Opinion | At Last, Washington Realizes the Obvious Truth About Marijuana

It caused a bit of a sensation in 2014 when the editorial board of The New York Times published a six-part series urging the federal government to stop banning marijuana. Readers responded with more than 15,000 comments, pro and con (mostly pro). TV networks interviewed board members, and the big newspapers and magazines wrote articles about the series. There were cringe-worthy headlines about the editorial page going to pot. Twitter users fantasized about Times opinion writers getting stoned.

The overall tone of the response was: Wow, if the staid New York Times thinks cannabis should be legal, maybe the federal government will finally loosen up and follow suit. But it didn't. At least not until this week.

Shortly after the series came out, the Obama administration issued a detailed rebuttal, saying we had overlooked the serious problems of addiction and substance abuse that would result from legalization. (Actually, we didn't overlook them; we just disagreed with its assessment.) And that pretty much summed things up for the next 10 years. While 24 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for recreational use, the federal government never budged from its insistence that pot is a Schedule I drug, subject to abuse on the same level as heroin and LSD. It ranks even higher on the danger list than meth, cocaine and oxycodone.

The editorial board urged the federal government to move marijuana off the Schedule I list, and on Tuesday, a decade later, the Biden administration began the process of doing that. The Justice Department said it would recommend that cannabis be moved to Schedule III, alongside other drugs with a moderate to low potential for abuse and dependence.

That's not the same as legalization, which can be done only by Congress, but it would send a strong message of cultural acceptance and could be of particular benefit to the cannabis industry, which is currently hobbled by financial restrictions related to Schedule I that force it to be a largely cash business. It would also allow important federal research to begin on the substance's effects, and it might prod more states to legalize or decriminalize.

No doubt there's some election-year politics at work here, in a hope to impress younger voters who have serious doubts about President Biden. But that's the way politics is supposed to work. Eventually the logical thing to do becomes the right thing, even if it takes a decade or so.

David Firestone, a former reporter and editor for the Washington bureau and the Metropolitan and National desks of The Times, is a member of the editorial board.