GOP Floats Pot Legalization Bill — By God, Let’s Help Them Pass It

Late last week, Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican House member from South Carolina, introduced a bill to federally decriminalize all cannabis products. The measure would also impose a 3 percent federal excise tax on marijuana, with the proceeds allocated to support, among other things, small businesses, mental health services, and retraining for law enforcement personnel.

The bill would allow states to retain any local-level restrictions on cannabis. But, with 36 states and four territories already allowing for medical cannabis use, and 18 states, two territories, plus Washington, D.C. all allowing for recreational marijuana use by adults, this bill would clear the way for localities to continue in the direction the majority of them are already moving in.

There would be some deep-red state holdouts even if this federal legislation passes. Yet, once citizens there saw the billions in tax revenue being generated elsewhere, even those pins could fall.

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Factions of the GOP have toyed with marijuana legalization in the past. This time seems serious though.

Mace is the first Republican to propose legislation at the federal level to decriminalize marijuana, and while she has already faced strong pushback from within her own party, she also pledges that there will be at least half a dozen Republican co-sponsors of her bill in the House. Nationally, more than seven in 10 Americans now support decriminalizing marijuana, and even within the GOP six in 10 younger Republican voters support legal use for both medical and recreational purposes.

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There’s plenty for Democrats to love in this bill as well. Although the 3 percent tax and the butting out of states’ business support what were once the Republican values of generally lower taxes and less regulation, respectively, the bill also contains a provision to expunge convictions for nonviolent cannabis offenses.

According to Mace, expungement and release for those who are currently serving time for nonviolent marijuana convictions within the federal prison system would result in some 2,600 individuals walking free.

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer backed a separate marijuana legalization package this summer, but the top Senate Democrat’s favored bill proposed a 25 percent rather than a 3 percent cannabis tax. Mace argued that a high 25 percent tax rate would spur the continuation of a cannabis black market, and that is a pretty fair argument.

Police in Oregon (a state that legalized recreational marijuana use in 2015 within certain limits including imposition of a 20 percent total sales tax for cannabis retailers in many areas) recently seized 500,000 pounds of illegal cannabis with an estimated street value of half a billion dollars.

Ultimately, marijuana legalization will probably come down to cold, hard cash. Legitimate sales in the states with local legalization laws hit $20 billion in 2020 (these sales supported 321,000 full-time jobs).

For 2021, sales of locally legal marijuana are set to top $26 billion. Industry trade publication Marijuana Business Daily projects that the legitimate cannabis industry will represent a $45.9 billion chunk of the U.S. economy by 2025, making it larger than the craft beer industry.

Keeping the potential for self-incrimination to a minimum here, I think anyone who’s spent a few hard nights vigorously supporting the craft beer industry, and been able to compare it to evenings indulging in locally legal cannabis, can attest to the fact that the former is more apt to have ruinous personal consequences than the latter, which is typically only ruinous to one’s supply of Jack’s frozen pizzas. It’s just really hard to come up with many good reasons to keep marijuana a federally prohibited Schedule 1 substance.

We don’t have to keep leaving money on the table for illegal drug kingpins. We could achieve a big social justice win. The finance industry would get to keep playing around with fun cannabis-related investment products, which will surely perform better post-legalization.

Democrats might worry about ceding a win to Republicans, but if a legalization bill passes with Joe Biden in the White House it’s going to be a bipartisan tide that lifts all boats (and even lefty voters like me are going to punish Democrats if they can’t get something this important done because of partisan bickering over the appropriate cannabis tax rate). Maybe allowing Republicans to get some points on the board over cannabis would even help bring a few more of them back into the fold of arguing over actual issues instead of continuing to play follow-the-cult-leader.

Marijuana legalization is no longer a fringe issue, and we’ve reached a point of informed national consensus. It’s high time lawmakers listen to their constituents on cannabis and get a national decriminalization measure moving.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

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ATL Finance, Finance, Finance Docket, Government, Jonathan Wolf, Marijuana