How The Republican Party Learned To Love Cannabis Legalization
With Donald Trump’s support for Florida’s pro-pot Amendment 3 and the expected federal rescheduling of marijuana, here’s why the GOP finally jumped on the weed bandwagon.
By Will Yakowicz,Forbes Staff
In early September, former President Donald Trump officially announced his support for potheads.
“I believe it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “We must also implement smart regulations, while providing access for adults, to safe, tested product.”
Trump, who is a Florida resident, went on to say that he would vote “yes” on Amendment 3, which if passed this November would legalize recreational cannabis in the Sunshine State and could be a linchpin for other Southern red states that have yet to legalize marijuana. And if he becomes president again, Trump wrote that he would also support the federal government’s ongoing review to potentially reclassify cannabis as a less dangerous drug, work with Congress to pass cannabis banking reform bills and support states that wanted to legalize pot sales within their own borders.
For most voters, the leader of the Republican party coming out in support of cannabis legalization was surprising. The political movement to legalize marijuana has long been associated with liberals and Democrats. But over the last few years, more and more Republican lawmakers, big money donors and conservative thinkers have coopted the issue.
Thanks to a $30 billion state-licensed cannabis economy spanning 38 states— 15 of which are Republican states—marijuana legalization is becoming a proxy for classic conservative issues: pro-business, states’ rights and freedom from Big Government. (Even Richard Nixon, the Republican president who started America’s war on drugs in 1971 and classified marijuana as one of the world’s most addictive substances, said that cannabis “is not particularly dangerous” in audio tapes from 1973, a recent report in the New York Times revealed.)
Jeremiah Mosteller, the cofounder of the Cannabis Freedom Alliance and the policy director at Americans for Prosperity, billionaire Charles Koch’s political advocacy group, has been lobbying Republican lawmakers on cannabis reform since 2018. He says that, after years of perpetuating the war on drugs, the GOP has finally realized that legalization is happening with or without them. Now many lawmakers have decided to get on the bandwagon in hopes of incorporating conservative policies into the new laws, such as low taxes and fewer regulations to foster competitive free markets.
“We are seeing Republicans and conservatives increasingly warm up to cannabis policy,” says Mosteller. “I think Trump recognizes what those of us who have been watching the issue for a long time know: that there is high support among the American public for this issue, but it’s not an issue that makes a difference at the ballot box.”
If there is one man in Congress who can read the temperature on marijuana opposition and support, it is Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, and the founder and co-chair of the bi-partisan Congressional Cannabis Caucus. “We’ve been watching: there has been a slow, steady enhancement of Republican support,” says Blumenauer. “What we are seeing now is the last stages of entrenched Republican opposition.”
Among those who have had a recent conversion is Representative David Joyce, a Republican from Ohio, which legalized recreational use in 2023. Last December, Joyce introduced the States 2.0 Act, which would formally legalize state markets under federal law.
If passed, Joyce’s bill would de-schedule state-legal marijuana, but pot produced and sold outside of state-licensed programs would remain illegal. This nuanced technicality sets the stage for a states-rights approach to legalization in a similar fashion that sports betting was legalized across America.
Joyce says Republican support is there for cannabis when legalization is framed as a states’ rights issue. So much so that he believes “there are enough votes for cannabis reform” in Congress. “Republicans are becoming enlightened,” says Joyce, who says he started supporting legal cannabis in 2013. “Someone can hate the issue, but if they’re strong on states’ rights, how can they deny it?”
Weldon Angelos, a cannabis reform advocate, has both Democrats and Republicans to thank for getting out of prison 42 years early. In 2004, the then-24-year-old Angelos was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 55 years for selling about a pound of marijuana to an undercover cop while carrying a firearm in Utah. His case caught the attention of Charles Koch, who lobbied on his behalf, and in 2016, President Obama commuted his sentence, and he was released. In 2020, President Trump gave him a formal pardon.
Recently, Angelos has been working with the campaigns of both Kamala Harris and Trump, asking them to support clemency for people still serving time for cannabis offenses. He says he has felt the tide turning on the Republican side of the aisle.
With Trump coming out in support of [legalization in Florida], I think more Republicans will be open to the idea,” says Angelos. “Republicans are starting to realize it’s a conservative issue and an increasingly popular issue for Republican voters.”
According to a March Pew Research Center poll, 42% of Republicans favor legalizing marijuana for both medical and recreational, compared with 72% of Democrats. And those rise with younger Republicans: 57% of Republicans ages 18 to 29 support legalization, and 52% of Republicans ages 30 to 49 agree. According to a Fox News Poll from May, 59% of Trump supporters and 55% of registered Republican voters now favor legalizing recreational sales.
Former Congressman Greg Walden, a Republican who was a representative from Oregon from 1999 through 2021, was anti-legalization for most of his career. But after voters legalized recreational use in 2014, he changed his position. “Times change and policy needs to keep up with the times,” says Walden, who is now the co-chair of the Coalition for Cannabis Policy, Education, and Regulation. “Our job as policymakers is to make it work, because the voters have spoken.”
All the optimistic talk from the Beltway, however, is not getting cannabis investors too high. Morgan Paxhia, the cofounder of San Francisco-based cannabis hedge fund Poseidon, has been in the industry for more than a decade and says he will believe it once he sees movement at the federal level.
“It all feels great—but it’s an election year,” says Paxhia. “We’ve heard words for years about reform, but we need the action. We don’t want to be told it’s going to happen, ‘Vote for me and I’ll do this.’ We want to see it happen.”
For Blumenauer, who started supporting cannabis legalization in 1972 as a state legislator in Oregon, America is in a different place than it was during the height of the war on drugs. For the first time in American history, both candidates running for president are pro-cannabis.
“This is a remarkable turn of events, and the momentum continues to build,” says Blumenauer, who is retiring at the end of this year. “I hope that we’ll see legislative leadership put [cannabis bills] on the floor.”
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