Trump and Cannabis: A Timeline

Since the 45^th President of the United States of America took office earlier this year, the cannabis industry has been tiptoe-ing around wondering what Mr. Trump would do in regards to marijuana. After all, he did begin slashing a lot of former President Obama’s progress on many issues, including LGBT rights, women’s rights and health care to name a few.
 
Surprisingly, President Trump hasn’t been all that hard on marijuana, yet that doesn’t mean he won’t eventually be.
 
The Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment, which first came into legislation in 2003 (first as the Rohrabacher-Farr movement due to the initiating legislators) to protect state-level medical marijuana from federal interference was renewed by Trump in May until September. Current action against the power of Attorney General Jeff Sessions leads marijuana advocates, users, and entrepreneurs positive that perhaps marijuana may be saved from Trump and his administration.
 
The Amendment allows time for the administration to conduct more research to gain and understanding of medical (and recreational) marijuana.
 
To understand President Trump’s personal stance on marijuana, it’s important to look at the man, his history, and his persona.
 
Here’s a brief timeline on Donald Trump and his presence in the marijuana discourse as a civilian and now as President of the United States:
 
1990: The Sarasota-Harold Tribune reports that “Billionaire developer Donald Trump said that the nation’s drug enforcement is ‘a joke’ and repeated his call for the legalization of drugs,” the article quoted him. “We’re losing badly (bigly?) on the war on drugs,” the future President said. During that article, Trump was also quoted saying that tax revenues from drugs could be spent to educate the public on the “dangers of drugs”.
 
2015-2016: Trump’s public comments leading up to his time in Office as detailed by The Daily Leaf have been wishy-washy (not surprisingly) but have vaguely come out in favor of medical marijuana. In summer 2015, he said that Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana was “bad” citing that “medical marijuana is another thing”. In October 2015, he told The Washington Post that marijuana legalization should be a state-by-state thing. On February 16, Trump was on the Bill O’Reilly Show and said he is “in favor of medical marijuana 100%” yet he stated that the Colorado industry is a “real problem” with the potential of exploitation of legal cannabis in illegal markets.
 
2016: Billionaire Donald Trump becomes the 45^th President Elect of the United States of America. The marijuana industry takes a collective gasp as he begins stacking his administrator with a rush of Conservatives.
 
2017: Once Trump took office, as everyone feared, he appointed Attorney Jeff Sessions as the head honcho in charge of taking care of cannabis in the nation. Sessions, infamously known for his 2016 quote, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” in a Senate drug hearing. All signs have continued to point to Sessions’ personal understanding of marijuana to be completely misguided, personally drawing a wrong correlation between marijuana and violent crime.
 
In May 2017, Trump signed the first bill of his presidency, a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill, that included the renewal of the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment protecting states from federal crackdown until September 2017.
 
2018:  On January 4th Jeff Sessions announced, in signature Trump fashion, that he would be countering another one of Obama’s directives – The guidance he gave that directed U.S. Attorneys to not go after marijuana businesses in states that had voted to legalize it.  This could potentially be a killer blow to the young, budding recreational cannabis industry that was just implemented in California at the turn of the new year.
 
Now that the time is a-ticking, and Jeff Sessions’ position in Trump’s administration is on shaky-ice due to affairs a lot bigger than cannabis, perhaps cannabis and the need to prosecute states for cannabis will become less and less of a priority and we’ll be able to focus on the more pressing matter our country faces.
 

Despite This, Cannabis Thrives

 
Since cannabis is illegal at the federal level, the legal cannabis industry has faced some difficulty in terms of fear of crackdown for dispensaries and forget access to a bank account as dispensaries are getting doors in their faces when seeking bank accounts.
 
People are working to iron out the kinks of the legal cannabis business, but despite this, cannabis is worth BIG BUCKS in the U.S.A. According to Marijuana Business Daily’s annual fact book’s executive summary estimates for revenue for 2017 across legalized states could grow to $5.1-6.1 billion dollars.
 
With Donald Trump pretty much personifying an interest in making profits, the marijuana business must seem lucrative. Perhaps civilian-Trump would have eventually invested himself.
 

Let’s See What Happens

 
With the weakness of Trump’s administration and the strength of the legal cannabis industry across the nation, perhaps the cannabis industry can relax and continue to do their thing, but as the President’s track record has proven, nothing he could do should come as a surprise.