“Tell everybody in this government that y’all need to let everybody out of jail for selling weed before y’all start making it legal for people to sell it and make capital off it,” said Chance the Rapper in 2017.
But a vote in the 50-50 Senate would require 60 in favor to break the filibuster, and Biden still won’t back the bill, so legalization this year remains a long shot.
The MORE Act would remove cannabis from the federal Controlled Substances Act, giving it a legal status on par with alcohol and tobacco.
To put that in practice, the MORE Act requires all 94 federal district courts to review their records for nonviolent cannabis convictions and arrests, and order them to be expunged.
The impact would be very significant.
And a relatively small fraction of them are in federal prison for marijuana—about 12 percent, according to a 2015 study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Most of the War on Drugs, in this sense, has been fought by state and local governments.
If the MORE Act passed tomorrow, we could still be waiting years for more states, like Texas or Florida, to follow suit.
Expungement there has been slowed by a combination of poor leadership, combative elected officials and the logistical challenges of finding and sorting several decades’ worth of criminal records.
More money can help with some of those problems. The MORE Act would charge a 5 percent federal excise tax on cannabis products .
The SBA would provide grants to states that make it easier for low-income people and those with past cannabis convictions to become licensed cannabis business owners.
If Congress passes the MORE Act or something similar, it will be an important and necessary step to reversing a near century-long war on cannabis users.