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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. You know that cannabis or marijuana is now legal for adult recreational use, not just medical, in about half the states now. Basically, the whole northeast from Virginia, if you can count that as the northeast quadrant, up through Maine except for New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the whole northeast except for those two states. Also the whole West Coast and some other Western states, but still in half the states mostly in the South and Midwest it's still not. Could this be the year that marijuana becomes legal nationwide? Maybe.

The election year might have something to do with it. The Biden administration is reportedly taking steps to reclassify cannabis in a way that will help the businesses in legal states and will also facilitate medical research and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer just announced two bills to end different aspects of federal prohibition.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Over the decades, millions of Americans, most often Americans of color, have had their lives derailed and destroyed by our country's failed war on drugs. The consequences of this harmful campaign linger on to this very day. I was pleased by yesterday's news that the DEA, under the Biden administration, is preparing to take a truly historic step, rescheduling cannabis from a Schedule 1 substance to a Schedule 3 under the Controlled Substances Act. Reclassifying cannabis is necessary, and it's a long overdue step.

Brian Lehrer: We will give you details of what Congress is going to do as we go. That was Schumer on Wednesday. Federal cannabis policy is not all going in one direction. POLITICO has a story now called, Seize All Cannabis: Inside the Surprising Federal Crackdown on New Mexico Weed Farmers. Those farmers were going legally based on New Mexico's legal cannabis law. POLITICO also has a story called, Biden administration poised to weaken weed restrictions, a seismic shift, it says, from decades of harsh policy. The writer of both those stories joins us now. It's Natalie Fertig, Federal Cannabis Policy Reporter for POLITICO. Natalie, thanks for coming on after a week of some pretty big federal cannabis policy news.

Natalie Fertig: Hey, yes. Thank you for having me on. It's been a wild week.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with what the Biden administration is doing that your headline describes as a seismic shift. It involves reclassifying cannabis from a Schedule 1 drug under federal policy to a Schedule 3 drug. Schumer cited that too in the clip. That sounds dry and bureaucratic. Schedule 3 versus Schedule 1, what's the difference?

Natalie Fertig: Functionally, for people that are living in any state there's not a massive difference. If your state has legalized cannabis at the state level you'll still be able to walk into a dispensary and buy it. If your state has not legalized cannabis recreationally or medically, you're not going to suddenly be able to start buying marijuana.

It does change things for the cannabis industry. It changes what tax code cannabis businesses fall into. They're going to be able to write off more of their business expenses. They're going to have more money in their pockets. That means that there's probably going to be an expansion of state cannabis businesses in states where it's legal. It also means that there could be some changes for research. A Schedule 1 drug is classified as having no medical value, so it's really hard to get a license from the federal government to research it. Schedule 3 drugs include things like ketamine and Tylenol with codeine. They're things you need prescriptions for, but you can get prescriptions for. That means it'll be a little bit easier for pharmaceutical companies and for researchers to look into the health benefits and the medical benefits of cannabis.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. On what it would do for the legal industry, would it allow the legal dispensaries to use banks like other normal businesses? I think they can't get loans or take credit cards from customers yet, for example, correct me if I'm wrong, because banks are federally regulated and marijuana is federally illegal. Is banking that restrictive for these legal businesses?

Natalie Fertig: Banking is sort of in a gray space. You have more and more banks starting to serve the cannabis industry, but compared to what, say, a local bar could access or a grocery store could access it's still- there's many fewer places that you could go get a bank account or get access to credit card services or get a small business loan. This especially hits some of the smaller companies that would like to get a small business loan to get themselves off the ground.

The rescheduling, there's conflicting arguments over whether that will make any differences to banks, but the thing that could make some differences to banks is the Safe Banking Act, which is another bill that's moving its way through Congress. I know you mentioned majority leader Schumer's Bill that would de-schedule cannabis completely make it federally decriminalized, but there's another bill that just addresses banks and it would just make it easier, less onerous for banks to serve the cannabis industry. Less paperwork, fewer fees.

It wouldn't make it so that all of the big banks are suddenly serving the cannabis industry, but it would lower the amount that cannabis businesses have to pay just to have a checking account. It might make it a little bit more likely that you could use a debit card or maybe even a credit card when you walk into a cannabis business.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, first priority on the phones for this segment to anyone who works in the legal cannabis industry right now. Growers, dispensary owners and workers, anyone else, if you're in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, or any other legal state, would federal law changes or these federal policy or rescheduling changes that we're talking about that Biden came out for, reportedly coming out for, I don't think he said it himself yet, and that we did hear Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer come out for, will these help your existing legal cannabis business in a legal state? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Maybe this is probably a longer shot, but anyone in medical research who maybe wanted to study cannabis's positive or negative effects, but can't, if anyone like that is out there 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. for Natalie Fertig who covers federal cannabis policy for POLITICO. I guess even your beat is an indication of the new world that we're living in in recent years. People might be thinking, "Oh, POLITICO has a full-time reporter for federal cannabis policy."

Natalie Fertig: Yes. Actually, we have two full-time reporters. I focus on federal cannabis policy, and then I have a colleague who lives in New York City who covers state cannabis policy, and we've got an editor. There's a whole team at POLITICO doing this coverage. We get people from other teams also pitching in on healthcare cannabis stories and tech cannabis stories. POLITICO really saw this as an important thing that was happening, and I'm super glad that they did. I think it's important to take it seriously. I think when I started to be a cannabis reporter people would laugh. People would try to pitch me on CBD-infused yoga pants, but it's a really serious [crosstalk].-

Brian Lehrer: Right, and probably really bad jokes that I won't repeat-

Natalie Fertig: Oh, [crosstalk] [laughs].

Brian Lehrer: -even though we could all think of them that pertain to your beat, right?

Natalie Fertig: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, but the world has changed in six years. Chuck Schumer has introduced a bill to decriminalize cannabis. The president is moving to reschedule it. Cannabis has changed a lot. The policy area has changed a lot. New York has legalized. Things have changed a lot in six years,

Brian Lehrer: On the medical piece, and I should say the medical research piece, that moving it from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 would enable-- There is some research already. There are articles out there coming out all the time about what medical research has found the benefits of cannabis to be and the risks of cannabis to be. What is it that can be done and what is it that cannot be done at the moment?

Natalie Fertig: Technically, everything can be done, it's just about how hard it is to get a study approved. One of the hardest types of studies to get approved with Schedule 1 drugs is an actual clinical study where you're giving that drug to someone and then seeing how they react to it. A lot of cannabis studies you'll see a lot more observational studies where they put a call out. They say, "Hey, if you're a common cannabis user, can we ask you questions about your use? Can we follow you for a couple months or a couple years and see how your body changes?" Actually getting people into a research facility and giving them cannabis and seeing how their body changes on that, those studies are fewer and farther between.

They're still going to be hard to do because if you're giving a human something that's a pretty big deal, but with a lower schedule it should be easier to get those approved a little bit.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here's Roland. in Tampa. You're on WNYC. Hi, Roland.

Roland: Hi. How are you doing? It's a great segment. The timing's fantastic. This is a lot of [unintelligible 00:10:11]. My paternal grandfather lived during prohibition and he said he never missed a drink at all. He never understood what that was all about. We have been advising a couple of applicants for New York marijuana licenses and I've never seen such a slow rollout of any new industry.

There's been confusion. There've been clinics opening up in New York, Buffalo, and Rochester, which are not really licensed dispensaries which are selling marijuana. In all the confusion, I have clients who've been waiting for approvals while some illegal person has opened up a marijuana shop in the very neighborhood where they have been waiting patiently for the cannabis board in New York to approve the licenses.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. That's right. We did a--

Roland: [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Roland, I'll jump in just to reinforce. We did a whole segment with Jia Tolentino, from The New Yorker, who wrote an article on it, exactly that recently, the slow rollout of the dispensaries in New York State. Some of it has to do with the kind of things that our guest from POLITICO was talking about at the federal policy level. I wonder if this might make it a little bit easier. For you, did you tell our screener that you're a lobbyist in this area? Are you working for specific policy changes specifically?

Roland: Working for licensees and working for policy changes specifically, yes. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: If you're working for some of the licensees, Roland, has one of the problems been that New York righteously has tried to put, at the head of the line, people who've had past marijuana convictions as a form of reparations to get dispensary licenses if they're otherwise qualified? Those people tend to be lower-income people. With the federal restrictions on bank loans and things like that, they are working at cross purposes. The people with the past records who the state wants to enable are blocked by federal law from doing exactly what the state wants to do for exactly the right righteous reason. Are you running into that? Are your clients running into that?

Roland: Very much so. I've tried to get clients who had capital married up with clients who had records, and they didn't want anything to do with them. These were people who had venture capital money who said, "I don't want to be involved with people who had previously been convicted for marijuana violations," most of whom are rightly identified as members of minority groups.

There's one more issue too. I spent some time in Western Massachusetts during the session in Albany, and the town of Great Barrington has had a license dispensary for several years now. When I would spend weekends in the Berkshires, you would see rows and rows of cars waiting to get up to that marijuana dispensary with New York license plates buying marijuana in Great Barrington, which is not far over the border from Columbia County, New York. That was revenue that was going out the door from Albany that Massachusetts was saying, "Come on over." [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: That was one of the arguments in the state legislature, those lines in Great Barrington and other Massachusetts towns that were close to the New York border. There was a New York market, obviously. There were even buses. I think we-

Roland: Oh, yes.

Brian Lehrer: -once mentioned on the show buses taking people from New York to Great Barrington to buy illegal weed and then coming back, but not anymore, I imagine.

Roland: No, no, no, that's changing. That was years. For four or five years that was going on., how many millions of dollars did New York lose? I like the town of Great Barrington to have revenue, but that shouldn't come at the expense of Schenectady County, Albany County, Rensselaer County, and people driving up from as far as [unintelligible 00:14:29] New York City just specifically to spend the day in the Berkshires and buy a lot of pot to take back home.

Brian Lehrer: Right. In New York City, there are very few dispensaries, even in New York City where presumably there would be a big market, and they seem to be concentrated in certain neighborhoods. I don't know if you have a take on that. It seems like the village in lower Manhattan has a bunch of dispensaries but the rest of Manhattan doesn't. I think there's one in Harlem now, maybe, but--

Roland: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: The concentration struck me as weird-

Roland: [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: -also as I looked at the map.

Roland: Yes. Interesting demographic.

Brian Lehrer: Roland, thank you. Thank you very much for your call. Natalie, anything on that? I know he was talking about New York State policy in particular. You're a federal cannabis policy reporter, but they intersect at least on the banking regulations as we were discussing there.

Natalie Fertig: Oh, definitely. As a federal reporter, I do have the opportunity to look at a lot of different states. I'm from Washington State, which was one of the two first states, and so I've been watching the rollout of this over time.

A lot of the problems that you and Roland were talking about are problems we've seen in other states before. The proliferation of these unlicensed shops siphoning away money from the licensed industry, the licensed industry taking a long time to get up and running.

I've said to a couple of people before, it was like New York State said, "Hey, we're 20th, I think in the country. We can do way worse than all of the other states have done." There's all of this history from other states you can look to and say, "What did they do? Let's do it better." It seems like New York State went in the opposite direction and said, "Let's make it worse." I know it's a controversial opinion, but it's really a mess, and I think, like you said, the mess comes out of a good place.

I've talked to equity licensees in Massachusetts. POLITICO wrote a story about this recently. What some of these licensees told me, they took years to get their businesses open. One of them just opened very recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts after waiting years and having to hold on to a storefront for years and lose money for years. This operator told me, "I wish they'd just done it like Oregon."

I know there's a lot of pros and cons to a lot of these different systems, but his point that he was making was, "If they just let me grab a license, I wouldn't have had to get all of this capital to hold onto this storefront to go through the litigation that came out of trying to prioritize people like me in this process."

He said, "If you could just give me a green light to go forward, make it less complicated, make it less onerous, I would've been succeeding two or three years ago." That was an interesting- a narrative that went against what I would've thought and went against what Massachusetts was trying to do. Yes, what Roland was saying and what you were saying is something that I've heard in multiple other states. I don't think there's a state that has succeeded in this, but [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: You mean in marrying past cannabis convict priority with efficient rollout?

Natalie Fertig: I have not seen a place that has been able to do that.

Brian Lehrer: One could argue that it's better to roll it out a little slower, even if it takes a few more years, than just popping up a lot of stores now that it's legal, in order to prioritize those who were personally marginalized in society by a result of past laws that we now consider wrongheaded.

Natalie Fertig: I think that that is a very powerful argument that a lot of people are making. My job isn't to say which is the best rollout. It's just to say this is what has worked in these places or not. I think the places that have rolled it out the quickest and have seen less movement into these unlicensed shops are places like Arizona, which handed licenses to their existing medical marijuana industry first but granted, their existing medical marijuana industry was quite white and not full of people who had been hurt by the war on drugs. When medical was legalized, that was not something that was a priority. It's a big tug of war to get this right, and I haven't seen a state yet that's doing it right. I think that New York will be a case study for a lot of other states to come.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, now that I mentioned the concentration of the dispensaries in Manhattan being in the southern part of the borough, a listener immediately texts "Great new housing works dispensary at 86th and Lex highly recommended." That's a recommendation from one listener, or the more informational part of that is for people who care saying where that is.

You mentioned, or the caller mentioned the going back and forth to Great Barrington by New Yorkers in the early days of Massachusetts' legalization. Here's a question from a listener, a text message that says, "How does rescheduling affect the legality of flying with cannabis or sending through the mail?"

I remember in the coverage from the early states when Washington and Colorado and then California were legalizing dispensaries, there would be warnings in some of the coverage that would say, "Do not get on an airplane." If you're coming from New York or New Jersey or somewhere to a legal state and you go, "Great. I'll take some home with me," do not get on an airplane because you could still get busted. Does this federal rescheduling that Biden and Attorney General Garland want to do, assuming it goes through, take away that risk?

Natalie Fertig: It does not. I think it's a really important question. Rescheduling does not change any of the legality around flying or in driving your cannabis in a car over state lines. It's all considered interstate commerce, and that's regulated by the federal government.

There are different regulations in different states. I think I remember the Portland Airport was one of the first to say, hey, we're not going to take your cannabis from you, but if TSA finds it, we will tell you. If you're flying within Oregon, you're okay. If you're flying out of the state, that's a federal crime. I now see airports in California are doing this in different places. The risk isn't high in a lot of situations. The consequences, if caught, would be quite high because it would still be considered federal drug trafficking.

Brian Lehrer: Which I think brings us to the Chuck Schumer laws. We're going to take a break and move from talking primarily about what Biden is doing on cannabis policy this week to what Schumer and Congress are trying to do, at least some of the members of Congress are trying to do. We'll continue with Natalie Fertig, federal cannabis policy reporter for POLITICO. More of your calls too, 212-433-WNYC, and texts 212-433-9692 on this very newsworthy week for federal cannabis policy. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we're talking about developments in the news this week both from the Biden administration and from Congress on federal marijuana or cannabis policy, our guest is POLITICO's federal cannabis policy reporter, Natalie Fertig. We've been talking about the executive branch. Now let's get to Congress. The Axios story on this is called Schumer's marijuana moment, or Chuck Schumer's Senate Democrats make very public push on marijuana. Here's another clip of the majority leader.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: It's past time for Congress to catch up with public opinion and to catch up with the science. I'm proud to be the first majority leader ever to call for an end to the marijuana prohibition because I've seen both the consequences of the outdated drug laws and the benefits of common-sense cannabis regulation at the state level. It's time for Congress to follow suit.

Brian Lehrer: Natalie, it looks to me like there are two bills, one aimed specifically at those banking rules that we mentioned before, and one to end federal prohibition. Generally, is ending prohibition the same thing as legalizing?

Natalie Fertig: Yes. Ending federal prohibition tends to be the term that Democrats use for removing cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act which is the same thing we're talking about with the DOJ and rescheduling. It would be an act of Congress or take an act of Congress to completely remove it from that, and then also to change the federal criminal code to remove any marijuana-related penalties.

Brian Lehrer: To remove any marijuana-related penalties. Would something still have to happen at the state level for dispensaries as they're called? It sounds so clinical by the way. They're pot stores. There are liquor stores. Maybe it should just be okay to say that. Schumer's end to prohibition, would that automatically allow dispensaries to open in Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, about half the states, those that don't have them yet?

Natalie Fertig: No. Actually, it would not. This is the difference between federally descheduling and federally legalizing something. Alcohol is not federally legal. We still have counties, and there used to be states that were dry counties and dry states. Alcohol is not federally criminalized, so states can do whatever they want with alcohol. This would do the same thing with cannabis where the federal government would come up with regulations for cannabis; can it be used in food? What's the potency level? How much do we tax it?

Then states can go out and say, yes, we want to legalize this too, and we'll put some of our own regulations on this like you see with alcohol sometimes being sold in state stores, and some places it's sold in grocery stores. States would have their own regulations, but states could still say, "No, we're not going to sell this here." What it would change would be possession. Say you can't sell weed in Texas, you can still drive through Texas with weed and not be afraid of getting 20 years in prison.

Brian Lehrer: I'm a little confused by that because if it's still illegal in Texas, couldn't you still be arrested under Texas State Law if you drive from a legal state with some into Texas? You just can't be arrested federally for crossing state lines with it?

Natalie Fertig: I think a lot of these things will be explored in the courts should decriminalization happen. What we've seen in places like California, a really big state where many counties in California have still not allowed cannabis production in sales, is that you can possess cannabis. You can drive out of a dry county and buy it and bring it back with you, but that county can say you're not allowed to sell it here. If you brought it back and you started selling it, then you would be in criminal hot water. If you were just using it yourself and you were operating within the state's legal limit, to at that point, it would be the federal legal limit for possession, but right now, the state's legal limit for possession, you would be fine. Does that make sense?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Of course, it's a lot for people if they are carrying across state lines to keep track of, but these things change slowly. We'll get to the Republican's position on this since it takes a majority, if you haven't noticed, of the House and Senate, listeners, to actually pass bills in the United States and the relationship of all of it to the election year. Miranda in Massachusetts, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Miranda: Yes, hi. I'm a CEO of a cannabis grow in Western Massachusetts. We have just now in the end of January gotten permission to actually sell our crop. We've been trying to do this for the last four years. It's been a complete mess.

There's two things I wanted to say. One is I wanted to ask about the enforcement of cannabis laws because not that I'm advocating more people getting arrested for illegal cannabis, but it seems to me that once it became legal in Massachusetts, there was absolutely no effort made to differentiate between legal sellers and illegal sellers, legal growers, illegal growers. I think the police all just went, "Oh, phew, we don't have to deal with this anymore because it's not a problem." Again, I'm not advocating them going out and busting people.

At the same time, we have often wondered, |Why are we doing this legally? Exactly, why are we trying to do this legally when all these people are making so much money in so many other ways selling it without a license?" That is one thing that I just wonder if your guest knows, has statistics about how much is being enforced in terms of illegality. You go to New York, everything-- I walked into a dispensary, and I said, "So, where are you getting all your stuff?" He said, "Oh, mostly California." It's all being shipped all over the country to all of these illegal sources. It's not being enforced which is really, what's the point of having these laws if they're not being enforced. Why not just get rid of them?

Brian Lehrer: Because it's state by state right now and federally illegal. There is no official national cannabis market. A company has to start in each state that legalizes, grow in that state, and distribute only in that state.

Miranda, let me ask you something because I know that in New York it's such a big issue what to do about all the illegal smoke shops that have opened. There's a new provision in that, in the new state budget that just passed in Albany that's supposed to make it easier to shut them down. Do you have that problem in Massachusetts too at the dispensary level? Do you follow the question? Can you hear me?

Miranda: Are you talking to me or are you talking to your guest?

Brian Lehrer: Talking to Miranda.

Miranda: Oh, okay. No. Not on the dispensary level that I know of, but there's lots of events that, at least in our area which is very rural, where home growers can come and sell their weed which is great for them, I guess, but there's none of the--

Brian Lehrer: It's competing with you as a licensed business trying to make your living on it.

Miranda: Exactly. Also, none of those products have been in any way gone through all of the safety protocols that have to be gone through by the legal growers in order to make the product safe for the market. Is it safe or is it not safe, or are the things that we are doing not necessary? We have to spend a lot of money on our weed before we can sell it legally because of regulations about what is healthy to inhale and all of that, which they're not necessarily real. As your guest pointed out, they haven't been studied that carefully, and nobody's getting sick from the illegal weed that I know of [laughs].

Again, another thing that really, I would caution any new state, if they're setting up regulations, is that all the regulations in Massachusetts were really geared toward indoor growing because that's what the illegal growers did because they couldn't grow outside [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Well, also, do you have a growing season in Massachusetts that would enable it outdoors?

Miranda: Of course.

Brian Lehrer: You do?

Miranda: Oh, yes. We have a wonderful crop that we grew last summer and under the sun. Our power usage is a fraction of what the indoor growers [crosstalk]-- We are trying to do something ecological and with the resources that are free or relatively free, such as water and sun, and yet we have to do all kinds of things that the indoor growers have to do that doesn't actually apply to our business. They're also, because we're in the poorest county in Massachusetts, which we picked deliberately because it was an area of disproportionate impact--

Brian Lehrer: Which one is that?

Miranda: It's Franklin County. There are a lot of farmers here, which is why it's not a rich county. There are a lot of rules, a lot of abilities that farmers have to use the land. There's right to farm rules that you can do things.

Brian Lehrer: Miranda, I'm going to go for time, but thank you for giving our listeners so much insight into some of the issues in the legal grow--

Miranda: Thank you for having this. Thank you for having this. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. Bye.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Natalie, a lot of really interesting stuff there from a legal grower in Massachusetts.

Natalie Fertig: Oh, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Bugs in the machine as she sees it.

Natalie Fertig: I could address many of the things that she said. She brings up a lot of really interesting points, things I've heard from a lot of places. One thing she pointed out is she goes into cities, places like New York City- we have this happening also in Washington, DC, and they say, "Hey, we got our cannabis from California." That's the fact that there's still this nationwide illicit market, and a lot of it-- I've been to places where these farms exist in California and in southern Oregon. I've talked to people who are working to clean them up. I think there is a lack of recognition of both the environmental impact and the human impact of what big drug cartels are actually doing.

A lot of that weed is making it to New York, to New York City, to Washington, DC, to Philadelphia. People think it's someone who's a nice hippie growing in Humboldt county, but a lot of those people try to get into the legal market. What you've got left is-- I sat and talked to people who were human trafficked to come work at weed farms in southern Oregon, in northern California. I've talked to parks rangers who are trying to clean up carbofurans, which are rat poison that can kill bears with a capful, and they're using that on illegal weed. It's not something you want to inhale into your body.

There's some pretty big problems going on. Like you said, it's all because we've got this disparate system. Where that's grown in California., the minute leaves California, the California authorities can't follow it in New York State and to Washington, DC, to Pennsylvania. It's definitely a mess.

Brian Lehrer: A buyer beware aspect of that. The caller was saying, well, as far as she knows, nobody's getting sick from illegal weed. You're saying, "Hey, heads up. What you buy in a legal dispensary is regulated for health. Even if that farmer thinks maybe it's being over-regulated for health, you don't know what you're getting in an illegal smoke shop.

Natalie Fertig: I always tell people know where it came from and actually know where it came from. Don't just take someone's word at it.

Brian Lehrer: To the caller's point, listener texts, "Why is there a limit on licenses? If there is a market, why are we limiting it here in New York City?" I guess that could apply to anywhere, but that's an interesting question. If it's a legal product now, well, the state doesn't say where you can put a grocery store. I'm not sure if the state, whatever state says where you can put a liquor store or how many liquor stores there can be in a state. I don't know if you know. That's a question.

Natalie Fertig: There are often state and city regulations for liquor stores. They vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I think the most common comparison that I hear made is to New York City taxi medallions. It's something that its rarity increases its value if there were cannabis stores on every corner. We've seen in Oregon, where there were at one point more cannabis dispensaries than there were McDonald's and Starbucks combined in the state, and the bottom fell out of the market. A lot of people went out of business. There's a Goldilocks thing where you have to find the middle ground where you have enough licenses that it puts the illegal people out of business, but not so much that it puts the legal industry out of business.

Brian Lehrer: I guess the question is, should that be up to the state or should that be up to the market, like with a lot of other legal stuff, to sort itself out? We're running out of time, so I definitely want to get to the politics. A, is there Republican support for these legalization bills in Congress?

Natalie Fertig: The bill that Schumer introduced does not have any Republican support right now, but there is Republican support for the idea of federally decriminalizing. You've got some- especially in the US House of Representatives, you've got Ohio Congressman Dave Joyce, who's actually a former prosecutor. His voice holds a lot of weight amongst his colleagues as someone who says, I saw this in the legal system and it didn't work. He's a big proponent of decriminalization. There are some other people. Senator Rand Paul leans libertarian. Libertarians and populists often say, let's decriminalize this. The government shouldn't be telling us what we can consume. You've got Republicans coming at it from different perspectives.

I would say that Republicans tend to not be as supportive of it when it includes things like social justice. and expungements. and some of the equity provisions that Senator Schumer and Senator Cory Booker and Senator Wyden, who introduced the bill with him, find really important to include with that. That's why there's not a lot of Republicans signed onto that bill.

I do think it'll be interesting to watch how this conversation changes and how the two sides come together over what may very likely be the next decade. I don't think that decriminalization will pass incredibly soon unless something very big happens, like people start to get hurt in mass by the current state of federal laws.

Brian Lehrer: A decade. It's a lot longer than Election Day this November. You write that this could provide a boost for Biden politically, especially among younger voters. Other articles on the Schumer bills say he's also looking at the politics of this in the election year. I don't doubt the polls that show younger Americans broadly support loosening marijuana laws, but in reality, it is widely available legally or illegally. I wonder if it would be a decisive issue for many voters who might show up or not or be swing voters. Do you think it might?

Natalie Fertig: I think it's all in how it's used. It also depends on where you are. I think in states where marijuana is not currently legal, I think it has more of an importance in people's lives. I went up to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during the last election to talk to people during the primary for Senator John Fetterman, who is one of the most pro-cannabis lawmakers on Capitol Hill now, and as lieutenant governor, was trying very hard to get Pennsylvania to legalize weed. I talked to maybe twelve people on the street, and one of them brought up marijuana organically as something that they saw the then lieutenant governor doing that made them want to support him. That's not a super high percentage.

What I think the Biden administration is trying to do, and what Democrats are trying to do is to take cannabis and say it's part of this great, complete package. It goes with student loan debt forgiveness. It goes with some other things that younger, more liberal voters that may not want to show up to the polls, especially with the criticism that the administration is getting right now over how it's handling Gaza and its support for Israel and how that is alienating some younger voters, they're hoping that some of their more progressive policies, like cannabis, can win some of those people back or get some people to come out who might have otherwise stayed home.

Brian Lehrer: Student loans is another one. Biden put some new policies on that in play recently. I mentioned that I wasn't sure how the number or spacing of liquor stores is regulated. We've gotten a number of texts so just for people's interest, listener writes, "New York State only allows one liquor store per owner of corporation. Trader Joe's only has one wine store," it says. Another one, "My grandfather had a liquor store for 30 years. Licenses are highly regulated even now." One other, "Supermarket owners were not much historically overpoliced. So much of this cannabis program is about supporting those historically criminalized while supporting small businesses and state industry. If left to the free market, big out-of-state money will crush the competition, the Starbucks model."

Let me just get one quick take from you on the other story of yours that I mentioned in the intro that's so surprising. You have this other story about a federal crackdown on legal marijuana growers. We had that farmer caller. Legal marijuana growers being cracked down on by the federal government in the state of New Mexico. New Mexico is otherwise a fully legal state, I see. What are they doing?

Natalie Fertig: This is the whiplash of this week, is that at the same time that the Biden administration, the DOJ is moving to reclassify cannabis, a different agency, the Department of Homeland Security, where Customs and Border Protection lies, is cracking down on state-legal cannabis farmers and producers, and distributors in New Mexico. CBP is split up into a lot of different regions. This is one specific customs and border protection region.

What's happening is that CBP has checkpoints that are above the border. Along the southern border, they are north. Along the northern border, they're south of the border. In New Mexico, they're as far as 80 miles from the border. In that space between these checkpoints and the border, there are people, there are cities, there's businesses. The cannabis operators south of those border checkpoints are hitting these checkpoints and they're starting now over the last two months to have their cannabis confiscated when they go through these checkpoints. They've got their licensed manifests. They're saying, "Hey, we're a licensed business. Here's our manifest. We're all above board." CBP is still taking their cannabis.

Over $400,000 retail worth of cannabis has been lost by about 15 to 17 stops in the last two months. It's a really big deal because it's the first time that I've seen the federal government in the last decade really go after legal businesses. There's been some one-offs where-- there was a situation where some Native Americans were having their medical marijuana plants pulled up, but it hasn't been regular and systematic in the way that this has now been going on for the last two months. It raises a lot of questions about what the federal government's role is in state-legal cannabis and if this is also going to expand and happen more in places like Arizona and California, New York, Maine, places with border crossings and the checkpoints, if it's going to become a more widespread problem.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I will just acknowledge the listeners who are also texting us who do not like this widespread legalization. One writes, "Smoking pot in public should be banned. Children should not be forced to inhale pot smoke." Another one writes-- I'm going to have to summarize it. "I was a semi-regular smoker until seven days ago when I quit. I'm going through a lot of pain. It's not without consequences." Somebody else writes, "How is tobacco smoke the devil and marijuana smoke the angel?" Just acknowledging that there are dissenters out there, although certainly we see what states are doing and now the federal government may be doing, and the opinion polls almost everywhere seem to support it. We leave it there. Did you want to say anything about that real quick?

Natalie Fertig: Oh, I was just going to add that, I think it is good to bring up questions of public health and youth consumption. I don't think those are non-issues. It's something that people should be talking about.

Brian Lehrer: Fair. We've done some separate segments on public health implications, con as well as pro. Natalie Fertig is the Federal Cannabis Policy Reporter for POLITICO. Thanks so much.

Natalie Fertig: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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