Schedule I Marijuana, a counter-factual declaration that cannabis is a dangerous addictive drug with no medicinal benefits, has passed away. The lie was was born of the War on Drugs in 1971 via Republican President Richard Nixon, died 2025 via Republican President Donald Trump. In-between, Democratic President Jimmy Carter vowed to decriminalize marijuana but never followed through. Democratic President Bill Clinton claimed “he tried it, but didn’t inhale,” then his Department of Justice attacked California doctors’ free speech rights to recommend medical marijuana. Democratic President Barack Obama admitted “I inhaled—frequently—that was the point,” then cracked down on medical marijuana harder than Republican President George W. Bush. Democratic President Joe Biden (who, as Senator, was architect of much of the War on Drugs, including the creation of the Drug Czar’s office) vowed to reschedule cannabis, setting in motion Trump’s rescheduling today, but then sacked dozens of staffers who honestly admitted to past cannabis use when asked.
It is Republican President Donald J. Trump who has finally, sensibly, inevitably rescheduled cannabis out of the “it’s not medicine” Schedule I (alongside LSD and heroin) and into the “it’s prescription medicine” Schedule III (alongside steroids and ketamine). I can tell you that for the past two decades I’ve been warning that if Democrats didn’t proudly embrace marijuana legalization, and leveraged it for voter turnout among young and low-propensity voters as the low-hanging fruit populist issue it is, eventually Republicans would get over the Reefer Madness, see the profit in it, and snatch the issue away.
2010
“What do Democrats have to offer the cannabis consumer who comes out for a 2010 election?” I asked that in a 2010 post on the popular LGBT blog Pam’s House Blend about the pending California Prop 19 legalization vote. The political chatter was that Democrats would use pro-marijuana state initiatives to drive up turn-out like Republicans had done the decade before with anti-gay initiatives. “Unlike Rove and the Republicans, the Democrats don’t really believe in these initiatives (publicly). Sen. Boxer, Sen. Feinstein (a former mayor of San Francisco, c’mon now!), and former Gov. / current AG Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown all publicly oppose Prop 19 (really, Jerry? You toked with Linda Ronstadt! Please!)”
I noted that President Barack Obama had campaigned on ending the War on Drugs and wasn’t shy about his past use of cannabis. Then we “got Obama elected. We even got him a massive majority in Congress. We were thrilled when he asked us online what items we’d like to see on the new administration’s agenda and multiple times we responded with ‘legalize marijuana‘, topping almost every public survey and dominating with 16 of the top 50 questions in the largest survey. So what did we get in response? Something we in marijuana law reform simply call ‘The Chuckle.'”
Democrats, I opined, got the votes of marijuana consumers by default because of the GOP’s Reefer Madness moral opposition. “But how long will it take some younger, Tea Party-friendly Republicans to realize they have a potential windfall of new, young, diverse voters if they steal the low-hanging fruit of marijuana legalization for their own?”
The answer is another fifteen years from that post, roughly.
2014
In a 2014 article for HIGH TIMES Magazine, I covered an interview President Barack Obama gave to CNN’s Jake Tapper. Obama told Tapper, “I stand by my belief based on the scientific evidence that marijuana for casual users, individual users, is subject to abuse, just like alcohol is and should be treated as a public health problem and challenge.”
His recognition that marijuana is ‘no more dangerous than alcohol’ as he said a few days prior is critical to defining a rational drug policy. Cannabis is currently listed in Schedule I, alongside heroin, PCP, and LSD as dangerous drugs of abuse with no medical benefit, while alcohol kills far more people than all illegal drugs combined and isn’t scheduled at all.
So, what does President Obama say when asked about reconciling his belief about marijuana’s relative safety to alcohol with his Administration’s policy that marijuana’s as bad as heroin?
“First of all, what is and isn’t a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress,” Obama said.
Oh. And here I thought the President of the United States, who is chief of the Executive Branch and, therefore, boss of the Attorney General and the head of the DEA, might have some influence in the matter.
2017
As Trump took office in his first term in 2017, I composed best- and worst-case scenarios for his potential to affect marijuana legalization.
What if conservatives finally realize they must plan for the voting demographics of the future? They gained complete power with large support from older white voters, a voting demographic that will decrease as time goes on. How can the GOP of the future win the votes of a younger, more diverse electorate?
Maybe to win the larger point of having the states’ rights to oppress people and arm everyone, the Republicans decide to acknowledge the states’ rights to regulate marijuana as they choose. Maybe President Trump sees that removing cannabis from the federal drug scheduling would still allow retrograde states to ban it all they like, so it doesn’t cost him votes there, while earning him some votes from independents, minorities, and younger people.
In doing so, he’s taken marijuana off the table as a political issue at the federal level….
If there’s one predictable thing about Donald Trump, it’s that he wants the Trump brand to shine. Trump hates losers; politically and economically, marijuana is now a winner. Trump descheduling marijuana also has the side effect of earning him some criminal justice reform cred, creating a whole bunch of jobs, and boosting the economy as he seeks re-election. He can paint himself as the man of action who finally made progress on something the people support, using the opportunity to blast Democrats who claimed to be progressive but maintained prohibition.
2020
Following the 2020 Election, I noted how marijuana legalization on state ballots was outperforming Joe Biden.
It’s beyond frustrating to watch Democrats continue to shy away from the issue of marijuana legalization.
It’s been a winning statewide ballot issue now in the past five congressional term elections (we’d all like to forget 2015’s Ohio Issue 3), yet not only do Democratic leaders reject legalization as a plank in the party platform, they go and nominate for president the #1 Drug War Democrat — Joe Biden, the man responsible more than anyone for mandatory minimums, mass incarceration, and creation of the Drug Czar’s office, who has only been dragged reluctantly to Kevin Sabet’s preferred policy of maintaining penalties for adult marijuana users to coerce them into drug treatment they neither want nor need.
We wait with bated breath as to whether Biden can eke out a narrow Electoral College win against the worst human being to occupy any elected office in any nation in the history of mankind. We can only imagine how many more voters a Democratic candidate who strongly supported marijuana legalization could have driven to the polls, considering that three-quarters of Democrats, two-thirds of Independents, and even half of Republicans support it.
It’s almost as if Democratic leadership is more interested in what certain corporate people think of marijuana legalization than what two-thirds of the human people want.
2025
I hate being proved right on this. Marijuana legalization has been a majority support issue among Democrats’ own voters since President George W. Bush’s 2nd term. It has been a winner among Independents since President Barack Obama’s 1st term. It started gaining majority support among Republicans in President Donald Trump’s first term but has dropped to just 40% now in his second term. For all the timidity Democrats have displayed around the issue of cannabis, despite its now supermajority popularity with their voters, Trump is actually rescheduling marijuana as its support among his voters is lowest it has been in a decade.
Donald Trump’s second term has been a vulgar display of power, but it in general and this rescheduling issue in particular should prove to Democrats that they have been far too reticent to wield the power they have when in office to enact change. To have whiffed on cannabis policy for the past fifty-four years, and especially the last dozen years when marijuana’s become legalized in half* the states and medicalized in four-fifths of the states, is political malpractice.
* Yes, only 24 states currently have legalization. But South Dakota had it until their Supreme Court nullified it and Florida would have had it if its vote threshold were 50% instead of 60%. So, more than half of the U.S. states have voted for legal marijuana.
