Just a few months ago, many of us believed that weed might easily be federally legalized soon, assuming that Kamala Harris would win the presidency and the Democrats would win at least one house of Congress.
After Election Day, when Harris and the Democrats lost it all, the presumption was that those hopes were dashed, given congressional Republicans’ refusal to get any such measure through. The Senate proved to be the place where legalization bills, and many other cannabis reforms, went to die, thanks mainly to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Last week, the podcast Inside Cultivation, hosted by “BigMike” (Michael Straumeiti, the CEO of Advanced Nutrients), seemed to indicate that maybe things don’t look so bleak for legalization after all. It promised to reveal Trump’s “Blueprint for legalization.”
It turns out, though, that even the optimistic guest—GOP apparatchik, Trump advisor and lobbyist Bryan Lanza—thinks it will take longer than Trump’s four-year term to get it done, though he does believe that the feds will liberalize medical-pot laws and make some other reforms, like finally passing a bill to shield banks from liability for serving cannabis clients.
Lanza called that a “short window.”
Lanza is a longtime Republican operative from California whom the U.S. Cannabis Council, a lobbying group, recently decided to hire to push its agenda in Washington. He is a “senior advisor” to the Trump transition team.
For normal people, at least those who were adults before the rise of fascism in the United States starting a decade ago, there’s something very disturbing about watching people talk about Donald Trump as if he were a normal political figure and as if he cared one way or the other about policy in general. He cares mostly, of course, about himself and what people are willing to do for him, or against him.
This happens across the media. The New York Times, CNN, NPR and the Washington Post all treat Trump as if he were basically a more colorful version of the dull Republican policy wonk Jack Kemp from the ’80s and ’90s. This installment of Inside Cultivation was all that and more, with these two guys talking calmly about Trump’s supposed “plans” for cannabis as if they were talking about Ronald Reagan’s budget policies on Meet the Press in 1987.
Not mentioned during the podcast: that Donald Trump represents a grave threat to the American republic. Immediately after this podcast in my email feed was a news roundup from The Guardian about Trump’s allies talking publicly about him running for an unconstitutional third term and about Trump threatening to criminally prosecute his political enemies. He’s also talking openly about filing defamation lawsuits against news organizations, and he’s planning to deport perhaps tens of millions of people after herding them into concentration camps.
Meanwhile, he’s nominated a bunch of deeply unqualified lunatics and buffoons for cabinet posts and other positions, with zero regard for how well they’ll run their offices. The man has never shown the slightest interest in policy except when it will in some way affect him.
We can’t possibly know what he will do, or what he will ignore. Cannabis is likely way, way down on his priority list even though he talked about it some during the campaign. (He said he favors medical pot and decriminalization, but not legalization.)
Perhaps the best thing that can be said for the cannabis industry as Trump takes office is that he’ll likely leave it alone for the most part, and maybe a few reforms will be passed that he doesn’t care about, but will sign into law. But legalization is clearly not part of his “blueprint,” despite what Inside Cultivation says.
