efforts taken and proposed by the President today are long overdue,” said Erik Altieri, executive director of NORML, which advocates legalization. Since 1965, he said, nearly 29 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana-related offenses that most Americans think should be legal.
Marijuana Politics
“Marijuana policy is a place where politics is finally catching up to the culture,” said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist. “Marijuana decriminalization enjoys bipartisan support and it also happens to be really good policy. This will help President Biden not only with his base but also with other constituencies that are finding religion on the drug war.”
The move by the president continues the push to roll back some of the most far-reaching impacts of the war on drugs that began about a half-century ago, just as Biden was entering the U.S. Senate. America’s prison population, the world’s largest, had ballooned as a result of the push to crack down on drug use, and some Republicans and Democrats have since sought to shift away from punishment and focus instead on addiction treatment and other alternatives.
Biden, who once served as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and backed strict drug laws in the 1980s and ’90s, has previously faced criticism from some Democrats for taking a harder line on criminal justice than many in the party. But as president, he has moved away from those positions, taking executive actions to address police misconduct and pardon nonviolent offenders.
Polls suggest that a majority of Americans support Biden’s moves. A 2021 Pew Research Center Poll found that 67 percent of Americans favored releasing people from prison if they were being held solely for marijuana-related offenses. And 61 percent favored removing or expunging marijuana-related offenses from criminal records.
More broadly, the poll found that 57 percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use, and 31 percent favored it for medical use only.
And a November 2021 Gallup poll found that 68 percent said marijuana use should be legal, compared to 31 percent in 2000.
But Biden’s moves carry political risks, as Republicans have spent much of the past year accusing the president and Democrats of being soft on crime, linking rising incidents of violence and addiction to liberal policies.
“In the midst of a crime wave and on the brink of a recession, Joe Biden is giving blanket pardons to drug offenders — many of whom pled down from more serious charges,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “This is a desperate attempt to distract from failed leadership.”
But many Republicans have relaxed their views on marijuana use as the culture has shifted, and some now say the issue should be left to the states.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who has pushed legislation that would release prisoners arrested for simple possession and expunge the records of those convicted of nonviolent cannabis use, said she was highly supportive of Biden’s move and spoke with the White House on Thursday.
Mace added that the “devil is in the details” in getting other Republicans on board.
“There are nonviolent, simple possession users who are behind bars who shouldn’t be. And they’ve been punished in this very harmful, expensive war on a plant,” Mace said in an interview. “We’re seeing this wave of reform reach across the country, and it’s past time that Congress addresses it.”
Biden appeared to try to get ahead of Republican criticism in his videotaped remarks, arguing that the changes would not impact large-scale trafficking of narcotics or the crime of selling marijuana to children.
“Even as federal and local regulations of marijuana change, important limitations on trafficking, marketing and underage sales should stay in place,” he said.
And some Democrats have aggressively promoted the idea of decriminalizing marijuana, including Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman, who said he spoke to Biden about the issue last month. Fetterman tweeted Thursday that the move was a “massive step towards justice.”
While parts of Biden’s announcement will have immediate implications — particularly the decision to pardon federal offenses of marijuana possession — his order to Becerra and Garland to speed a review of how marijuana is “scheduled” is far more complicated and could take months, if not years, said Andrew Freedman, executive director of the Coalition for Cannabis Policy, Education and Regulation.
Freedman, who served as Colorado’s cannabis czar in 2014 when the state legalized marijuana, emphasized the ongoing tension between many states that have eased marijuana restrictions and the tough laws that are still on the books when it comes to the federal government.
“This is the start of an actual good national conversation of, ‘All right, there’s a reality that states have started to legalize this in different ways, and the federal government can no longer hold the position of this is prohibited,’ ” Freedman said.
Schedule I substances, which currently include marijuana, are those that have been deemed to be potentially extremely harmful and have no medicinal benefit. In his statement, Biden noted that marijuana has a higher classification than fentanyl and methamphetamine, which have spawned a deadly overdose and addiction epidemic nationally.
Rescheduling marijuana, however, would require the input of multiple agencies. First, HHS would need to make a finding that there’s a potential medical benefit to cannabis, Freedman said, and conclude that there is enough research to make such a finding.
That recommendation would then go to the Drug Enforcement Administration for review, and the DEA would need to come back with its own finding on how marijuana should be scheduled. From there, the attorney general would review and decide whether to initiate a rulemaking process to reschedule marijuana.
The process can typically take several years, Freedman said, but depending on how much pressure Biden applies to the agencies to expedite the review, the administration could complete the review within two years. But even reclassifying marijuana as a schedule 2 substance — meaning it could have some medicinal benefits but is still harmful — would not do much to change the on-the-ground reality, Freedman said.
The push to decriminalize marijuana began in earnest in the 1990s as a reaction to the Reagan-era “war on drugs,” which activists argued had yielded overly severe penalties. Initially they argued for allowing marijuana for medical purposes, as research suggested that it could ease pain and nausea.
Five states and the District of Columbia approved medical marijuana in the 1990s, with eight more joining them in the 2000s. And as the cultural battles of the 1960s faded, states allowed recreational use as well, with Colorado in 2014 becoming the first to allow special dispensaries to sell marijuana for recreational use.
Currently, 37 states and D.C. allow medical marijuana use, while 19 states allow the drug for recreational purposes, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. But even as states moved toward greater acceptance, the federal government continued to treat it as dangerous and illegal, creating an unusual tension between the two.
Five states have cannabis laws on the ballot in November, potentially adding to the momentum. Meanwhile, at least some federal lawmakers cheered Biden’s move.
“Cannabis justice is racial justice!” tweeted Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus.
[WashintonPost/ABCnews]
