In his first year as president, Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, urged Congress to decriminalize low-level marijuana possession, saying "penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." Forty-three years later, Joe Biden, who for decades had been one of the Senate's most zealous drug warriors, promised to follow through on Carter's recommendation. "As president," his campaign said, "Biden will…decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions."
That did not happen. Nearly half a century after Carter said he wanted to "eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana," those penalties—a minimum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail—are still on the books. But in other respects, the legal landscape for cannabis consumers is dramatically different than it was in 1977, and Carter's speech is a revealing snapshot from that long journey.
