Personally, I think it should be legal nationwide. My concern with that is big tobacco would probably swoop in and fuck it all up for growers or lobby for laws that prohibit me from growing. I honestly like Trump’s non action on this, allowing states to do their own thing, besides he’s got way more important shit to deal with. No doubt there are states with draconian laws for marijuana still, vote those fuckers out. This country historically has failed controlling vices like alcohol and weed and they’re not about to get good at it anytime soon.
Dirty money in politicians pockets from Tobacco and Big Pharma will keep AAS and Cannabis from being legal federally for a long time.
Possible, but I don't think either Big Tobacco or Big Pharma has the power to do that anymore.
Big Tobacco, you may remember, got smacked down by the states' AG's in the 90's after 50+ years of attacking what we "know" about the harm of smoking by fighting the science behind it with FUD. And it worked -- they got decades of continuing profits (tens or hundreds of billions $?) and expanding their business throughout the world, particularly China and other 3rd world countries, so that by the time they lost the fight in US courts and in public opinion, it didn't matter... the monetary penalties even at billions of dollars were entirely affordable, and they simply shifted most of their attention overseas. Sure, the US may have become a highly restricted market with severe limits on their ads, requirements to put "CIGS KILL" warnings everywhere, and < 20% of the public even smoking anymore (and diminishing), but they're doing just fine in the world market. Microsoft did the exact same thing in the computer industry in the 90's and wound up paying slap-on-the-wrist multi-billion judgements in the US and Europe but still dominated the markets for 20+ years illegitimately and wound up WAY ahead money-wise. Big Oil is doing the same thing now with Anthropogenic Global Warming, spreading FUD with the help of the Koch Bros. and other oil interests, running any GOP lawmakers out of office if they even quietly whisper that AGW is a thing (pro-science AGW-is-real Republicans went extinct around 2010 due to all the primary challenges -- e.g. replaced by the likes of Trey Gowdy, if you're in a Google frame of mind), and pushing off that day of reckoning for a few more decades in the interest of their own profits. Convincing the right wing uninformed and/or (usually "and") unintelligent voter base via the Fox News Bubble that "AGW is a sham!" is an astonishing genius of a sham in itself... gotta tip my hat to em. But that's the American Way and long has been. Cash is King.
Big Pharma, they just got smacked down in multiple ways by the courts and gov't and are unlikely to see their power resurge anytime soon. They killed too many middle class white kids. Opioid epidemic. Now, if you kill black kids with heroin, crack, or the associated violence, it's no big deal... you can even kill poor trailer trash whites with their meth labs and it's also not quite a national emergency. It's not their fault, it just turns out that those pills are super good, addictive, and deadly, and it didn't help that China threw industrial quantities of cheap fentanyl into the mix, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
I just don't see Big Pharma able to stop the marijuana business juggernaut now that's it's already gotten started. Some huge companies are already heavily invested, large piles of cash in motion both industrially and lobbyingally... er, legislatively... and they won't quit without a fight at the corporate level, where the real fights happen. And now the national banks want a piece of the action, not as foes of marijuana but as friends. Too much cash in motion and the banks want to convert that to normal electronic money and take their cut. It's completely inevitable. And in this case, the result is a good thing.
I agree w/ you about Trump. He was the one GOP candidate in 2016 that had any tolerance for the legalization of weed. The rest of the GOP has their heads firmly up their a... I mean... firmly in the past. I was worried about Jeff Sessions and his rabid anti-weed declarations but then he got canned. Woot.
