In his 40 years in the Senate, as is now well known, Biden was a key architect of harsh criminal penalties for nonviolent drug users. Undoing much of his own work was one way to make sense of a large part of the criminal justice plan his presidential campaign recently released. Finding a centrist's safe-and-happy medium on weed in particular, Biden has not embraced legalization—a.k.a. commercialized, recreational pot use—but has claimed to back decriminalization, or removing at least most pot offenses from the criminal justice system.
In 2016, legalizing marijuana was a niche issue. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders mentioned it occasionally, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the lesser step of removing pot from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.
Things have changed. Nearly every major Democratic contender for the 2020 nomination has come out in support of legalizing marijuana at the federal level, and several candidates have gone even further, proposing expunging non-violent marijuana convictions and investing in communities harmed by the War on Drugs.
People in Colorado still remember John Hickenlooper’s crack after the state legalized marijuana, a move he opposed: “Don’t break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly.”
But Mr. Hickenlooper, the governor at the time of the 2012 initiative allowing recreational use of cannabis, eventually changed his mind. He acknowledged that fears of increased use by children did not materialize, and he boasted of the tax revenues for social programs that regulated sales delivered.