The Trump administration can slow down marijuana
legalization but they can't stop it.
I think medical should happen, right?
Don't we agree?
I mean, I think so.
And then I really believe you should leave
it up to the states.
It should be a state situation.
First of all, the federal government doesn't
have the power
to force states to make marijuana illegal again.
So even if they, say, filed a lawsuit to challenge
the system of licensing and regulation,
They might knock that out if they were successful
with that lawsuit.
But that doesn't mean that marijuana is banned
again in those states,
it just means that it's unregulated.
So, from their point of view, I'm not sure
that that's any better.
A lot of people are worried that the Trump Administration
will crack down on marijuana legalization
mainly because of the man he
chose for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions,
who is an old style drug warrior.
Marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought
to be legalized.
Good people don't smoke marijuana.
He could indeed crack down on a lot of marijuana
businesses in states where it's legal.
That would obviously have a very disrupting
effect on the industry.
What would be not just hard, but impossible,
would be to go after all of the people producing and distributing marijuana.
Because in almost all the states that have
legalized it for recreational use,
you're allowed to grow you're own at home.
The federal government wouldn't have the manpower
to go after all of these home growers.
The federal government has never had the resources
to actually enforce prohibition for the most part.
They relied overwhelmingly on the states.
Almost all of the arrests were done by the
states.
So they can create a lot of chaos, but ultimately
they are not going to reverse legalization
and bring back prohibition.
There's really very little upside politically
for Trump to go after legal marijuana.
It's first of all inconsistent with what he
said during the campaign.
Secondly it's inconsistent with conservative
principles
in so far as conservatives believe that states should be able to make their own policies
with respect to things that happen within the state.
And he is going contrary to public opinion,
because the polls show a majority of Americans support legalization.
Social conservatives might be pleased by a
crackdown on marijuana,
but he has placated them in various other ways already,
so that's the only benefit I can see and there's a very big downside.
