Members of Congress joined activists at a press conference on Wednesday to highlight the need for further federal marijuana policy reform beyond the incremental cannabis rescheduling process that the Trump administration is undertaking.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, pointed strong public support for broader marijuana legalization.
“Millions of people across this country agree that cannabis should be legal. People understand that the old approach has failed. They understand that adults should not carry criminal records for possessing cannabis,” she said. “They understand that we should be investing in education and economic opportunity, not mass incarceration.”
“It is about damn time Congress caught up with where the American people are,” Omar said.
But she also argued that “legalization alone is not enough.”
“If we legalize cannabis and simply allow large corporations to make huge profits while the very communities destroyed by the War on Drugs are left behind, then we have failed. Cannabis reform must be about justice and repair. That means expunging the records of people arrested for nonviolent cannabis offenses. It means reinvesting in communities that were targeted for decades by discriminatory policies, and it means ensuring working class people small businesses and
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