EXPAND YOUR MARIJUANA REFORM AMBITIONS.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: U.S. President Joe Biden's policy on marijuana legalization

UNLIKE MOST OF the candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (including his eventual running mate), Joe Biden opposes federal legalization of marijuana. Instead, he says he wants to "decriminalize cannabis use," expunge the records related to such cases, and move marijuana to a less restrictive legal category.

Those first two steps would not have much impact, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes low-level possession cases. Moving marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a category supposedly reserved for exceptionally dangerous drugs with no accepted medical use, to Schedule II, which indicates that a drug has a high abuse potential but can be used as a medicine, might facilitate research. But it would not address the untenable conflict between the CSA and the laws of the 36 states that allow medical or recreational use of marijuana.

That conflict casts a dark shadow over the burgeoning cannabis industry, making basic business functions such as banking and paying taxes needlessly difficult, costly, complicated, and legally perilous. Descheduling marijuana completely, as a groundbreaking bill that the House of Representatives approved in December would do, is the most straightforward way to address that problem. But even if Biden could be persuaded to support that solution, which Vice President Kamala Harris favored as a senator, Republican opposition probably would make it politically impossible. Just five Republicans voted for the House bill, and Senate passage would require GOP support or Democratic unanimity.

A less radical approach, embodied in a 2017 bill that attracted bipartisan support in the House, is to revise the CSA's marijuana ban so that it does not...