It’s been a long, chaotic six weeks in American politics. An endless barrage of executive orders, firings, and jarring shifts in foreign and domestic policy have dominated the headlines, with other embarrassments appearing almost hourly: renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” AI fever dreams of Gaza turned into a Trumpified beachfront resort, a televised Oval Office sparring match with the president of Ukraine. The zone isn’t just flooded, it has been completely submerged.
Unsurprisingly, much has been lost in the shuffle, including one salient, hugely popular issue: legal weed.
For decades, marijuana has been federally classified as a Schedule I drug, inexplicably placing it on the same level as highly addictive, potentially deadly substances like heroin and above others that are far more dangerous, like fentanyl and cocaine. While Trump expressed support for rescheduling marijuana on the campaign trail last September, he hasn’t spoken on it since, and with his past ambiguity on the issue—and the ideological makeup of his right-wing, “law and order” Cabinet—it’s not clear if he still supports reclassifying marijuana or if his administration even plans to do so. What is clear, however, is this: Trump only has two plausible paths forward on marijuana, and both would be awful for consumers—and pretty much everyone.
The country was slowly but surely moving toward reclassifying marijuana under the Biden administration. In October 2022, President Biden noted that the federal government’s handling of marijuana legalization was a “failed approach” and ordered his agencies to revisit the issue, which then in turn led to an official recommendation that medicinal cannabis be moved from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3. The recommendation was approved by the Drug Enforcement Agency in May but has gotten little attention since. It barely factored into Kamala Harris’s or Donald Trump’s general election campaigns, and the issue has been essentially buried since Trump entered office in January.
Weed is legal in 39 states, to widely varying degrees: Only 24 of those states allow it to be used recreationally. In some states where weed is technically still illegal, the situation is often muddled: In Nebraska, for instance, marijuana was decriminalized without any updates to existing policy. Policy and enforcement, for that matter, differ dramatically between states: California has a robust, mature recreational market, while New York has a chaotic, unregulated mess. The dissonance and inconsistency persist all while the drug soars in popularity and accessibility—and while large marijuana corporations rush to establish monopolies.
This confusing, disorderly situation is being exacerbated by the fact that President Trump has never held a coherent position on marijuana.
In the earliest days of his first campaign, President Trump personally expressed an openness to medical legalization (“Medical marijuana, medical? I’m in favor of it a hundred percent”), while also expressing wariness toward recreational legalization (“I think it’s bad, and I feel strongly about that”). Jeff Sessions, Trump’s short-lived first attorney general, did his best Nancy Reagan impression, declaring in 2017 that weed was “only slightly less awful” than heroin. Sessions was fired before he could really do any damage to the drug’s status, and Bill Barr, who succeeded him, mostly left it up to the states. (Barr is now a part of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a prominent anti-legalization group.)
Trump doesn’t seem to feel very strongly about the issue. Some point to his support for a failed attempt at legalization in Florida as part of a larger shift, but it’s now clear this was little more than a campaign maneuver. By backing legalization, Trump effectively neutered it as a potential campaign issue, since he and Joe Biden (and later, Kamala Harris) effectively had the same position. (It probably also helped that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whom Trump relishes humiliating, was strongly campaigning against legalization in his state.) Far from being the first step in some greater vision for marijuana legalization in America, it was instead something baser and more familiar: a politician saying what voters wanted to hear to get elected.
Trump’s actual choice is simple: He will either embrace loose regulation that favors large, corporate producers or he will completely abandon federal legalization and shift back to the socially conservative policies at the heart of Project 2025. The X factor here is likely Elon Musk.
Musk has seized unprecedented authority since election night, and would certainly have Trump’s ear on an issue like marijuana legalization. Musk—reportedly a raging kethead and regular psychedelic user who tries his absolute hardest to “win the internet” every day, sometimes by attempted weed-related humor—has expressed support for legalization in the past, infamously smoking (but not inhaling) on The Joe Rogan Show in 2018. Musk unfortunately speaks to the young, low-propensity manosphere electorate to which Donald Trump has grown to endear himself, and the president has realized that. One can imagine that the Silicon Valley alum currently destroying the federal government would jump at the opportunity to fully corporatize the weed industry under the guise of legalization.
This would look like an even worse version of the current landscape: Large, well-endowed “multistate operators,” or MSOs—vertically integrated corporate weed companies—sweep in and dominate the market. They buy out and kill smaller competition, create the illusion of choice for consumers, and focus only on creating the most potent weed, and as much of it as possible, which is not in the best interest of consumers. Most importantly, a lack of federal involvement in marijuana legalization would make it even more difficult than it presently is to ensure that marijuana products are adequately tested and regulated to the same standards that any other product is.
The Musk path will make it harder to ensure that large marijuana producers provide consumers with basic information like dosage and side effects, and that they aren’t using illegal pesticides. This would require a partnership with some of the largest MSOs in the country—the seeds of which have already been planted. The CEO of Trulieve, the world’s largest cannabis retailer, met with Trump in Florida after he came out in support of Amendment 3 (Trulieve owns and operates nearly a quarter of the 704 dispensaries in Florida). And in January, Trulieve, Cresco Labs, Green Thumb Industries, Verano, and Curaleaf formed the “U.S. Cannabis Roundtable” to lobby the Trump administration.
This is in direct contradiction with the social conservatism that has come to define Trump’s base, and his actual appointed Cabinet. Attorney General Pam Bondi is very much anti-legalization. In 2013 she blocked a bill that would have legalized medical weed in Florida on the grounds that it would “make Florida one of the most lenient medical-marijuana states.” When that effort failed, she tried to ban smokable medical marijuana. Today, Bondi refused to state her position, answering every question related to cannabis scheduling with, “If confirmed, I will give the matter careful consideration after consulting with appropriate Department officials.”
Then there’s Budget Director Russell Vought, the Project 2025 mastermind and devout social conservative who thinks secularism is “evil.” This does not sound like a guy who’d be down for legal weed, and he most certainly isn’t. In 2022 he called marijuana a “a gateway drug” and stated, “We have a cultural complacency in the country as to whether it is good to be using drugs.”
“[You] can’t go to a big city without being involved with this—the smell of it,” Vought continued. “It is a serious problem, and that extends to—there are calls to legalize cocaine. It is where the elite opinion is going.”
Both of these perspectives—Musk’s potential laissez faire corporate legalization and Vought and Bondi’s dreams of the war on drugs part 2—are equally represented in Trump’s inner circle. If he does become actionable on this issue, his position may simply depend on who spoke to him last. But either way, both paths place politics, profit, and production over people’s health, safety, and awareness.
