Justice Department formally moves to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug in historic shift

... And it's still illegal to carry on federal land (including boarders). This is a win but it's a fucking minor one.

Amazingly enough after Canada legalized weed our country didn't instantly fall into anarchy.

Hey a half a loaf. Its Zenos paradox of legalization. With progress like this, in another 40 years we'll be another halfway there to legalization.

So it moves to be rescheduled but is just being sent to DEA for them to now think about it?

I get it's news but I don't see what is actually changing

There's two things this changes.

1. Easier to research.

2. We get a lot less tax money from it.

For 1, it's not that much of a gain, we don't need more studies to show it's safe. That's been accomplished, and it wasn't that hard to do a study the last couple years.

For 2, tax money was the biggest reason states could be convinced to legalize.

There's a little bit of a 3 involved. I forget the specifics from an earlier article, but I read something about while a lower schedule may let them transition from cash only to banking, the DEA can still seize all their funds because it's on the schedule. It's just now they can do it from a computer.

When they don't use banks, at least the DEA had to actually show up and steal seize their cash.

So say a Republican takes office and is pissed at Cali, he can tell the DEA to freeze and seize the bank accounts of every business and person connected to the cannabis industry.

And it'd all be 100% legal, take very little effort, and can easily be converted into some kind of "border security" bullshit like building a giant pointless wall.

I dunno, lately I keep getting frustrated at people never realizing what shit can naturally lead to. Maybe my standards for planning ahead need lowered?

I just don't understand why this is acceptable when Biden told us decriminalization was the goal.

A co.plete removal from the schedule would have been that, and would have accomplished a lot and taken the same effort as this. I don't see why we don't try to actually fix shit.

Still illegal without prescription

Will this allow dispenseries and retail stores to use banking?

Will they retroactively commute sentences of people who were charged with the previous classification?

So how many other agencies have to sign off on this?

What happened to legalization?

This is not a win, don't mistake it. They reclassified it and now it's going to be even hard to legalize because they'll use the excuse "we reclassified it already!". Full legalization is what we need, this doesn't actually change shit. Marijuana being illegal is one of the most racist laws we have.

Now if we could just agree that a plant that grows naturally is not a fucking drug