Marijuana is the trend the whole country is watching.
Weed was first banned by Massachusetts in 1911. Pennsylvania was one of the last states to outlaw it in 1933. The federal government followed in 1937. For a long time, everyone was on the same page about it — at least when it came to the letter of the law. As popular as the plant may have been at Grateful Dead concerts and on college campuses, the fact that it was illegal was well established.
That started to change in the 1990s as a growing movement pushed for its use to ease the symptoms of things like glaucoma or chemotherapy side effects. California was the first state to approve medical marijuana use in 1996. Pennsylvania legalized medical use in 2016. Today 36 states allow that purpose.
Then there was recreational marijuana. If you can spark up to quell nausea, why not just to relax? Colorado and Washington were the first on this train in 2012, but to date, 15 states and the District of Columbia have legalized use of marijuana just for fun.
The complication is the states can make their choices but that doesn’t change the fact that the federal government has held the line on marijuana as an illegal drug — a designation that can cause complications for state-authorized legal use, business and industry development and the money side.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman have been pursuing the idea of recreational legalization and the tax money it could generate.
”Now, more than ever, especially in the middle of a pandemic, we are in need of the economic boost that cannabis can provide,” Wolf said in September.
Colorado makes more than $300 million off legal weed. Washington state pulls in $390 million. Pennsylvania’s population is close to both states combined.
On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to decriminalize marijuana. That is an odd limbo between legal and illegal, but it opens the door wide enough to help both business interests and communities that have been overly affected by petty drug prosecutions.
The Senate is not expected to vote on the House bill, leaving it to languish and die. That is unfortunate as the issue deserves more than silence or indifference.
Political scientists often note the beauty of the American system, where states can serve as laboratories for experimentation in policy-making. Advocates of legal weed extol the revenue enhancement alongside the benefits of keeping users out of the criminal justice system. The jury is still out, however, on the long-term social effects of mainstreaming marijuana use. In short, do we really need to sanction another method to make people more numb?
Pennsylvania, a state of tradition and history, has every reason to go slow on legalizing recreational marijuana. Let’s study the effects on the social fabric — and the development of teenagers’ brains — in other states, rather than reaching for the short-term fix of easy tax money or trying to be cool like Colorado.
— The Tribune-Review (TNS)
