Pundits hope Biden Administration move to reschedule marijuana will get them clicks
Most Americans support legalizing pot. Political pundits insist Biden is courting votes by rescheduling the drug. The latest headlines and news stories channeling chart junk creators come from the Associated Press and the Washington Post. Without evidence, each claims that the Biden Administration’s rescheduling of marijuana is designed to win November votes. The implication: Biden […]
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Most Americans support legalizing pot. Political pundits insist Biden is courting votes by rescheduling the drug.
The latest headlines and news stories channeling chart junk creators come from the Associated Press and the Washington Post. Without evidence, each claims that the Biden Administration’s rescheduling of marijuana is designed to win November votes. The implication: Biden is catering to a minority.
In the AP story, the lede references 20-somethings but the included polling data are for individuals 45+. Almost two-thirds of those polled support legalizing pot. There is no evidence for the headline claim.
The Washington Post follows suit, claiming “Democrats hope move to reschedule marijuana will help them in November.” Of the nine people quoted, three are Democrats. Only one, in paragraph 17, makes the claim in the headline.
I call this reporting style “Pundits hope move to reschedule marijuana will get them clicks.”
Biden’s decriminalization efforts are not “new”
Biden called for a review of federal marijuana law in October 2022 and moved to pardon thousands of Americans convicted federally of simple possession of the drug. He has also called on governors and local leaders to take similar steps to erase marijuana convictions (emphasis added).
According to Pew Research, as of April 2024 only “11% say the drug should not be legal in any form.”
The group most affected by decriminialization is Black, not young
Rathering than pandering to youth as AP opined, perhaps Biden is seeking fairness and justice.
Despite using cannabis at a slightly lower rate than their white counterparts, Black people are roughly four times more likely to be arrested for cannabis.
The second edition of my book Marijuana: A Short History [was released June 30, 2020], and it explores the explicitly racist roots of cannabis policy in the United States as well as the broader War on Drugs. It highlights how politicians across the political divide spent much of the 20th century using marijuana as a means of dividing America. By painting the drug as a scourge from south of the border to a “jazz drug” to the corruptive intoxicant of choice for beatniks and hippies, marijuana as a drug and the laws that sought to control it played on some of America’s worst tendencies around race, ethnicity, civil disobedience, and otherness…
Despite cannabis usage rates between whites and non-whites being similar, Black Americans are arrested for cannabis offenses at a rate of nearly 4:1, compared to whites.
Both articles are rife with unsupported claims
Without a quotation or a link, Jonathan J. Cooper claimed in “Biden’s historic marijuana shift is his latest election year move for young voters”:
Facing softening support from a left-leaning voting group that will be crucial to his reelection hopes in November, Biden has made a number of election year moves intended to appeal in particular to younger voters. His move toward reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug is just the latest, coming weeks after he canceled student loans for another 206,000 borrowers. He has also made abortion rights central to his case for reelection.
Unsourced claims: three of them.
- The election is six months away. What “softening support”?
- Rather than beginning in an “election year,” the Biden Administration started its decriminalization efforts in October 2022.
- Biden’s second attempt to broadly cancel student loan debt started in October 2023. Student loan forgiveness is not a knee-jerk, ‘new’ attempt to woo voters. The first: August 2022. U.S. Supreme Court rejection: June 2023. This week, he forgave loans taken out by students who were hoodwinked by The Art Institutes.
It’s deja vu at the Washington Post.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement Tuesday that he was rescheduling marijuana under federal law was just the latest turn in what Biden’s advisers see as a key political strategy — along with issues such as student loan relief and climate policy — to unlock votes this fall.
In addition, the Post engaged in he-said stenography, reposting claims as though they are credulous:
The influential House Republican Policy Committee released a briefing in February that declared that “there is nothing ‘recreational’ about the use of marijuana,” while arguing that the drug was associated with violent crime and declines in worker productivity.
The claim is neither checked nor contextualized.
Check: A literature review in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online (2021) found:
Results suggest that there is a link between cannabis use and violence; however, this relationship is strictly correlational, and the strength of this relationship varies depending on the population (e.g., populations with severe and persistent mental illness versus the general population). These findings have important ramifications for treatment considerations and for public health and safety approaches (emphasis added).
Context: “Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is one of the leading causes of the global burden of disease and injury (WHO, 2021).” About 15% of robberies are linked to alcohol use in the U.S. and 37% of sexual assaults and rapes… 2/3rd of victims suffering from violence by a current or former spouse or partner report that the perpetrator had been drinking.”
With reporting like this, why does the GOP need ads?
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