Hillary Clinton’s answers on law enforcement issues for the International Association of Chiefs of Police include something you might have missed—I did!—when her campaign recently announced it: Clinton supports rescheduling marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II.
On the conflict between state and federal governments over legalizing marijuana, Clinton said she would “allow states that have enacted marijuana laws to act as laboratories of democracy,” so long as they prevent sales to minors and keep organized crime out of the industry. Clinton did say that she supported both “carefully prescribed medical marijuana” and rescheduling marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II in order to enable more scientific research on its medical benefits, which would be a monumental shift from theObama administration’s recently restated policy that marijuana is equivalent to heroin and LSD and has “no currently accepted medical use.”
This is something to celebrate for people who rely on cannabis for chronic pain, to control nausea, or for other medical reasons. Rescheduling and, even more so, allowing states to set their own laws, are also moves toward sanity in the treatment of a substance that’s been used as a reason to incarcerate so many non-violent offenders.