In the Weeds

The contemporary movement to reform the nation's marijuana laws has succeeded to an extent hardly imaginable as recently at the start of this century. It is a movement worthy of historical contextualization. The authors of this new study claim to offer “a historically grounded examination of marijuana policy reform” that will help us understand “how we arrived at this point” (p. vii). Writing history from the present back requires deciding at just what “point” we are. For the authors, it is the moment when support for marijuana legalization has reached a tipping point, with legal-reform efforts continuing their inexorable progress. The authors’ confidence in this version of the present derives from their reading of history. They treat prohibition as a historical anomaly, one that lasted just fifty-nine years, from the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937 to the 1996 passage of medical marijuana legislation in California. However, multiple historical studies have demonstrated that the 1937 act followed decades of antimarijuana activity and legislation at the state and local level. One could argue that the authors mean to highlight the start of national-level controls. To be consistent, though, the 1996 California legislation would then take a backseat to the stubborn fact that in 2019 marijuana remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law

Demonization · Legalization · Legislation · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research · History · Law

• Policy and Political Learning

  Open Access•Daniel J Mallinson, A Lee Hannah•Publius The Journal of Federalism•2020

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