The Drug War infrastructure is still sitting there, waiting to be fully utilized again. Cannabis advocates can fight back, but they have to organize in new ways.
Drug War III?
The last time Donald Trump was in the White House, it was a pill mill for ADHD meds, Xanax, and opiates.
There is good reason to believe it will return to this. The rulers of every society have more access to drugs and use a greater variety than they allow their subjects; it’s been this way ever since early agriculture, where tribal leaders decided to grow grapes for their wine instead of wheat for the people.
There are plenty of substances available to those with the means to afford prescription healthcare or who buy it off the shelf at the local liquor or weed store, and jail or fetty for everyone else.
The coming Trump administration’s drug policy is tied into its immigration policy, which is tied to Mexico. Already the big guy has threatened to stage a military invasion to “wage war” on cartels. Those who have been keeping score since Drug War II recall when Panamanian President Manuel Noriega was arrested by the US military in Panama for laundering drug money. Noriega got to wear his general’s uniform while in a US federal prison, because by the Geneva Conventions he was a prisoner of war.
Which makes all the Americans incarcerated due to drug prohibition prisoners of the same war.
The Mexican-American War Redux is unlikely, but the practical difficulties of staging and deporting 20 million next-door neighbors make putting up a few miles of border wall child’s play by comparison. Wall sections do not require water, food, or waste disposal, for example. When Stephen Miller and his flunkies get frustrated at how slow it’s going, they’ll turn from immigrants to disciplining the native population, and the dopers will be among the lowest-hanging fruit and the first targets. The Drug War infrastructure—like Drug-Free Zones, HIDTA’s, and mandatory minimums—is still sitting there, waiting to be fully utilized again.
Rescheduling
Rescheduling cannabis does nothing to decriminalize it, which is why we don’t hear prohibitionists speaking out against rescheduling.
Pharma has little use for organically-derived cannabinoids, and when the DEA eventually issues Schedule III manufacturing licenses, expect almost all prescription cannabinoids to be synthesized. It is more predictable, reliable, and efficient to synthesize drugs, favorable to scientific medicine, and all the reasons that will be needed in those (Republican-voting) states that reluctantly approved medicinal cannabis to rescind medicinal cultivation licenses. “Smoked marijuana is not a medicine,” former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey once declared.
The marijuana reform movement might be able to capitalize on a refreshed Drug War, but it’s become starved of funders since legalization stopped being trendy. Over-reliance on a tiny number of wealthy donors (who have moved to hallucinogen legalization or live in weed-legal states), and the migration of “activists” to industry have left the two national players—MPP and NORML—considering a merger for the sake of sharing the two remaining people who can and have given six-figures in a year to weed reform since 2020.
There are reform veterans who see Trump’s prior nonchalance related to state marijuana policies as an indicator he will pursue more laissez-faire approaches, and perhaps so. Recall, however, early in his first term he had AG Jeff Sessions rescind the Obama-era Cole Memo, which outlined how states could construct legal retail cannabis markets and avoid federal raids. Authoritarians do not give up levers willingly, and it takes a lot of work to dismantle prohibition.
Legalization
I’ve joked that we are actually closer to federal legalization today than we ever have been before. Despite voters in three states that went MAGA rejecting weed legalization initiatives, we now know what Trulieve and other multi-state operators are willing to pay. Some reformers think that the remedy is to run to the multi-state operations (MSOs) and get them to throw a mere pittance (NORML and MPP’s combined annual operating budgets are literally less than 2% of the amount that amendment supporters paid to lose Florida this year) into reform. But industry money is what turned the NRA from being a sportsmen’s club to making pro-gun press appearances, following mass murders.
The best pathway to legalization is not to corrupt the consumer advocates, it is to bribe the president.
If three or four MSOs step up with, say, 12.5% of their shares, and give them to the president all of a sudden, he stands to make money from federal legalization, so of course he will grease the skids. He’s already made it very clear he is for sale, and his Supreme Court has ruled that he cannot be violating the Emoluments Clause as long as it is part of what they consider his official duties. It would only take a few MSOs tossing him ownership bits to make it so. This is literally how his mentor, Putin, allowed Russian industries to grow.
This will never happen, though. Not because MSOs are above offering bribes, but because we know that these companies are not going to spend a dime when their competition stands to benefit without spending themselves. The Doctrine of Free Weed is for individuals under prohibition. In legal states, puff-puff-pass has become pay-to-puff.
Moving past nonprofit models of consumer advocacy
If the “marijuana” users (they call them that by law in prohibition states) are to get any further legalization, it is going to have to come from something other than the advocacy models we have relied on for over 50 years. The incoming administration is already threatening nonprofits.
Foundations and other non-government organizations have long allowed monied people to make and execute the social policies they would like to see, while avoiding taxes and giving their offspring an allowance and hobby. This is all well and good, until we have a president bent on forcing massive cultural and political changes, and who will shut down nonprofits simply because he does not like them or their benefactors.
Traditional, for-profit industry lobbying keeps the consumers out of the room. We have already seen the self-interests of cultivators, testing labs, and retailers coinciding to result in inflated THC percentages and falsified mold test results. We cannot hope that a billionaire will suddenly start cutting checks in consumers’ interests.
The future of reform advocacy is going to come from a social benefit corporation model, like a Ben & Jerry’s—only instead of saving rainforests and whales, it will drive resources from cannabis consumers in legal states to marijuana reform in prohibition states. Instead of selling ice cream, it will have to offer benefits and services to cannabis consumers (maybe AAA bongside assistance?). These entities, privately-owned but publicly-committed, will attract investors, tap into legal markets and casual consumer bases in ways that MPP and NORML were never designed to, and through membership numbers, will be able to lobby effectively on behalf of the 50-plus million American cannabis users.
There are more households with a past or present-day cannabis consumer in them than ones with licensed firearms. Properly organized, they can rival the NRA for political influence; but they have to avoid corruption by non-consumer interests.
Or, I get this totally wrong
If, instead of keeping the Drug War option open and using it in conjunction with the purge, the new administration decides to claim cannabis legalization once and for all for the Republicans by pushing through federal laws that will allow for banking, taxation, regulation (ha!), and interstate commerce, and the United States commits to amending the UN Single Convention on Narcotics to globally treat weed like alcohol, and we start talking about importing and exporting, I will publicly announce that I misread their intentions, resign my commission, and quit the fight.
But something tells me that they are not infringing on liberty in so many ways, only to let the potheads off the hook.
As for the nonprofit citizen-advocacy model, its leadership has chosen to be too dependent upon large individual benefactors for sustainability. This is the second time we’ve seen marijuana legalization go out of style, with memberships, volunteer hours, and donations lagging far behind what they were several years ago. With more pressures to be placed upon them in the near future, and more surveillance than ever, expect cannabis consumers to go back into the closet like it was the 1980s, especially in states where possession remains a crime.
I may be wrong on that point, too, but I don’t see a future for cannabis consumer advocacy that relies on resources from a dwindling number of donors and volunteers.
