On Thursday, October 6, US President Joe Biden announced that he would pardon all federal offenses of simple marijuana possession. “There are thousands of people who were previously convicted of simple possession who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result. My pardon will remove this burden,” the president tweeted.
Biden also called on State governors to pardon those convicted of marijuana possession on the state level. The vast majority of sentences for marijuana possession are at the state level. In addition, Biden asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Attorney General to change the scheduling of marijuana. Drug scheduling is how a substance is classified according to acceptable medical use and abuse or dependency potential. Marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug, the most severe classification, alongside heroin and more severe than methamphetamine.
Biden’s pardon will clear around 6,500 people who were convicted of simple marijuana possession at the federal level from 1992 to 2021, and thousands more who were convicted in Washington DC.
But the pardon will not free anyone from prison. No one is currently in federal prison solely for simple possession of marijuana. The federal government more commonly prosecutes marijuana trafficking crimes, whereas marijuana possession is almost entirely prosecuted at the State level. According to the US Sentencing Commission, in 2017, only 92 people out of a total of nearly 20,000 drug convictions were sentenced for marijuana possession federally. Biden urged governors to follow up with a state pardon of marijuana possession, but there does not seem to be any enforceability behind this request.
With midterm elections coming up in November and many predicting that the Biden’s Democratic Party will fare poorly, it is possible that this pardon is part of a last minute bid to beat the Republican Party. Marijuana decriminalization is vastly popular in the US with 68% in favor, although Biden did not call for decriminalization.
Some argue that this latest pardon is a political ploy, rather than a genuine call for justice, especially when analyzing the track record of Biden’s Vice-President, Kamala Harris. When Kamala Harris was the District Attorney of San Francisco, marijuana convictions spiked. Her attorneys successfully prosecuted 1,956 convictions for marijuana possession, cultivation, and sale. She only began to advocate publicly for the legalization of marijuana when she became a likely presidential candidate in 2018.
