Senator Elizabeth Warren is the latest Democratic Presidential hopeful to release a plan to legalize cannabis if they are elected. It’s similar in many ways to the plan released by Senator Bernie Sanders a few months ago, although it brings about legalization on a less aggressive timeline.
Warren plans on filling her administration with pro-legalization officials in key positions, as well as pushing for legalization on a federal level with expungements, repairing the harm done by the War on Drugs, allowing veterans access to medical marijuana and allowing banking access for cannabis companies.
Another similarity between the Warren and Sanders plans is the singling out of “Big Tobacco” for censure and banishment from the legal cannabis industry. Here’s what I said at the time about Sanders singling out “Big Tobacco”:
I’m not sure what the point of these stipulations is beyond pandering and punishing a specific industry for past transgressions. If there is a real worry about companies that make dangerous products entering the cannabis industry, why do the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries get a pass, for example?
This seems like a silly point to address a non-existent fear. Are you really worried about tobacco companies selling marijuana products? If you don’t want to buy cannabis products from tobacco companies, then simply don’t. In the age of the Internet, it’s not that hard to find out who makes and sells what.
The people who will get to choose who sells marijuana products are the people buying them. If the same company that makes Marlboro makes a great cannabis product and I want to buy it, so what? Why is that the business of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or anyone else who is not me?
Some people will give you various answers to those questions, but they all boil down to adults being too stupid to decide on what to buy so the geniuses in the government need to narrow down the choices and make sure they are all safe enough for you dummies to pick from.
To be frank, I’ve been buying cannabis for over 20 years with zero input from the government, and I think I’ll be able to manage the intricacies of buying legal marijuana when that day comes. If I have a question about anything, I’ll just find the answer.
I appreciate the effort to legalize marijuana on the part of all the candidates that favor that, I really do. But we just need you to rectify the screwups of your predecessors, not tell us how and where to buy marijuana and who to buy it from.
The downside to allowing big corporations into the “marihuana” growing business, is that they will use their shareholder’s money to build big “marihuana” farms that overproduce cheap “marihuana” at cheap prices, to unfairly drive local “marihuana” growers out of business for the profits of “marihuana” shareholders.
Then the big corporations will use their shareholder’s money to buyout each other, so we end up with 3 or 4 bigger “marihuana” corporations competing on price, marketing to kids, underpaying employees, and the other problems that we have seen from big corporations. Then there will be an outcry for a bunch of reforms to limit the corporate excesses, limit their activities, and the other typical efforts that we have seen big government do.
Then, we the people, being relegated to lowly “marihuana” consumer status, will have to deal with a bunch of federal enforcement and regulations, paid by high taxes, which raise the cost of business, and limit our opportunities for entry into the “marihuana industry”.
That is basically the goal of this malformed definition that is so abstruse, bewildering, circumlocutory, deceptive, and equivocal, that the federal drug-law enforcement agency has unfaithfully misconstrued its meaning in order to revoke our rights to grow and use cannabis:
Sec. 802.
(16)(A) Subject to subparagraph (B), the term “marihuana” means all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds or resin.
(B) The term “marihuana” does not include (i) hemp, as defined in section 1639o of title 7; or (ii) the mature stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any other compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake, or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination.
But, by simply reconstructing the malformed federal definition of marijuana in the necessary and proper way to make it carefully deschedule cannabis by revealing the original prohibitions regarding the plant that are implied by the 2nd, 9th, 10th, and 14th Amendments of the Constitution, then the liberty, rights, privileges and immunities of citizens to again grow and carefully use cannabis – which has been revoked ever since the original malformed definition debuted in 1937 – will be returned to the people with federal protection, under state regulations for quality control, and within a perimeter of limited federal prohibitions, with a concise federal law that is respectable, sensible, truthful, understandable, and verifiable, even as marijuana itself remains prohibited until that “other substance” is separately removed from Schedule 1, like this:
Sec. 802.
(16) The term “marijuana” means all parts of the smoke produced by the combustion of the plant Cannabis sativa L., which is, as are the viable seeds of such plant, prohibited to be grown by or sold by any publicly traded corporation or subsidiary company, and such smoke is prohibited to be inhaled by any child or by any person bearing any firearm, as is their intake of any part or any product of such plant containing more than 0.3% THC by weight unless prescribed to such child by an authorized medical practitioner.
Why should marijuana continue to be misconstrued to mean cannabis so that marijuana prohibition can continue to be misconstrued to mean cannabis prohibition for peaceful adult citizens? Congress has to change the law so that the President, the States, and the People, can enforce it faithfully to the Constitution.
In this election year we can tell our representatives in Congress, and our favored congressional candidates, how to simply make marijuana actually mean marijuana, but with the originally intended, limited federal cannabis use prohibitions that control the undesired proliferation of marijuana, which will remain even if the prohibition of marijuana itself is separately halted.