Even though recreational marijuana use is now legal in 23 states and most Americans support ending the federal ban, investors, entrepreneurs and politicians are no longer high on it happening in the next 10 years.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently announced that if he is elected president of the United States in 2024, he would not decriminalize cannabis—let alone legalize it.
“I don’t think we’d do that,” DeSantis, whose home state is the country’s largest medical marijuana market with more than $1 billion in annual sales, said last week during a campaign event in South Carolina.
President Joe Biden isn’t pro-cannabis, nor are any of the other major declared candidates, including former President Donald Trump. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, rescinded Obama-era protections for the industry, and more recently, Trump said that drug dealers should be executed. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who opposed cannabis legalization during his first bid for president in 2016 and referred to tax revenue from pot sales as “blood money,” said during a town hall on CNN that he would end parts of America’s drug war, but still opposes legalization. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as a Democrat and got arrested for marijuana and heroin decades ago, said he would decriminalize weed, but he stopped short at legalization.
If Biden wins the 2024 presidential election, his term will last until 2029. If a Republican wins the 2024 election and gets re-elected for a second term, the earliest a pro-pot president could take the White House would be January 2033.
Read more at Forbes.com
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