Tribune. The American House of Representatives adopted in December 2020 its law on the advisability of a legal cannabis market, on the reinvestment of the profits of this future market, and on the erasure of criminal records related to cannabis (Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement Act, MORE Act). This must now be adopted by the Senate.
This bill, which decriminalizes cannabis, and therefore legalizes all its uses, including recreational, includes a whole series of regulations concerning the various economic, legal or social aspects.
It makes it possible to include in the legal trade the former small hands of the illegal market by erasing from the criminal records these acts which become legal; it sets up a cannabis justice office within the justice department; and empowers the Treasury Department to issue licenses and work with state authorities. It is also removing cannabis from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) list of narcotics.
Failure and injustice of cannabis prohibition
But more important than the text itself is its legislative path, as well as its political significance for Democrats. A first draft of the text was presented in February 2019 by Cory Booker of New Jersey (Senate) and Barbara Lee of California (representatives), two undisputed champions of social justice within the American Congress, under the title “Marijuana Justice Act” (Cannabis Justice Act).
The bill was later amended in a larger and more political version, accompanying the explosion of protests against racialist discrimination in 2020, and the disproportionate use of drug laws against African Americans (they are five to seven times more likely to be incarcerated than Euro-Americans for drug-related offenses of a similar magnitude).
This is how the MORE Act, more ambitious than the previous project, was presented to the Senate by the current vice-president Kamala Harris, and taken up after her election in November 2020 by the majority leader Chuck Schumer. The choice of these personalities to carry this project confirms the spectacular turnaround the position of American political decision-makers on cannabis: they believe that the prohibition of cannabis and the anti-cannabis police actions in disadvantaged neighborhoods are historical injustices that they wish to redress through the MORE Act.
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