In New Jersey, lawmakers have focused the ongoing debate on the drug war’s ills. Criminal justice equity has been as important as tax revenue as lawmakers debated the details of legalization. That has required open talk about racial profiling, poverty, the vice trade and the effect of a drug conviction in blocking access to everything from college loans and affordable housing to state licenses needed for jobs like cutting hair.
When Californians voted in 2016 to allow the sale of recreational marijuana, advocates of the move envisioned thousands of pot shops and cannabis farms obtaining state licenses, making the drug easily available to all adults within a short drive.
The last year was a 12-month champagne toast for the legal marijuana industry as the global market exploded and cannabis pushed its way further into the financial and cultural mainstream.
Liberal California became the largest legal U.S. marketplace, while conservative Utah and Oklahoma embraced medical marijuana. Canada ushered in broad legalization, and Mexico's Supreme Court set the stage for that country to follow.
We're now just over two weeks away from closing the door on 2018, and when we do, we'll likely look back on what was the biggest year ever for the marijuana industry.
In Canada, lawmakers passed the Cannabis Act in June, and officially ended nine decades of recreational weed prohibition on Oct. 17. As the first industrialized country to legalize recreational marijuana use, Canada has paved a path for other countries to follow, as well as given its legal weed companies an opportunity to generate billions of dollars in added sales.
The publication of data showing severe racial disparities in marijuana enforcement, with black people being several times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use than white people, despite comparable rates of use, also made it increasingly difficult to defend prohibition.
“The states to watch are New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Florida, with New York and New Jersey really being the ones that are more likely, I think, to go recreational in the next year or so,” said Ian Stewart, partner at Wilson Elser and speaker at the Cannabis Cover Masterclass Denver in March 2019.
Congressman James Comer stood in front of a local hemp harvest stacked shin-deep for hundreds of feet in every direction, a tangled mass of bushy branches that looked more like evergreen trimmings than marijuana buds. Little yellow butterflies flitted across the surface of the crop that filled the once-vacant warehouse with the comforting smell of damp grass clippings.
Marijuana initiatives appeared on ballots in four states in the midterm elections. In Michigan and North Dakota, initiatives gave voters the opportunity to legalize marijuana for recreational use. In Missouri and Utah, voters chose whether to allow people who are sick to use the drug for medical reasons.
Here are the results of those initiatives.
Michigan voters legalized the sale and use of marijuana
Weed stocks were sliding from their post-election peaks Thursday as worries surfaced that the successor to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions could also be against legal marijuana.
Pot stocks rallied on Wednesday, with Tilray surging more than 30%, after Michigan became the 10th US state to legalize marijuana and as Jeff Sessions, a long-term opponent of legal weed, resigned as the US's attorney general. In January, Sessions rescinded an Obama-era policy directing states to make their own decisions on cannabis without federal.
AND SO A few more dominoes fall. Michigan voted to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, while Utah and Missouri legalized it for medical use, according to projections made late Tuesday night. (A recreational measure in North Dakota failed, though medical cannabis remains legal there.) They join 31 other states that have already gone the medical route, and nine others that have gone fully recreational.