Looking ahead to the next year, Trump’s actions on this budget proposal put those businesses at risk of federal prosecution. While the president has not come out as explicitly anti-cannabis, his rhetoric usually elides any real policy position.
“To those following this issue closely, the president’s latest move hardly comes as a surprise,” Justin Strekal, political director for NORML, wrote in a recent op-ed. “Despite Trump mentioning during his campaign that he supported medical marijuana and a general states-rights approach to cannabis policy, his presidency has consistently proven these words to ring hollow.”
The Congressional protection is an explicit mandate that the DOJ not spend any funds on the prosecution of medical cannabis businesses. Without that guarantee (and in the absence of the 2013 Cole Memo, which former Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded in 2018), there would be no accord between the state-legal cannabis industry and the federal government—not that there is anything particularly agreeable otherwise about that relationship.
The recent vaping-related health crisis prompted a crackdown at the FDA—at Trump’s behest—over flavored tobacco vape products. In the cannabis industry, there are concerns that this development might create an obstacle to any goodwill that Trump might previously have had for the state-legal market. He’d said in earlier news clips that he would be in favor of a states’-rights solution to the cannabis legalization question, going so far as to cut a tacit agreement with U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) over the matter.
In a recent interview reported by Marijuana Moment, however, Marc Lotter, Trump’s reelection campaign communications director, told KLAS that the administration may take a harder stance against cannabis. “I think what the president is looking at is looking at this from a standpoint of a parent of a young person to make sure that we keep our kids away from drugs,” he said. “They need to be kept illegal, that is the federal policy. I think the president has been pretty clear on his views on marijuana at the federal level, I know many states have taken a different path.”
While the 2021 budget proposal is not yet approved (votes aren’t expected until sometime closer to Oct. 1), the medical cannabis protection provisions may be a sign of things to come—for better or for worse.
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