"Most Americans favor federal cannabis legalization. Nearly all Americans support medical cannabis legalization. This is not a new development. It has been that way for years. And it is a rare non-partisan issue. Over the past few years, while support has been its highest, well, ever, a series of federal election cycles have come and gone. You’d think that with a unicorn non-partisan issue with majority and super- or even ultra-majority support, the federal government would have figured something out by now. But nope," writes Griffen Thorne in a new article for Harris Bricken.
Federal cannabis legislation isn’t going to happen
"Back in 2018, when California opened up for recreational cannabis licensing, all I heard was how federal cannabis legalization was around the corner. In fact, a lot of businesses bet their business model on federal cannabis legalization actually happening. Remember how the MORE Act, the PREPARE Act, the States Reform Act, the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, H.R. 420, or any other legalization bill was “about to happen”? Yeah, about that…"
"What a lot of cannabis advocates didn’t realize is that support for cannabis legalization at the 30,000-foot level is hard to translate into actual legislation that can garner bipartisan support. The federal government can’t just legalize cannabis – it has to create some kind of legal framework to do that. And that is where the shit hit the fan. In order to reach a compromise, Democrats needed to give up on some equity provisions, while Republicans needed to give up on some business provisions. And nobody seemed to be able to compromise."
"So instead of federal cannabis legalization, what we got was a series of misguided attempts to do piecemeal legalization, most notably the SAFE Banking Act, which, even as I write this, is suffering the above fate due to the inability of Congress to reach a basic compromise in spite of herculean lobbying efforts."
Read more at harrisbricken.com