New York could soon start to get more recreational marijuana dispensaries after a judge on Friday approved legal settlements to end lawsuits that halted the state’s legal cannabis licensing program.
The settlements lift a court order that has blocked the state from processing or issuing retail marijuana licenses since August. State officials said the agreement will allow more than 400 potential retailers to move forward with pending applications to open storefronts.
“With this settlement behind us, hundreds of new licenses can now move forward, new stores will open, and consumers can legally buy safer, legal, tested cannabis products from New York-based entrepreneurs and small businesses,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement.
That certainly sucks.
With regard to the scheduling, to be fair to Biden, there is a set process in which the final scheduling is determined by the DEA. This process goes back to the Controlled Substance Act of 1970 (when a lot of our stances on drugs became fucked up).
https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/csa
Biden has called on Cannabis scheduling to be reexamined, now HHS has done their internal study and they think it should be stopped to a lower schedule, and now it’s the DEAs turn to act on their recommendation or not. (They are expected to, but who in the hell knows.)
It could be argued that maybe Biden could do it with an executive order, but they’re probably not going to do something that can be seen as circumventing the administrative process (since Republicans are more than happy to tear all of these agencies down, or at least they say they are.) EOs are pretty fragile things too.
The only other option in that case would be for Congress to pass or amend a law legalizing Cannabis and/or reforming the CSA. But Congress are pretty damn unreliable to say the least.
Thanks for clarifying. I didn’t realize it was that complicated.
It really shouldn’t be… And personally I think it makes zero sense for the DEA to both schedule substances and police them, because it creates an obvious conflict of interest that got us here in the first place. But here we are.