Yesterday at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, Democratic delegates approved the party’s platform for 2024, which includes sections lamenting the injustice of marijuana convictions. However, the platform failed to explicitly call for the legalization or even decriminalization of the drug – a change from the position four years ago.
“No one should be in prison for using or possessing marijuana,” the Democratic Party Platform for 2024 it says. “Sending people to prison for drug possession has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for behavior that is no longer illegal in many states. These criminal records create unnecessary barriers to employment, housing and educational opportunities and disproportionately affect Black and brown people.”
The platform praises President Joe Biden for his efforts to reclassify marijuana and for his “historic action to end this failed approach by pardoning people convicted at the federal level of marijuana use or possession.” It also promises that Democrats will “take action to expunge federal convictions related solely to marijuana” and “combat drug trafficking and expand the use of drug courts, interventions and diversion programs for people with substance use disorders.”
Former Republican President Donald Trump’s approach to criminal justice “could not be more different,” the platform argues. “His administration threatened federal prosecution in marijuana cases in states where marijuana was legal.”
For opponents of drug prohibition, however, the platform is a step backwards from the Democratic Party of 2020 platformwhich stated that it was “past time to end the failed ‘war on drugs’ that has put millions of Americans in prison – disproportionately blacks and Latinos – and has done nothing to reduce drug use.” The platform also stated that Democrats supported the federal decriminalization and reclassification of marijuana and the legalization of medical marijuana.
The Democratic Party’s official position on marijuana prohibition continues to fall far short of its stated goal of ending the unfair war on drugs. First, it confuses recreational drug use with substance abuse and addiction, which an atypical result.
Second, the program is based on the illogical notion that possessing and smoking marijuana should not be a crime, but selling it to others for smoking should remain illegal. (Notably, Biden’s “historic” pardons for marijuana offenses excluded people convicted of growing or distributing the drug.)
Third, while drug courts and compulsory treatment are a better alternative to prison, they are still a violent intrusion by the state into the personal choices of adults. Drug courts and diversion programs operate under the threat of prison for noncompliance—the metaphorical iron fist in a velvet glove.
Even measures that the Democratic Party no longer explicitly supports in its platform – such as changes in Justice Department policy and decriminalization – would leave the federal prohibition on marijuana dormant but intact, allowing future administrations to revive it.
This has already happened. Jeff Sessions, former President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, Memos from the time of President Barack Obama revoked Directing U.S. attorneys general to exercise restraint in enforcing federal marijuana laws in states where the drug has been legalized.
Mass pardons and expungements of criminal records are laudable initiatives, but they do not address the underlying criminalization of marijuana. Rescheduling is also not possible.
The Democratic Party’s stance on marijuana is more similar in spirit to that of the old Joe Biden, who could never fully abandon his drug war methods, than to the party’s new frontrunner. ReasonJacob Sullum recently detailedVice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz both support the legalization of marijuana, although Harris is a newcomer to her position. She was laughing Questions about the legalization of marijuana in 2014, but by 2018 she had changed her mind and Co-organizer a bill in the Senate that would have lifted the federal ban.
According to a Gallup poll As released last November, a record 70 percent of Americans, including 87 percent of Democrats, support legalization. If the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates and nearly 90 percent of their voters believe marijuana should be fully legalized, how long will it take for the party to catch up?
