This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 7th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President has pledged to pardon everyone federally convicted of simple possession of cannabis, urged governors to do the same with respect to state laws,

and ordered a review of the classification of cannabis under the Federal Controlled Substances Act.

It's hard to overstate just how long this has been in coming.

Cato's Trevor Burris discusses the law, politics, and history of this move.

There are a number of components here and I want to take each of them in turn.

First is the pardons. Do you have a sense of how large that is in terms of numbers?

Because these are people who have been federally convicted of simple possession, which, as far as I could tell, doesn't

sound like very many people.

Yeah, it's a pretty low number, but I mean, let's not, let's be honest, this is a big deal,

like symbolically, if nothing else. but the number itself very very few people are

convicted under federal law of just possession most people who are convicted of

possession of any drug are convicted under state law to get convicted under federal law you'd have to be doing it in like a

a national park or maybe in the District of Columbia where the federal law controls but so the very

very few I think the numbers about

6700 which would be one of the largest mass partners in history but none of

these people are currently in prison it seems like none of them are so they'll get their record expunged which of course is great.

Of course that's not nothing that could impact people's employment prospects and that sort of thing.

Oh yeah you know it's a big deal for those people and I'm very happy for them.

They should never have had this conviction in the first place. We should never have prohibited marijuana in the first place.

So the size there now doesn't apply to the dealers, which is about 2,700 people.

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