Democrats Reveal Plan to Make Marijuana Legal at the Federal Level
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his fellow Democrats plan to introduce a bill on Wednesday to end the federal prohibition on marijuana following the substance’s legalization in 18 states.
“The Senate has to catch up with the American people,” Schumer said, according to NBC News.
“The Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, expunge federal convictions for nonviolent marijuana offenses and establish a way to tax marijuana,” the report said.
NBC News said the bill would be sponsored by Schumer, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker and Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden.
A summary of the proposal “says states would still be able to decide their own laws about marijuana. The text compares proposed regulations to those for alcohol, sales of which states are free to prohibit,” the outlet reported.
In April, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden “supports leaving decisions regarding legalization for recreational use up to the states.”
She added he supports “rescheduling cannabis as a Schedule II drug so researchers can study its positive and negative impacts; and, at the federal level, he supports decriminalizing marijuana use and automatically expunging any prior criminal records. He also supports legalizing medicinal marijuana.”
Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation in February legalizing cannabis for adults, delivering on a campaign promise that added it as one of the latest states to approve the substance.
The new law decriminalizes the possession of up to six ounces of marijuana and lessens the consequences for minors caught with it in their possession.
Under the legalization bill, people 21 and younger caught with less than one ounce of cannabis would be charged with a misdemeanor disorderly persons offense.
The marijuana debate recently gained attention as track star Sha’Carri Richardson was suspended from the Olympic team after testing positive for cannabis.
At the U.S. Olympic trials last month, Richardson won with a time of 10.86 seconds, making her a gold medal contender, according to ESPN.
However, she had ingested marijuana while in Oregon for the Olympic trials, which she later said she did after learning that her mother had died.
“I want to take responsibility for my actions,” Richardson said on NBC’s “Today” show. “I know what I did. I know what I’m supposed to do. I know what I’m allowed not to do, and I still made that decision.”
“Not making an excuse or looking for any empathy in my case, but just, however, being in that position of my life and finding out something like that — something that I would say is probably one of the biggest things that have impacted my life positively and negatively in my life when it comes to dealing with the relationship I have with my mother, so that definitely was a very heavy topic on me,” she said.
“To have to go in front of the world and put on a face and hide my pain — like, who, I don’t know, who are you, or who am I to tell you how to cope?” Richardson said.
She said during the interview that she suffered “emotional panic” after learning of her mother’s death.
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