What are Joe Biden and the White House's Stances on Marijuana?
While President Joe Biden has made some incredibly important and progressive decisions, he is not the most progressive when it comes to marijuana. As Canada's neighbour to the south, U.S. federal cannabis policy has implications for cross-border trade, research partnerships, and broader North American drug policy — making it a topic worth following closely from a Canadian perspective.
Currently, according to Gallup, approximately 68% of U.S. citizens support the legalisation of marijuana at the federal level. However, Joe Biden was the only one of the Democratic presidential contenders in 2020 to not commit to legalising marijuana at the national level. At the same time, he does not hold draconian views of cannabis either, as he has gone on the record saying that people should not be imprisoned for using weed and he did promise to make it easier to conduct medical marijuana research.
House votes to legalise marijuana, but…
On April 1, 2022, in what was not an April Fool's Day gag, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to legalise marijuana by passing the MORE Act. If it becomes law, a few of the many things that would happen are: marijuana would be removed from the list of federally banned drugs, marijuana products would be subject to an excise tax, and breeders, producers, and importers would need to apply for federal permits.
Unfortunately, despite the House voting to legalise weed, the MORE Act was expected to not pass in the Senate, and even if it somehow did, many observers worried that Biden might exercise his veto power as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declined to answer whether he supported the bill or not. It was also possible that he would sign the bill into law, as vetoing it would risk alienating a good majority of his younger (18-to-39-year-old) voters, and legalising marijuana could help him not only keep them but win back the ones he had lost.
Psaki did also go on to say that Biden supports some reforms, such as his campaign promises to decriminalise marijuana and expand research on the effects of marijuana. Psaki said he also supports reforms related to the safe use of medical marijuana.
Campaign promises made, kept, pushed aside
As mentioned above, Biden made a campaign pledge to make medical marijuana research easier to conduct. This is a promise that he has somewhat followed through on with the signing of the infrastructure bill in November 2021, which includes provisions that allow researchers to study the marijuana that consumers actually purchase from licensed retailers, versus only being able to study government-grown cannabis.
That said, while he has kept the provision for protecting legal medical cannabis programmes from federal interference in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal year budget proposals, Biden has continued to block Washington, D.C. from legalising marijuana sales and wants it left out of the budget. Another campaign promise that Biden has kept so far is to keep the federal government out of individual states' rights to decide for themselves about the legalisation and regulations related to marijuana.
While Biden said during his campaign that marijuana should be decriminalised, he has yet to extend clemency to cannabis offenders, which is a power that he as president does have. When Joe Biden was running for president he clearly stated that he was in favour of moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II under the Controlled Substances Act. While this may seem rather inconsequential, doing so would make it easier for researchers to study its risks and benefits. However, Biden has yet to act on this campaign statement.
It is said that the biggest reason Biden's administration has been slow to move on cannabis reforms at the federal level is due to the fact that he and his team came in at a time when there was a global pandemic that needed to finally be proactively addressed.
While that makes sense, it does not explain why Biden made all of these relatively pro-cannabis reform statements and yet his own Department of Veterans Affairs said as recently as late 2021 that it opposes a bill passed on November 4, 2021, by the House that would require the department to execute clinical trials related to marijuana's therapeutic potential for veterans. This is particularly noteworthy from a Canadian perspective, as Veterans Affairs Canada has taken a comparatively more open stance on medical cannabis access for Canadian veterans under the Cannabis Act.
Weed as viewed from working inside the Biden administration
In the early part of 2021, the Biden administration reportedly asked dozens of White House staff, who during their background check process admitted to using marijuana in the past, to resign — effectively being fired or punished. Not even Psaki was able to successfully spin this, despite attempts to appease her office by emphasising that no one was let go for "marijuana usage from years ago," and that no staffer was asked to resign "due to casual or infrequent use during the prior 12 months."
Then a year later in March of 2022, it was reported that employees of the White House cannot invest in cannabis companies. The employee conduct guidelines also made it clear that the eligibility of potential hires and an individual's chances of receiving security clearance will be "negatively impacted," regardless of whether they did so unknowingly. However, it is speculated that this decision may have been made not so much as a means to set cannabis reform back, but out of recognition that the cannabis industry is growing and becoming more normalised. Viewed from that perspective — and particularly from Canada, where cannabis has been federally legal under the Cannabis Act since October 2018 — this could be seen as an indication that by wanting to eliminate the possibilities of conflicts of interest, the White House knows or has a sense that the federal government will begin to take further steps to regulate marijuana.
Conclusion
While Joe Biden is far from progressive in his stance on marijuana, the fact that he does support decriminalising weed and making it easier for marijuana research to be conducted is, as most things are, a meaningful improvement over his predecessor. For Canadians who have enjoyed federally legal cannabis since 2018 under the Cannabis Act, watching the U.S. slowly inch toward reform can feel equal parts familiar and frustrating. That said, the fact that the House passed the MORE Act shows that even if this White House administration will not be the one to do it, federal legalisation of marijuana in the U.S. does look like it could happen in the near-ish future — provided voters south of the border elect the kinds of Senate and Congressional members who support progress and reform.