According to reports yesterday, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) intends to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous substance, thus easing federal restrictions on the drug – but Senator Cory Booker wants the country to go further.
Booker, joined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), today reintroduced the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, a bill that would remove cannabis from the list of federally controlled substances entirely and give states free rein to set their own policies on marijuana.
At a press conference on the bill, Booker said that decriminalizing marijuana at a federal level – a policy that commands huge support among the American public, according to polls – is for him a racial justice and equity issue.
“From my high school years in a middle-class, affluent community, to my college years, to my graduate school years, to my law school years, marijuana use was ubiquitous and had no consequence,” Booker said. “But when you go to a community like the one I’ve lived in for the last quarter-century, you see that it has had a devastating consequence. You see people arrested for things that people in other communities do routinely with no fear of arrest.”
Booker acknowledged the DEA’s plans to relax marijuana laws, saying that it was a promising step but that his farther-reaching bill remains the best way to approach cannabis.
“I think it’s a great step that the Biden administration is moving in the direction of not making this a Schedule I drug,” Booker said. “But honestly, the bill that we are reintroducing today is the solution to this long, agonizing, hypocritical, unequally enforced set of bad laws.”
This is far from the first time that Booker has pushed for federal marijuana policy changes. He, Schumer, and Wyden previously introduced the same bill in the 2021-2022 session, but it only picked up four co-sponsors and never went anywhere despite Democrats controlling both houses of Congress.
This time, though, the bill is starting out with 17 co-sponsors, which Booker said gives him hope about the path to success. (All of the co-sponsors are Democrats; fellow New Jerseyan Bob Menendez is not among them.)
“The fact that, with [Schumer’s and Wyden’s] leadership, we have seen more and more senators signing on – it’s been slow, but the co-sponsors we have are a testimony to the progress we’re making,” Booker said.
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