In 1971, a group of high-school students in San Rafauel, Calif., planned to search for a cannabis crop that local legend alleged had been abandoned. Each day, they convened at 4:20 p.m. to begin. Though they never found the crop, they unwittingly founded an iconic date in global counterculture. Since the 1990s, April 20 (4/20, derived from their time) has become a day for cannabis enthusiasts to consume, celebrate, and advocate for legalization of the substance.
In recent years, their advocacy has been quite successful. Colorado’s and Washington’s voters approved referenda to legalize cannabis in 2012 — the first states to do so — after which Alaska and Oregon followed. The effort spread from the West across the country, with ten states’ legalization referenda being approved in six years. Currently, 18 states have legalized cannabis for recreational use, with eight doing so since 2020. In doing so, they’ve paved the way for a new recreational-cannabis industry, which has experienced explosive growth. According to a 2017 GQ article, by that year the industry was worth $40 billion, and marijuana had become the second-largest cash crop in the U.S. (after corn).
Support for legalization has crossed party lines. No longer are open cannabis advocates just hippies or young leftists. Per a recent Gallup poll, a full two-thirds of Americans support full legalization of the substance. Republicans, in conjunction, have undergone an evolution on the use of cannabis, from moral condemnation to a libertarian position of passive acceptance, with half supporting legalization and fewer than half opposed. Reforms to cannabis laws have now sprung up in Republican-led states, with Montana passing and South Dakota debating measures to permit recreational use, while most states have enabled cannabis to be prescribed by a doctor. Only in a minority of states is neither recreational nor medical marijuana legal.
The significance of this support, especially among conservatives, should not be understated. Though the heyday of Reefer Madness — a 1936 film linking cannabis use to hallucination, rape, suicide, murder, which influenced popular perceptions about the drug — has long passed, cannabis remained a taboo substance in the 1970s and through the Reagan Revolution. The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CSA) of 1970, signed by Richard Nixon, classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug — i.e., prohibiting both recreational and medical use — a status higher than cocaine and fentanyl. Reagan himself called marijuana “probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today,” and conservatives supported harsh criminal penalties for its use well into the 1990s.
There was always a divide within conservatism on this question, however. Even as conservatives sought to strengthen cannabis rules, the debate on the right was ongoing. William F. Buckley Jr., for instance, supported decriminalizing cannabis as far back as 1972. Since then, it seems, the rest of the movement has come around to this position. More recently, former attorney general Bill Barr, a Trump appointee, lamented the “intolerable” conflict between federal and state law on cannabis, hinting at reform.
Presently, though, the biggest obstacle to cannabis advocates’ main objective — federal legalization — comes not from conservatives, but the Biden administration. Despite promises on the campaign trail, it has refused to support any measure of reform. This comes even as the Democratic-led House passed a bipartisan bill to do so this month. That Biden would do so is perplexing — even as his own vice president has endorsed it, and amidst the growing consensus on the issue. As Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) said, “just get the Feds out of it.” He’s right. This 4/20, Biden should start to get out of the way.