Cannabis activists paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue with flags, banners, a 51-foot inflatable joint, and a plan to get high at 4:20 p.m. two years ago in a last-ditch bid to convince President Barack Obama to administratively legalize marijuana.
Attendees blew smoke through a shofar, took selfies, and reveled in a communal cloud as police watched, but the rally didn’t sway Obama, who left office with pot still a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, meaning illegal for any purpose outside limited research.
“I think he will go down among potheads as fitting the stereotype as someone who was lazy. He just sat on the couch,” said Ed Forchion, a New Jersey activist who attended the rally, but who currently is jailed awaiting trial for jury tampering after clashes with Trenton authorities.
This year, local activists have a different approach, hosting a National Cannabis Policy Summit at the Newseum on Friday, the annual 4/20 pot holiday, with buttoned-up panels with members of Congress, journalists, and nonprofit leaders. There’s no plan to march on the White House.
“We talked about it,” said D.C. Cannabis Campaign co-founder Adam Eidinger, who organized the 2016 White House smoke-in and a joint giveaway for Capitol Hill staff last April that resulted in eight arrests, though most charges were dropped.
“We’ve done our civil disobedience,” Eidinger said. “This year we’re going to do the exact opposite. Laws didn’t change, so we’ll do something different.”
The cannabis holiday comes exactly a week after the White House confirmed that President Trump told a Colorado senator he won’t allow a federal crackdown on state-legal cannabis and that he supports new legislation to make marijuana federalism permanent.
“If Donald Trump delivers legalization at the federal level, he would have shown that only a teetotaler could legalize marijuana rather than someone with the stigma of a user,” Eidinger said, referring to Obama’s admitted past pot use. “But he has to deliver. It’s a big if.”
Deaconess Anne Armstrong of Rhode Island’s Healing Church is more optimistic. Armstrong, who said a blessing before mass consumption of cannabis at the 2016 White House gathering, which was held on April 2 to underscore the “rescheduling” request, said she believes Trump’s word conclusively blocks a crackdown.
“Activists should and will be dancing in the streets and thanking and praising President Trump for his bold and decisive act,” she said.
Other grassroots activists aren’t so sure, saying they’d like to see the bill being drafted by Republican Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, who won the assurances from Trump by blocking nominees after Attorney General Jeff Sessions withdrew a policy memo shielding state-legal recreational pot markets and asked Congress to drop protections for state-legal medical pot.
Gardner told a group of Washington Examiner journalists Wednesday that the legislation was 80 percent complete, and spokesman Casey Contres said Thursday that he’s “almost finished” with a bill to “protect states’ rights to determine for themselves how best to address marijuana.”
An activist who met with Gardner’s staff Thursday said the draft bill currently takes a limited approach, carving out autonomy for states without comprehensive reform of federal drug law.
“It’s going to be a fairly short bill that protects states that have medical or recreational programs,” said Jonathan Lubecky, veterans and governmental affairs liaison at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. He said he came away with the understanding that “the language would state that under the Controlled Substances Act, states can make their own decision.”
Lubecky did not attend the 2016 smoke-in, finding that joining edgy protests could harm his ability to work with more conservative lawmakers. Lubecky credits pot, however, with vastly improving mental health issues relating to his military service, and he advocates for far-reaching federal reform that would allow greater medical research.
Philadelphia activist Chris Goldstein, who did smoke at the 2016 White House protest, just days after getting off federal probation for smoking at the Liberty Bell, recalls that “we felt Obama would move this forward.”
“President Obama spent eight years and he could have done something, which is why we were so frustrated,” he said. “We felt those protests were meaningful direct action. We always felt President Obama would move this issue forward. The fact that his presidency ended without more executive action on this issue was disappointing.”
Activists urged Obama to order his attorney general to administratively reschedule pot under a process specified in the Controlled Substances Act. A lower schedule could remove restrictions on research and possession. Scheduling decisions are traditionally handled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a part of the Justice Department.
Still, Goldstein — who teaches a “marijuana in the news” course to journalism students at Temple University — said he isn’t entirely displeased with Obama, noting that his Justice Department allowed the first recreational pot markets to open. Obama also said pot was less harmful than alcohol, though he believed rescheduling was a job for Congress.
“I hope one day I see President Obama join us on 4/20 to participate as a consumer once again,” he said. “We always hoped President Obama would have the first White House marijuana garden.”
Goldstein said he would be dissatisfied if people like former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who joined a marijuana company’s board of advisers this month, “hijack” legalization to benefit a small group of companies.
“People have been quickly forgetting what a position Obama was in with his Department of Justice crafting the Cole and Ogden memos, at a time when Speaker Boehner wasn’t selling weed, he was the drug war house speaker,” Goldstein said.
Former Marijuana Policy Project Executive Director Rob Kampia, who played an influential role in state campaigns to legalize marijuana, noted that Trump previously pledged to respect state laws while running for office. He said nothing changed with Trump’s recent commitment to Gardner, as he can’t control Sessions’ every move.
“The president displaying allegiance to federalist principles in the area of marijuana policy is absolutely not new,” Kampia said. “What would have been new is if he had said something anti-federalist. But whichever way the president chooses to speak about marijuana federalism, it doesn’t matter anyway, because he doesn’t have any legal authority until our legalization bill eventually hits his desk a few years from now.”
Eidinger, the local activist who spearheaded a successful push to make marijuana legal under local law in the nation’s capital, which now is accompanied by nine states with legal recreational pot laws and more than two dozen with medical pot laws, said if Trump ever wanted to get rid of Sessions, he has an idea.
“I think Jeff Sessions would resign if the president called him into the White House and said, ‘I don’t want you to enforce marijuana laws’, and then said, ‘Hey Jeff, I want you to reschedule, to go along with the process.’ …. I think you’d get Sessions to quit,” Eidinger said. “And it would have nothing to do with Russia. The liberal progressives who would think there’s some kind of conspiracy would say, ‘Yes, that makes a lot of sense.’”
