Dear Pot Lawyer,
Did the Democratic Party just endorse national legalization of weed?
NO, BUT the party added “marijuana law reform” as a platform plank to be adopted this month. It’s a step.
The two big US political parties tend to scrape together an agenda and revise their platforms in presidential election years. Bernie Sanders (remember him?) was doing pretty well around the time the platform drafting committee was convened, and he got to appoint 7 of its 15 members. Those members proposed some short and sweet language around cannabis, offering that “we will refocus our drug policy by removing marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act and allowing states to set their own policies.” (Period.) This language dovetailed with Bernie’s Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2015, which was shipped off to the Senate Judiciary Committee last November, never to be heard from again.
Like Bernie’s bill, his members’ platform proposal was bold but failed to win the day. Instead, the newly adopted language reads, “we believe that the states should be laboratories of democracy on the issue of marijuana, and those states that want to decriminalize marijuana should be able to do so….” You would stop reading if I transcribed the entire thing. It does, however, talk about the need to ease research barriers and it makes solid arguments about the status quo’s “unacceptable disparate impact on African Americans.” Both points are winners.