For once , we sort of, agree with something written in Forbes and would suggest that govt, business, the courts etc use this time wisely to prepare for the ineviatble so it isn’t a complete car crash when regulation rolls round.
Education, Education, Education !
Fobes write, by way of an introduction, to their piece
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently announced that if he is elected president of the United States in 2024, he would not decriminalize cannabis—let alone legalize it.
“I don’t think we’d do that,” DeSantis, whose home state is the country’s largest medical marijuana market with more than $1 billion in annual sales, said last week during a campaign event in South Carolina.
President Joe Biden isn’t pro-cannabis, nor are any of the other major declared candidates, including former President Donald Trump. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, rescinded Obama-era protections for the industry, and more recently, Trump said that drug dealers should be executed. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who opposed cannabis legalization during his first bid for president in 2016 and referred to tax revenue from pot sales as “blood money,” said during a town hall on CNN that he would end parts of America’s drug war, but still opposes legalization. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as a Democrat and got arrested for marijuana and heroin decades ago, said he would decriminalize weed, but he stopped short at legalization.
If Biden wins the 2024 presidential election, his term will last until 2029. If a Republican wins the 2024 election and gets re-elected for a second term, the earliest a pro-pot president could take the White House would be January 2033.
Joe Biden seemed like the answer to the cannabis industry’s prayers in 2021, but his record is mixed at best. In his lengthy tenure as a senator, Biden was partially responsible for America’s harsh drug laws, and as president, he fired White House staffers who tested positive for marijuana. Yet in October 2022, he pardoned all U.S. citizens convicted of federal marijuana possession and asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General to review “expeditiously” how marijuana is scheduled under federal law.
Since 1970, cannabis has been classified as a Schedule I drug, along with heroin and LSD, a category reserved for narcotics with a high potential for abuse and no medical value. “Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana,” Biden said in a statement announcing the weed-friendly moves last year. “It’s time that we right these wrongs.”
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