State rep Lou Lang remembers thinking the night of the election that people with a stake in Illinois’s medicinal marijuana pilot program—including cultivators, dispensaries, and patients—had a lot to fear from a Trump presidency and its promises of “law and order.”
Spicer also assured the public that Trump “understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing especially terminal diseases, and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana, can bring to them.” But he also (wrongly) implied that greater access to weed is correlated with an increase in opioid use. That’s false—a 2014 study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association found that states with medical pot laws had significantly lower opioid-overdose mortality rates than those that didn’t.
Mark de Souza, CEO of Revolution Enterprises, a state-licensed medical marijuana cultivator the Reader profiled last year, says Illinois “created the gold standard” for medicinal weed regulation.
“I think states should be allowed to do what they wish to do, especially if they are properly regulating their own programs,” Lang says.
Ultimately, Lang explains, if the appropriations rider banning the use of tax dollars to fund federal intervention in state medical marijuana programs isn’t renewed, there’s little the state can do to protect itself from DOJ interference.
And while some lawmakers may be hesitant to pass laws allowing for legal consumption of pot, public perception of the drug has shifted dramatically. Sixty percent of Americans now support legalizing marijuana, according to Gallup.
