The post Congress Renews Key Medical Marijuana Protections appeared first on High Times.
For two-and-a-half days last weekend, state-legal medical marijuana stood like a naked pacifist on a battlefield: vulnerable, defenseless and wide-open for a blow from the belligerents on the other side of the field. Beginning at 12:01 a.m. Saturday and lasting until Monday afternoon, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stared down Donald Trump and the Republicans over the tips of his bifocals and cut a deal to keep the government running, vital state-legal medical marijuana protections vanished.
The Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment
For the past few years cycles, we’ve had medical marijuana protections because of the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment. Basically, the U.S. Justice Department has been forbidden from pursuing prosecutions against medical cannabis activity that’s in accordance with state law thanks to this amendment tacked on to the federal budget. The amendment removed all DOJ funding from such prosecutions, and without money, the government—just like the rest of us—can’t do much of anything at all.
Hugely significant when these protections were first applied, the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment has been at risk of expiring before—the last time bickering over the budget meant a shutdown was looming, back in September—but it wasn’t until this latest impasse over immigration and border security that it actually happened.
And what did a world without Rohrabacher-Blumenauer look like? Exactly like a world with it.
There stood cannabis over the weekend, presenting itself like a lamb for the slaughter before a Justice Department with—in theory at least—new leeway to go and cut it down. And there it stood on Monday afternoon, with those protections restored in the temporary budget deal Schumer forged with Trump and the Republicans, untouched and unharmed.