Besieged 2024 presidential candidate RFK Jr. recently pledged that he would remove cannabis from the federal schedule if elected. He tweeted, “[the] current situation with contradictory state + federal laws is absurd. States should be able to decide without federal interference” in response to GOP candidate Ron DeSantis’ stated opposition to decriminalization.
DeSantis' opposition to marijuana decriminalization is wrong. I will decriminalize cannabis at the federal level. Current situation with contradictory state + federal laws is absurd. States should be able to decide without federal interference. #Kennedy24https://t.co/GtFZRJwCAa
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 25, 2023
The Brandon entity pledged to do the same while he was campaigning, yet he never did and, in fact, is currently plotting to outlaw nicotine by fiat as well. As it turns out, like so many of his other promises, that was a cynical election ploy to turn out millennials and placate racial activists who claim that the drug war disproportionately targets minorities.
Of course, the drug war is still popular among certain sects of both the conservative and liberal electorate. It’s also, it should go without saying, popular with the Washington bureaucrats who have made lucrative careers for themselves failing to stem the flow of drugs into the country.
The first and most important problem with the drug war is a moral one. Adults, who are allegedly free in the United States, should not be dictated to by the government about which substances they are or are not allowed to ingest. This is an obviously conservative position that should require no further elaboration or justification.
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Age restrictions for legal sales — such as exist with tobacco, alcohol, and a cornucopia of pharmaceutical drugs (many of which are more potentially harmful than cannabis) — should certainly be drafted and enforced, as they already are at the state levels where cannabis is legal, when it comes to marijuana. One of Trump’s greatest achievements, which he inexplicably rarely if ever touts, was the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized all cannabis products with physiologically inconsequential concentrations of THC (the compound in cannabis responsible for the high). This paved the way for the expansion of the CBD industry, which, if you know anyone who suffers from chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety, etc., has been a godsend. CBD is a miraculous molecule with numerous well-documented health benefits, as are many other cannabinoids found exclusively in the cannabis plant. Depriving Americans of the opportunity to avail themselves of CBD is sadistic.
Second, even if it were moral to restrict adults’ access to cannabis, the so-called “war on drugs” has been an unmitigated failure, just as prohibition was in the 1920s — which, incidentally, empowered the mob and other criminal elements who capitalized on the black market opportunities afforded to them by government policy.
Third, if states’ rights mean anything, it’s the ability to write their own policies governing drug commerce. There is no clause in the Constitution that explicitly permits the Drug War. On the contrary, the Tenth Amendment clearly leaves all other governing decisions not explicitly listed in the Constitution to the states. If the feds want to regulate the sales of cannabis across state lines, that’s in their purview, but they have no right to force draconian drug policies within state borders. Again, this is a fundamentally conservative principle that should require no further elaboration.
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