What the future of marijuana legalisation could look like under President Trump

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What the future of marijuana legalisation could look like under President Trump

10 November 2016

By Christopher Ingraham

Americans wake up this morning to find a drug policy landscape radically altered from yesterday. California, Massachusetts and Nevada have legalized recreational marijuana, while voters in a handful of Southern and deeply conservative states embraced medical marijuana with open arms.

Regardless of how a still-contested legalization vote turns out in Maine, more than 1 in 5 Americans now live in states where the recreational use of marijuana is, or soon will be, legal.

“This is the most momentous Election Day in history for the movement to end marijuana prohibition,” Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that supported a number of the legalization initiatives, said in a statement. “The end of prohibition is near, and it would be a mistake for the federal government to continue waging war on its own nonviolent citizens. How do you ask a DEA agent to be the last man to enforce a mistake?”

But jubilation over marijuana's ballot wins was quickly tempered by the uncertain future marijuana faces under a Trump Justice Department. “The prospect of Donald Trump as our next president concerns me deeply,” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement. “His most likely appointees to senior law enforcement positions — Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie — are no friends of marijuana reform, nor is his vice president.”

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Thumbnail: CC flickr Evan Guest