There’s a scary truth behind all these new skills we’ve learned and hobbies we’ve taken up this year, and all this free time we’ve had to binge-watch every show on every streaming service under the sun.
The ugly truth is that we’re just staving off an economic crash caused by the isolation we’ve been forced to endure over the course of this pandemic. Restaurants, sports arenas, and concert halls have been destroyed by government rules and regulations restricting our plans to gather, and, with evictions allowed to resume at the end of the year as a federal moratorium expires, an economic catastrophe awaits.
Our nation could very fall into a massive recession, if not a full-on depression, lest we are gifted some new economic boom to the likes of the Gold Rush over 170 years ago.
And like some miracle handed down from the gods, the House of Representatives is considering a bill that could do just that.
This week the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on a bill that would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act and require federal courts to expunge many prior marijuana offenses. It will be the first time the full House will vote on ending the federal prohibition of cannabis.
Morgan Fox with the National Cannabis Industry Association says House passage would “send a really strong message to not only the rest of Congress, but to a lot of other states that the time to end prohibition has come.”
The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act (MORE Act), introduced by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.), would eliminate conflict between state and federal law and allow states to set their own marijuana policies.
“We don’t need to have one size fits all. We just need to get rid of prohibition and then let the states do what the states are doing. It’s essentially what the states have done already. They haven’t waited for the federal government, which is why we have a lot of these discrepancies and challenges,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D., Ore.), who has long pushed for marijuana legalization.
The economic impact of marijuana has been monumental in the 30-some states where some form of the plant has been made legal or decriminalized. This could just be what the nation needs to get back on its feet after the COVID-19 crisis.
