Last week, the House of Representatives voted 220-204 to approve the MORE Act, which would end the federal prohibition of marijuana. While the bill certainly isn’t perfect, it’s preferable to prohibition, which is why it’s unfortunate that only one California Republican member of Congress, Rep. Tom McClintock, voted in support.
For decades, the United States federal government has waged a losing battle against marijuana.
Most American adults have tried marijuana despite the best efforts of the government — which has entailed the arrest of millions of Americans, including several hundreds of thousands per year, countless raids and international interdiction efforts.
The failure of marijuana prohibition is of course no surprise. It’s going as well as alcohol prohibition a century ago, which is what most people understand at this point.
According to consistent public polling in recent years, most Americans support legalizing marijuana, which remains prohibited under federal law even as increasing numbers of states legalize it for medicinal and recreational purposes.
This past November, 68% of Americans surveyed by Gallup indicated support for legalization.
California, of course, has been a pioneer of marijuana law reform.
Medical marijuana has been legal here since voters approved Proposition 215 in 1996, and recreational marijuana was legalized following passage of Proposition 64 in 2016.
Though the federal government hasn’t shown as much interest in meddling with states that are going contrary to federal law, the contradiction is untenable.
Since federal marijuana prohibition is nonsensical, unjustifiable and harmful, that should be reason enough to strike prohibition and allow states to make their own laws about how to manage it.
Add in where public sentiment is at and it’s a no-brainer.
The MORE Act gets us there by striking marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act and decriminalizing related offenses. It also rightly puts forth processes for people convicted of federal marijuana offenses to clear their records.
While we’re not especially thrilled that the proposal calls for various federal taxes, the end of marijuana prohibition is long overdue.
While votes in opposition from many members of the California Republican delegation don’t surprise us — Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Temecula, for example, has consistently told us about his opposition — we’re disappointed that Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Huntington Beach, voted against it.
Steel told our editorial board in October 2020 that despite her personal opposition to marijuana use, she “would support the removal of marijuana from Schedule I and giving the states and their respective local governments the ability to find the marijuana policies that work best for them.”
Federal marijuana prohibition has been a failure. Supporting efforts to end it should be a no-brainer.
____
