A Senate panel met on Tuesday to consider a bill that would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level, less than a week after the legislation was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and two Democratic colleagues. The bill, the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, was introduced on July 21 by Schumer, the senior senator from New York, Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden of Oregon and New Jersey’s Senator Cory Booker.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, which is chaired by Booker, discussed the legislation and heard testimony from witnesses at a hearing held at the nation’s Capitol on Tuesday. Under the nearly 300 pages of legislation, marijuana would be removed from regulation under the federal Controlled Substances Act, where the drug is listed under the most restrictive Schedule I, and states would be allowed to create their own cannabis policies. The measure would also establish a national tax on cannabis products, expunge records of past federal cannabis convictions, and allow nonviolent cannabis prisoners to request resentencing.

Booker, the chair of the subcommittee and the only Black senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that national cannabis prohibition has “miserably failed” and has led to a “festering injustice” of enforcement policy that disproportionately targets Black and Brown communities. According to a 2020 report from the American Civil Liberties Union, Black people in America are almost four times more likely to be arrested for a cannabis-related offense than whites, despite relatively equal rates of pot use.

“Cannabis laws are unevenly enforced and devastate the lives of those most vulnerable,” Booker said during the Tuesday hearing.

Witnesses Testify To Support Cannabis Decriminalization Bill

Weldon Angelos, a former federal cannabis prisoner and criminal justice reform advocate, appeared before the subcommittee to testify in favor of the legislation. Sentenced to 55 years in federal prison for a first-time cannabis conviction and firearms possession charge, Angelos spent 13 years behind bars before being released in 2016. He told the senators at the hearing that expungement is a vital element of cannabis policy reform.

“Each arrest, prosecution, conviction and sentence makes the world a little bit smaller for those bearing the modern scarlet letter,” Angelos said, referring to what life is like for those with a conviction for a drug offense.

Representatives of the law enforcement community also testified in favor of the legislation to reform the nation’s marijuana laws. Edward Jackson, chief of the Annapolis Police Department, told the subcommittee that “there is nothing inherently violent” about cannabis.

Jackson said that decriminalization would permit police officers to concentrate on more serious crimes and help restore the community’s trust in law enforcement.

“I have spent far too much time arresting people for selling and possessing cannabis,” Jackson testified.

Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Missouri, lodged his opposition to the cannabis legalization bill and expungement, arguing that the legislation “would wipe clean the criminal records of illegal alien traffickers.”

“When these criminals trafficked marijuana, they broke the law,” Cotton told his colleagues on the subcommittee. “Whether some find that law unfashionable or even unfair, what they did was illegal.”

Cannabis Industry Reacts to Senate Hearing

Mason Tvert, partner at cannabis policy consulting firm VS Strategies, told High Times after Tuesday’s hearing that it “is refreshing to finally see a significant discussion of cannabis policy in Congress’ upper chamber.”

“History has shown that the more people talk about and hear about cannabis, the more quickly support grows for ending its prohibition,” Tvert wrote in an email. “Hopefully there will be more to follow, and members will have an opportunity to continue hearing about the many important aspects of this major policy issue, from expungement and equity to the economics and public safety benefits of legalization.”

Ryan G. Smith, co-founder and CEO of online cannabis wholesale platform LeafLink, urged lawmakers to approve comprehensive cannabis policy reform at the national level.

“For far too long, communities of color have been disproportionately harmed by unjust cannabis laws,” Smith wrote in an email to High Times. “Today’s hearing was a step forward, but now it’s time for Congress to take real action to end prohibition and support communities that have been unfairly targeted and left behind.”

But George Mancheril, co-founder and CEO of cannabis industry lender Bespoke Financial, is not optimistic that meaningful cannabis policy reform measures will be approved in the near future, noting that less controversial bills such as the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, which would allow banks to offer financial services to legal cannabis companies, have not fared well in the upper chamber of Congress.

“This hearing was an important step towards federal cannabis legalization but illustrated the long road still ahead. Passing comprehensive legislation is significantly harder than limited scope proposals such as the SAFE Banking Act which stalled in the Senate numerous times,” Mancheril said in an email. “The current political and economic environment will likely continue to keep all such cannabis focused bills on the fringe of political discussion and unlikely to pass any time soon but we hope that future hearings will drive the discussion towards the mechanics and timeline for federal regulation to provide greater clarity and transparency to the industry and to all stakeholders.”

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The wait for the Senate’s version of a cannabis legalization bill will continue for months, with Democratic leaders in the chamber indicating Thursday that it will come sometime in the summer.

According to The Hill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that he’s proud of the progress senators have made in “bringing this vital bill closer to its official introduction” before the recess in early August.”

The timeline marks a shift from what Schumer had said previously and it may dismay legalization advocates who had hoped that the Senate’s legislation would arrive sooner—especially after the U.S. House of Representatives passed its own bill to end prohibition on the federal level earlier this month.

The New York Democrat said after the House’s passage that he hoped the Senate would unveil its legalization measure by the end of this month.

On April 1, the Democratic-led House passed the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (MORE) Act, which would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, effectively ending the federal prohibition on pot.

Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who is working with Schumer and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden on the Senate’s legalization bill, said that the bill passed by the House was unlikely to win approval in the Senate, which is also controlled by Democrats.

“Right now we’re looking at doing the one that we’ve been working on for a long time,” Booker said, as quoted by Roll Call.

According to The Hill, Schumer said that the Senate’s bill is titled “the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act,” and the majority leader said the legislation will remove cannabis from the federal list of controlled substances and “help repair our criminal justice system, ensure restorative justice, protect public health, and implement responsible taxes and regulations.”

Schumer and other Democrats on Capitol Hill have made it clear since the party took control of Congress and the White House last year that they intended to move on federal legalization.

In an interview with Politico last year, Schumer said that Democrats would take action, despite President Joe Biden’s reluctance to support legalization.

“We will move forward,” Schumer said. “[Biden] said he’s studying the issue, so [I] obviously want to give him a little time to study it. I want to make my arguments to him, as many other advocates will. But at some point we’re going to move forward, period.”

Schumer said in the interview that seeing legalization work on the state level contributed to his evolution on the issue.

“In 2018, I was the first member of the Democratic leadership to come out in support of ending the federal prohibition. I’m sure you ask, ‘Well what changed?’ Well, my thinking evolved. When a few of the early states—Oregon and Colorado—wanted to legalize, all the opponents talked about the parade of horribles: Crime would go up. Drug use would go up. Everything bad would happen,” Schumer said. “The legalization of states worked out remarkably well. They were a great success. The parade of horribles never came about, and people got more freedom. And people in those states seem very happy.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said that he supported decriminalizing cannabis, but stopped short of advocating legalization.

Following the House’s passage of the MORE Act earlier this month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the president believes “current marijuana laws are not working.”

“We look forward to working with Congress to achieve our shared goals, and we’ll continue having discussions with them about this objective,” Psaki said at a press briefing.

Winning over Biden may prove easier than getting support from Republicans, however. As The Hill noted, “Many Republicans are opposed to legislation legalizing marijuana, posing one of the biggest hurdles to Schumer getting such a measure through the 50-50 split Senate,” and that to “secure passage, Democrats would need the support of their entire caucus, and at least 10 Republicans to bypass a likely filibuster.”

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Sen. Cory Booker, Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer plan to release cannabis legislation to both end the federal prohibition of cannabis and help communities that are most impacted by the War on Drugs, possibly by the end of the month.

Sens. Booker, Wyden, and Chuck Schumer introduced a discussion draft of the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act (CAOA) last July, which would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level and allow states to decide whether to make it legal. It would also expunge nonviolent cannabis crimes, and taxes would be allocated to help communities hit hardest by the War on Drugs.

Since releasing the outline of the bill, lawmakers called for feedback on what to include and exclude from the final bill. The community responded. NORML, for instance, called for strengthening civic protections to clear records, revising outdated testing requirements, and providing a pathway for small businesses to compete with large ones. Others showed concern about tax rates.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced at a press conference in February that he intends to formally introduce the bill in April. NJ.com reports that the bill is almost written, and due to drop towards the end of the month. While the media is targeting April 20 as a good symbolic date for an announcement, the Senate is in recess through April 22, so a bill being introduced during the week of April 25 is more likely.

“I don’t mean this to be fully in jest but there’s been a lot of conversation about doing it on 4/20,” Booker told news outlets at the U.S. Capitol. “Aspirationally, I would love to see it done on 4/20 but I can’t speak to that, given all the things that are sort of backing up in the Senate.”

The U.S. House approved another comprehensive cannabis bill on April 1, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, but that gained support from only three Republicans. Booker needs the support of at least 10 GOP senators if the Senate is to pass any sort of legislation, but remains optimistic about ending prohibition the right way.

“This cannot just be about simple legalization,” Booker said. “It has to be about restorative justice. We had a really awful run of prohibition. This war on drugs has been not a war on marijuana. It’s been a war on people. This idea that you can just suddenly legalize or decriminalize and have so many Americans still suffering the consequences for having a criminal conviction where they can’t get a job, a loan from a bank, that’s just patently unfair. So this is a bill built around those ideas of restorative justice.”

Steven Hawkins is president and CEO of the U.S. Cannabis Council (USCC), as well as the former executive director of Marijuana Policy Project. Hawkins said that we don’t have the full bill quite yet, but a few things stand out. A full list of the USCC’s guidance for the draft discussion was released last September, but a few immediate issues come to mind.

“First of all, the proposed tax, at least in the draft, had the federal tax at 25% on top of high state taxes that exist currently,” Hawkins told High Times. “It would just make it impossible for the industry to succeed in most states. So that would have to be addressed. And then the question of primary jurisdiction. The draft proposed that the FDA have primary jurisdiction. We certainly have concerns with the role of the FDA. We’d rather see the Tax and Trade Bureau have primary jurisdiction.” 

The CAOA would also establish a regulatory framework for cannabis under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). Descheduling would also normalize income tax for legal cannabis businesses, meaning existing businesses would no longer be subject to Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code. But some argue cannabis should be regulated more like alcohol. “The Tax and Trade Bureau is already dealing with adult-use products with alcohol and tobacco,” Hawkins said. “We’d want that agency to have jurisdiction over cannabis as well.” 

The bill, once introduced, will head to the Senate, where it will pass through several committees and converge with more. “The bill—to our knowledge—will intersect with at least a dozen committees,” Hawkins said.

The CAO Act (or CAOA) has been characterized as a states’ rights bill, allowing states to choose, and differs from bills such as Rep. Nancy Mace’s States Reform Act, mostly due to the inclusion of items such as social equity provisions.

“Normally legislation this comprehensive doesn’t pass on the first go,” Hawkins said. “You have to build support. What we saw with the MORE Act, was that there were some Republicans asking questions: How do we protect children. How do we deal with intoxication. There were a couple people who said, absolutely not, we should not allow this ever, but there were not anywhere close to the majority in terms of comments during the hearing. What we’re seeing is the maturity of our movement. There are now competing bills in the House of Representatives with Nancy Mace’s bill, the MORE Act, etc.”

While some leaders worry about the bill’s odds in the Senate under the current Congress, others worry about the tax implications. Rep. David Joyce opposed the MORE Act, issuing an announcement citing that it has no chance of passing the Senate, while others disagree.

“The movement towards cannabis descheduling and legalization is growing stronger and stronger,” Hawkins said. “We now have competing visions in the House. We’ll see what Republican support emerges in the Senate. It may be—given the partisan nature of the Senate—that the CAO bill will just be seen—rightly or wrongly—as simply a Chuck Schumer bill. But that doesn’t mean if a Republican bill were to emerge in the Senate, that there would not be [more supporters].”

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer finally revealed his legalization proposal. Here’s what it actually does.

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