It can take a while to determine the victor in a presidential election. But one winner was abundantly clear on Election Day.
Drugs once thought to be the scourge of a healthy society, are getting public recognition as a part of American life. Where drugs were on the ballot Tuesday, they won handily.
New Jersey, South Dakota, Montana and Arizona joined 11 other states that had already legalized recreational marijuana. Mississippi and South Dakota made medical marijuana legal, bringing the total to 35.
The citizens of Washington, D.C., voted to decriminalize psilocybin, the organic compound active in psychedelic mushrooms. Oregon voters approved two drug-related initiatives. One decriminalized possession of small amounts of illegal drugs including heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines. (It did not make it legal to sell the drugs.) Another measure authorized the creation of a state program to license providers of psilocybin.
Election night represented a significant victory for three forces pushing for drug reform for different but interlocking reasons. There is an increasingly powerful cannabis industry. There are state governments struggling with budget shortfalls, hungry to fill coffers in the midst of a pandemic.
And then there are the reform advocates, who for decades have said that imprisonment, federal mandatory minimum sentences and prohibitive cash bail for drug charges ruin lives and communities, particularly those of Black Americans.
Decriminalization is popular, in part, because Americans believe that too many people are in jails and prisons and also because Americans personally affected by the country’s continuing opioid crisis have been persuaded to see drugs as a public health issue.
The war on drugs has lost its political allure for many conservatives. John Boehner, the former Republican speaker of the House, was once a staunch opponent of marijuana legalization. He is now chair of the National Cannabis Roundtable, a lobbying group.
“When cannabis is on the ballot, it wins,” Boehner said of Tuesday’s results. “Even with hyperpartisanship everywhere else, people of all stripes agree about cannabis reform.”
So do businesspeople. “It’s not really a hippie peacenik substance anymore,” said Martin Lee, a drug historian and CBD information advocate. “It’s big business. Billions of dollars are involved with this.”
The money that cartels and drug companies found in illegal and unintended use of drugs has become attractive to many, given the substances’ growing medical and cultural legitimacy. Plant-based drugs, for example, are a growing category in the booming business of wellness.
Michael Pollan, author of “How to Change Your Mind,” which focused on the cultural history and medicinal use of psychedelics, said that he believed there were two currents at work in Tuesday’s results: the public’s exhaustion with the drug war and the reframing of marijuana and psilocybin as medicines.
Now marijuana, psilocybin and MDMA (the scientific name for Ecstasy or Molly) are increasingly seen as good for you.
“The image of psychedelics was closely tied to the counterculture and Timothy Leary,” Pollan said. “Now when people think about psychedelics, many of them think about psychotherapy. They think about healing.”
‘It Is Time for Us to End the Drug War’
“Twenty years ago, no one thought a night like this would be possible,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which pushes for criminal justice reform on drugs. She called the passage of the measures, particularly in Montana and South Dakota, “a resounding mandate that it is time for us to end the drug war and that decriminalization is politically viable.”
In 1969, two years before the dawn of the drug war, 84% of Americans thought marijuana should be illegal, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2019, again according to Pew, 91% of Americans supported the legalization of marijuana, either for both medical and recreational use or solely for medical use.
Political opposition to marijuana has not disappeared entirely. Kevin Sabet, an adviser in the Office of National Drug Control Policy under three presidents who has fought against legalization, said that many of marijuana’s opponents had just gone underground.
Still, he said, they’re out there: “If you read my email inbox, you’d see all the messages of support.”
Emily Dufton, author of “Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America,” said that marijuana always became more socially acceptable when other, more dangerous drugs began to concern the public.
Crack cocaine — which became a focus of the media in the mid-1980s but whose impacts were overblown and whose policing was racist — displaced worries about marijuana for many years.
And the opioid epidemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans — about 48,000 died from opioid overdoses in 2019 — has also helped contextualize marijuana as a significantly less dangerous drug.
“The cultural campaigns against pot can’t gain a foothold when opioids today, or crack in the 1980s, seemed so much scarier or more deadly,” Dufton said.
President Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, but it grew increasingly draconian during Ronald Reagan's administration. Nancy Reagan’s top priority was the anti-drug campaign, which she pushed aggressively as her husband signed a series of punitive measures into law — measures shaped in part by Joe Biden, then a senator.
In 1986, Congress passed a law mandating severe prison sentences for users of crack, who were disproportionately Black. In 1989, with prison rates rising, 64% of Americans surveyed said that drug abuse was the most serious problem facing the United States.
The focus on crack meant that when pot returned to the headlines in the 1990s, it received comparatively cozy publicity. In 1996, California voters passed a measure allowing for the use of medical marijuana. Two years later, medical marijuana initiatives were approved by voters in four more states.
“The playbook in legalizing marijuana was, first, change its image from a recreational drug to a medicine,” Pollan said. “Once you’ve changed its image, you have a much easier time legalizing it for everybody.”
In Every Vice, an Opportunity
Even as public opinion has changed, law enforcement still aggressively polices the possession of drugs — even legal drugs — by Black people, who, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report released earlier this year, are more than 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people. As of March of this year, 20% of the more than 2 million incarcerated people in the United States were imprisoned because of drug offences. Many of those people have not been convicted of any crime and are held in local jails after the arrest.
Pollan noted that even as the war on drugs had receded, the federal government had introduced other powerful law enforcement measures, including the Patriot Act and the surveillance apparatus associated with the National Security Agency.
If states are the laboratories of democracy, then, as Pollan put it, some of the measures passed Tuesday will set up interesting experiments.
Neighbouring states will watch as Montana and New Jersey create regional cannabis destinations to be envied, imitated or scorned; unlike some other states, Montana and New Jersey do not directly border states where marijuana is fully legal, so they could draw more customers from out of state (though it is illegal to bring marijuana into a state where it is criminal).
And it’s not entirely clear that marijuana is always the fiscal boost its champions say it is, even as cannabis tourism has helped states like California and Colorado. A state assessment of the financial impact of legalization in Montana, for example, showed that the state expected significant revenue — as much as $48 million a year in 2025 — but that its implementation costs would be nearly as high.