Congress has veto power over the capital city’s laws.
Despite touting federal marijuana reform in his State of the Union address last week, President Joe Biden issued a budget plan to Congress that keeps a longstanding provision blocking the city of Washington, D.C., from allowing regulated recreational cannabis sales.
Congress has veto power over the capital city’s laws, and the block has been maintained ever since the district’s voters overwhelmingly approved a legalization ballot question in 2014.
The situation led the D.C. City Council to greatly expand the local medical marijuana industry as a stopgap. Despite the repeated attempts by locals to stand up a functioning adult-use market, the Biden administration is poised to let the tradition of obstructionism continue, Marijuana Moment reported Monday.
A transition for many of the longstanding gray market cannabis retailers in the nation’s capital is underway, but that has also meant market contraction for many.
As of February, only 76 gray market dispensaries had applied for legal status, and only 26 of those had taken further steps toward licensure, according to one media report. That’s down from a gray market that boasted 1,000 to 1,500 businesses at one point, industry insiders previously told Green Market Report.
The Biden budget plan also maintains a prohibition on the Drug Enforcement Administration using federal funds from interfering with state-implemented medical marijuana programs. In addition, it keeps formerly established federal protections for hemp businesses. Combined, these measure indicate that the federal budget overall has not changed much year over year with respect to marijuana policy, according to Marijuana Moment.
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