“Legalizing and regulating cannabis provides for more job opportunities, greater tax revenues, and safe access to high quality products at increasingly affordable prices,” NORML’s State Policy Manager Jax James said. “This economic data shows once again why legalization is a preferable policy option over criminal prohibition.”
“These totals affirm that targeting marijuana-related growing operations still remains a DEA priority, even at a time when most Americans have made it clear that they want cannabis policies to head in a very different direction.”
“We believe that the adoption of these rules may further stonewall efforts to advance our scientific understanding of cannabis by unduly expanding the DEA’s authority and control over decisions that ought to be left up to health experts and scientists.”
A federal court has ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration to respond to a lawsuit charging the agency with failing to move forward with a 2016 policy to expand the total number of federally licensed marijuana cultivators.
Newly appointed US Attorney General William Barr is being urged to review more than two-dozen pending applications for federal marijuana grow licenses which have languished before the agency for over two years.
Seizures of indoor and outdoor cannabis crops in the United States fell nearly 40 percent between the years 2016 and 2017, according to annual data compiled by the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Republican Gov. Phil Scott publicly announced at a news conference that he intends to sign legislation into law legalizing the use and cultivation of personal use quantities of marijuana by adults. I know there are diverse opinions … as to whether we should move forward,” he said. “But I still firmly believe that what you do in your own home should be your business, as long as it doesn’t affect someone else.”
According to the DEA’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Statistical Report, agents and cooperating agencies confiscated more than 5.3 million marijuana plants nationwide in 2016. The total is a 20 percent increase over the agency’s 2015 seizure totals and is the most plants seized by the DEA since 2011, when law enforcement confiscated more than 6.7 million plants.