Legalized weed marches across the map

By Paul Demko

A sign supporting Ohio's Issue 2 ballot measure sits in a residential yard on Election Day, Nov. 7, 2023, in Cincinnati. | Joshua A. Bickel/AP

HIGH MAINTENANCE — Americans have few regrets about the country’s decade-long cannabis legalization experiment. The freshest evidence arrived last week when Ohio became the latest state to endorse legal weed, meaning just over half of Americans now live in states where anyone at least 21 years old can legally possess the drug.

The creeping expansion of legalized marijuana isn’t likely to stop there — there are two potential developments on the horizon for 2024 that could further entrench the country’s radical shift on cannabis policy.

The latest Gallup survey shows that a record 70 percent of Americans now believe marijuana should be legal – more than 20 points higher than in 2012, when voters in Colorado and Washington state became the first to embrace full legalization.

A lot more Americans are consuming weed too. Just over 40 million adults reported using marijuana in the last month — or about 16 percent of the U.S. population — according to the just released 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. That’s a more than 50 percent jump from five years earlier, when just under 10 percent of adults reported past-month use.

This embrace of weed legalization endures despite significant problems that have arisen with the emergence of a quasi-legal industry that’s slated to take in $35 billion this year — and with sales expected to double again by 2030.

Most notably, the promise of a safe, regulated market usurping the entrenched underground network of drug dealers has proven elusive. In many states — particularly California and New York — the illicit market remains dominant, with little fear of punishment for people flouting the law.

Even more disturbing, criminal syndicates — often with ties to foreign countries like China and Mexico — have exploited legal markets to camouflage their operations and run massive illicit weed farms in states like Oregon, Oklahoma and Maine. Those cartels have been tied to grisly murders and allegations of human trafficking.

There have been some signs of backlash. In March, Oklahoma voters overwhelmingly rejected recreational legalization, with every county in the deeply conservative state voting against the measure. That marked a rejection of the state’s freewheeling medical market, which at one point had more than 14,000 licensed weed businesses — far more than even California — and earned it the unlikely moniker of ‘Tokelahoma.’

Weed referendums have also gone down to defeat in Arkansas, South Dakota and North Dakota in recent years.

But all signs suggest that there’s no stopping weed legalization at this point. Florida is likely to vote on recreational legalization next year, although the referendum must survive a legal challenge before the state Supreme Court. If the ballot measure passes — no easy feat, since it will require support from 60 percent of voters — it would mean another 22 million Americans live in a state where adults can legally possess marijuana. Pretty much all of the country’s biggest weed companies have planted a flag in the Sunshine State in anticipation of it eventually embracing full legalization.

Even more significantly, the Biden administration has begun the painstaking process of changing the classification of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act. Ever since the landmark drug law was enacted in 1970, marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I drug — the same category as heroin — meaning it’s deemed to have no therapeutic uses and a high potential for abuse.

In August, the Department of Health and Human Services — after conducting a scientific review — recommended that marijuana be moved to Schedule III. The Drug Enforcement Administration is now tasked with making the final decision, with that likely to come in the first half of next year.

While state marijuana markets would remain illegal at the federal level if it ultimately is moved to Schedule III, that would still mark the biggest change in federal drug policy in half a century.

If even Joe Biden — an octogenarian, old school drug warrior with a history of substance abuse problems in his family — is embracing looser restrictions on weed, the times truly have changed.

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— Conviction in conspiracy-fueled attack on Paul Pelosi: A jury has convicted the man charged with breaking into the home of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and striking her 83-year-old husband in the head with a hammer in an act of political violence fueled by hard-right delusions. David DePape, a Canadian citizen who was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time of the attack, was found guilty by a jury in federal court today of assault and kidnapping charges that could send him to prison for decades.

— UAW-General Motors contract has enough votes for ratification: United Auto Workers members at General Motors had enough votes today to ratify their contract with the company, according to a tracker maintained by the union, checking the first of three boxes needed to officially end the strike against the Detroit automakers. Failure to ratify even one of the three contracts would be a blow not only to the union and companies, which had framed the agreements as record-breaking, but also for President Joe Biden, who was heavily invested in the outcome and showed striking workers unprecedented support. Votes at Ford and Stellantis were still ongoing as of this morning.

— Capitol Police confront fallout from violent protest at Democratic headquarters: The Capitol Police announced that a protest that turned violent outside of Democratic Party headquarters Wednesday night resulted in one arrest for assaulting an officer. A group of protesters advocating for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war had blocked an entrance to the headquarters, located just blocks from the Capitol, prompting police to attempt to clear the protesters out of the way. The USCP said in a statement the group had “failed to obey our lawful orders to move back from the DNC.”

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FAMILIAR VILLAIN — A familiar villain has begun rearing its head again in the 2024 presidential campaign: Social media, reports POLITICO. GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley went on the attack across four recent appearances, calling anonymous social-media posts a national security threat. Less than a week earlier, the candidates at the third Republican primary debate took the toughest swings at TikTok, with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie promising to ban the platform entirely on his first week in office.

As policy ideas, those were quickly batted down. Critics have noted that TikTok can’t just be banned with the stroke of a pen. And Haley took a lot of flak — largely from her own party — for her suggestion that companies end anonymous posting.

TRUMP’S SHIELD — POLITICO reports that prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office accused Donald Trump of trying to use his presidential campaign to shield himself from prosecution, saying in a new court filing that his effort to dismiss his criminal case over hush money payments is “essentially an attempt to evade criminal responsibility.”

“Defendant repeatedly suggests that because he is a current presidential candidate, the ordinary rules for criminal law and procedure should be applied differently here,” prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office wrote in the 99-page document. “Courts have repeatedly rejected defendant’s demands for special treatment and instead have adhered to the core principle that the rule of law applies equally to the powerful as to the powerless.”

Prosecutors filed the court papers in response to Trump’s October motion to dismiss the criminal case, which his lawyers wrote “has prejudiced President Trump and the public by interfering with his presidential campaign.”

CAUSES WITH BENEFITS — In 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earned more than $500,000 as the chairman and top lawyer at Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit organization that he has helped build into a leading spreader of anti-vaccine falsehoods and a platform for launching his independent bid for the White House, reports the New York Times..

Throughout his long public life, Mr. Kennedy has cultivated an image as a man committed to a greater good, the blessing and burden of belonging to one of America’s most storied political families. Whether cleaning up rivers as an environmentalist or railing against the purported dangers of inoculations, he has said he is driven by his family’s legacy of civic duty and sacrifice. But an examination of Mr. Kennedy’s finances by The New York Times, including public filings and almost two dozen interviews as well as tax returns and other documents not previously made public, showed that while he appears to believe in the causes he champions, they have also had a practical benefit: His crusades, backed by the power of his name, have earned him tens of millions of dollars.

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Yahia al-Sinwar (center), Gaza Strip chief of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, shakes hands with a masked fighter of Hamas' Qassam Brigades in Gaza City on Dec. 14, 2022. | Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images

SUCCESSION PLAN — Israel doesn’t want to end up deciding who rules Gaza after Hamas — that is, if Hamas does lose control — but is liaising closely with its allies on the future of the coastal enclave, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told POLITICO today.

Israel insists it won’t stay on as an occupier, and Ophir Falk, Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser, also dismissively shook his head when asked about a role for the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority or the UN.

“I think the worst thing that could happen is for Israel to say who governs, but we can say who’s not going to govern, and it is not going to be Hamas,” he noted.

Given Israel won’t pick the successor to Hamas, Falk argued a diplomatic approach would be needed to help settle what comes next.

Still, not all suggestions from allies are going down well. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently secured agreement in principle from the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah party, to take over Gaza but only if there are serious talks about a two-state solution. This would be a highly significant move because Hamas battled Fatah for control of Gaza in 2007 that effectively split Palestinian political structures in two, with Hamas controlling Gaza and Fatah predominating in the West Bank.

Falk was not in favor of the idea of a return of the Palestinian Authority, arguing it had failed to denounce “to this day the worst atrocities of the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” adding “not only have they been unable to denounce the burning of babies and the beheading of children, but there are also some [PA] ministers who even take pride in what Hamas did on October 7.”

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I LOVE YOU TO MARS AND BACK — In preparing to eventually send people to Mars — a trip that would consist of around half a dozen astronauts over the course of a few years — NASA is forced to study a scenario it has long avoided: romantic relationships in space. The space agency has earned a reputation for dodging questions about astronauts falling in love on missions. But now, NASA is exploring the effects intimate relationships can have on space travel through a Florida Maxima Corporation and University of Central Florida professor’s study. In this article for Mashable, Elisha Sauers looks at past and future space romances and why NASA may see astronaut romance as “cringe,” but ultimately necessary for the future of space exploration.

On this date in 1990: Romanians protest against the ruling National Salvation Front in Brasov, Romania, as part of nationwide demonstrations. The ruling party cracked down on protests that began in June of that year, just months after the Romanian revolution of 1989. | Siumui Chan/AP

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