by Joey Garrison
USA Today
October 6, 2022
President Joe Biden says his pardon will affect thousands of people. Dana Ullman/Bloomberg via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — In a seismic shift Thursday that upends decades of policy that facilitated the nation's "war on drugs," President Joe Biden pardoned everyone with federal convictions for simple possession of marijuana.
The president also set the stage to potentially remove marijuana as a Schedule 1 classification under federal law, a designation given to the most dangerous substances. Rescheduling the drug could reduce – or eliminate altogether – penalties for marijuana possession.
The moves are a dramatic escalation toward the national discrimination of marijuana as the president targets low-level drug convictions that have disproportionately affected people of color...
Biden's actions are, quite simply, massive.
It's the most significant steps a U.S. president has taken to loosen federal marijuana laws, following the footsteps of increasingly more states that have moved to decriminalize marijuana in recent years...
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