Whether congressional elections were better for Democrats or Republicans may be up for debate, but they were a clear win for cannabis.
Not only did three states — Utah, Missouri, and Michigan — legalize some usage of marijuana, voters “have given us the best Congress we’ve ever had” as far as easing federal restrictions on the drug, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who captured 73 percent of the vote in his district, told reporters on Wednesday.
Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican long viewed as a major obstacle to laws easing a federal ban on marijuana, lost his bid for re-election, Blumenauer noted, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Godlatte, who chaired the Judiciary Committee, didn’t seek re-election.
“In terms of a victory for the continued momentum of cannabis legalization, it was a big night,” said Blumenauer, who helped form the bipartisan Congressional Cannabis Caucus and has introduced a bill that would drop using or selling the drug from the list of activities that disqualify foreigners from entering the U.S. “Three of the greatest obstructionists to progress are not coming back.”
Not only is American support for legalizing cannabis — which critics have long decried as a gateway to abuse of harder drugs like cocaine and heroin — at an all-time high, Canada began allowing the use, possession, and sale of marijuana last month.
A mid-spring poll by the liberal Center for American Progress showed 68 percent of U.S. residents support legalization, roughly four points higher than a survey by Gallup in October 2017. Gallup first measured public opinion on the matter in 1969, when only 12 percent of participants supported legalization.
More than 40 states, along with U.S. territories, Native American tribes, and Washington, D.C., have passed laws permitting or decriminalizing marijuana or marijuana-based products. If Democrats don’t act swiftly now that they control the House, Blumenauer has said, Trump may decide it’s a winning issue with younger voters and try to take credit for work by his rivals during his 2020 campaign.
Indeed, on Wednesday afternoon one member of Trump’s cabinet who had opposed marijuana legalization, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, submitted his resignation. Sessions had been a target of the president’s ire since recusing himself from an investigation of whether Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russians to win that election.
To keep Trump from moving in on marijuana, Blumenauer has suggested House Democrats hold hearings in the judiciary, energy, and financial services committees from January through March, then begin marking up bills that would start to narrow the policy gap between the federal government, states, and Canada.
Those should include giving military veterans access to cannabis treatments for pain and post-traumatic stress, giving marijuana producers access to banking services, and removing barriers to marijuana research, he has said.
Cannabis has been outlawed in the U.S. since the 1930s, when Congress limited use to people who obtained it for medical purposes and paid a tax when purchasing the drug. Lawmakers added mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana offenses in the 1950s, then repealed them in the 1970s, though cannabis remained illegal and the federal government deemed it both unsafe and likely to be abused.
Support for reversing such restrictions has been on a “slow boil,” Blumenauer said Wednesday, and activism in states such as Florida, which has two Republican senators, is likely to spur action even in the GOP-dominated upper chamber. “This doesn’t have to be anybody’s top priority. It just has to have an opportunity to move forward.”
