Everybody should know that the cannabis business includes a fair number of fascists among its ranks, maybe even more than the average consumer-facing industry.
And of course tons of people who just voted for Donald Trump are avid weed-consumers. Just look at how many people have pot-themed pages among their Facebook likes right next to pictures of Marjorie Taylor Greene brandishing an assault rifle, or Trump’s mugshot.
But as with many of the people who voted for Trump because “he’s a businessman” or “he tells it like it is,” many of those people are likely to soon find out that they got way more than they bargained for.
Some of the execs at the big cannabis companies are probably high-fiving each other right now, since federal regulations of all kinds, including the weak-sauce restrictions on industry concentration, seem likely to be gutted. That spells trouble for smaller operations that are already struggling under the yoke of Big Weed.
But even Big Weed is subject to an “I never thought leopards would eat MY face” moment when the bros realize that hopes for federal legalization have been all but dashed, especially if the GOP takes both houses of Congress. They have the Senate, and, at this writing, it looks more likely than not that they’ll take the House, too. There’s nothing Big Weed desires more than federal legalization: you can’t truly be a domineering behemoth unless you can sell your wares across state lines.
That doesn’t necessarily mean legalization won’t happen, but even if it somehow does, the resulting legislation is likely to be completely fucked: again, especially for smaller players. Interestingly Project 2025, the “blueprint” for a second Trump administration written by his close allies and former (and future) staffers, and published by the ghoulish Heritage Foundation, contains no references to cannabis at all. But there’s tons of stuff in there about “dismantling the administrative state,” by eliminating whole swaths of regulatory agencies, including offices that investigate antitrust violations.
We probably don’t have to worry about that, though, since nationwide legalization seems more remote than it has since states started legalizing weed a decade or so ago. Up until last week it seemed like legalization was all but certain to happen in the coming few years. But this country’s “everyday Americans” have put the kibosh on that.
Though there are a fair number of GOP legislators, like the buffoonish and rapey Matt Gaetz of Florida, who favor legalization, the politics just don’t add up for it. In Marijuana Moment, William Garriott, a professor at Drake University in Des Moines and an expert on drug policy and pot legalization in particular, took note of what he calls the “red wall” that stands in the way of legalization. He noted that, on Election Day, voter initiatives to legalize failed in both Dakotas, as well as in Florida (even though Trump, who overwhelmingly won the state, announced he’d vote for it).
Twenty-six states still outlaw adult-use weed, and the congressional representatives in the vast majority of those states are unlikely to snub their constituents. While more than 70% of Americans now favor legalization, only slightly over half of Republicans do. And the Republicans who oppose it are often particularly exercised in their opposition.
Trump himself seems friendly toward legalization, as NPR News reported on Nov. 11. But the report, which extensively quoted optimistic statements from a flack from the U.S. Cannabis Council lobbying group, didn’t even mention legislation except in quoting Trump pledging to “work with Congress” on the issue. Congress of course would have to pass a measure for Trump to sign it. Or at least that’s how it worked in pre-2025 America.
In the meantime, the DEA’s re-scheduling that we all expected to happen (making pot a Schedule 3 drug rather than keeping it in Schedule 1 along with heroin: i.e., illegal in all situations) won’t come, if it does, until next year because the hearings were delayed until at least January or February. It seems like it might well still happen, but we can’t even bank on that anymore. We can’t really bank on anything.
