“What the Marijuana Lobby Could Offer Hillary Clinton”

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new Bloomberg Politics article, and here are excerpts:

Hillary Clinton says she has never smoked pot, not even as a bell-bottom-wearing undergraduate in the 1960s.  Her husband’s administration went nuclear in the War on Drugs.  During the 2008 campaign, she publicly opposed marijuana legalization.

But it’s now seven years later, and the marijuana industry isn’t selling baggies and answering beepers.  It’s a $2.7 billion business — the fastest-growing in the United States — and one that operates without any legal sanction in four states, is decriminalized in 16 others, and is permitted for medical use in a few more.

And now people that are selling, growing, and, in some cases, using marijuana have money to burn.  They want to give some of that green (not that, the other green) to politicians hungry for donations.  But they want some answers first.

At an August fundraiser at the home of Democratic consultant Win McCormick and Carol Butler in the exclusive Dunthorpe neighborhood of Portland, Oregon — a state that legalized marijuana in 2014 — nearly a dozen cannabis industry professionals paid $2,700 a head to get an audience with the Democratic front-runner and former secretary of state.  There, she mentioned working with Portland Representative Earl Blumenauer, one of Capitol Hill’s loudest advocates of pot legalization, on, among other items, “cannabis reform.”…

What did these pot industry professionals want?  Some clarity, for one thing.  The Obama administration has willfully turned its head away from the legalization experiment and the thorny interstate issues it has raised.  And even though the industry has boomed since marijuana was legalized in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon over the last three years, the growing crop of pot entrepreneurs faces serious problems.  For one thing, marijuana remains a Schedule 1 drug, on par with heroin, quaaludes, and bath salts, a classification which limits the ability of researchers to study it, and forbids its use.  (A Schedule 2 drug, like codeine, is acknowledged to have some medical uses, and is available for research.)

Plus, they want access to the banking system.  For now, even legal marijuana businesses remain all-cash, since many banks won’t accept their money for fear of violating federal laws, and sellers and grow operations are unable to deduct their businesses expenses like other entities.

Few advocates want the federal government to impose legalization by diktat, but want states to continue to be able to pass new liberties as they see fit.  And so at a bare minimum, what the pot lobby wants from politicians this year and beyond is a commitment to let this state-by-state experiment that the Obama administration tacitly condones to continue to play itself out.  The thinking goes that, much like the gay marriage debate, once enough states legalize it, the federal government will have to adapt….

If anything, Clinton is a laggard, if a slight one.  She has said that she wants to “wait and see” how legalization plays out in the states, but has also told a television interviewer that she doubts the efficacy of medical marijuana….

A congenitally cautious pol whose current platform differs not one iota from the standard Democratic playbook, Clinton seems unmoved even by a poll commissioned earlier this year by her own pollster, Joel Benenson, which showed that 61 percent of Americans favored legalization, with even larger majorities among exactly the kind of voters Clinton needs to excite in 2016 — young people, African-Americans, and Hispanics.

The Clinton campaign declined a donation from the National Cannabis Industry Association earlier this year, according to NCIA executive director Aaron Smith. And so at the industry’s annual trade show in June, it was Rand Paul, and not Clinton, who was invited to hold a fundraiser on the sidelines, where 40 industry professionals maxed out to his campaign.