Former president Donald Trump on Sunday confirmed his support for marijuana legalization. In a post on Truth Social, the Republican nominee explicitly endorsed Florida’s legalization amendment. He also promised to “unlock the medical uses of marijuana [as] a Schedule 3 drug,” and supported devolving marijuana policy to the states.
Trump’s announcement follows his earlier apparent endorsement of Florida’s Amendment 3 and echoes his 2018 position on the issue. Kamala Harris, meantime, has been characteristically quiet on the issue, but in a Monday morning op-ed, a marijuana-reform advocate who met with the vice president claimed that she supports legalization.
Trump’s capitulation marks the first time that both major party presidential candidates support liberalizing marijuana policy. The former president’s move has an obvious logic: Why not abandon a position that puts you at odds with 70 percent of Americans?
But this political strategy, no matter how savvy, does not bode well for the United States. That both parties are now enticing voters with vices, including but not limited to marijuana, reflects a degradation of our self-governing republic.
Trump’s stated reason for supporting legalization—to “end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use”—mirrors that of many Democrats. But that doesn’t make it any more fact-based. Almost no one is incarcerated for marijuana possession, and while pot arrests declined following legalization, overall arrests have risen, reflecting in part police substitution of other forms of pretextual enforcement.
The real reasons why politicians support marijuana legalization are simpler. People like pot, and they don’t like being told what to do. And in a democratic republic, this is a rightfully powerful set of arguments. A free society ought to have a rebuttable presumption that people can do what they please so long as it doesn’t harm others.
But for over a century, drugs and related vices, such as gambling and pornography, have rebutted that presumption. This is because they are individually and socially harmful, and, pivotally, because they are addictive. Their use, to some, is so compulsory that they can be said to constrain users’ liberty—and to merit a freedom-loving government’s intervention.
Marijuana matches each criterion. Pot is individually harmful; it has been linked to lung cancer, heart disease, and schizophrenia. It is socially harmful, yielding car crashes, workplace accidents, and unpleasant odors in public. And it is addictive; about a quarter of regular users meet the clinical criteria for a “cannabis use disorder,” characterized by continued use despite harms to yourself or others. Nearly half of users experience withdrawal.
The control of marijuana—the prohibition on its sale or prescription except in limited circumstances—follows from these facts. This same pattern of facts justifies the control of other drugs and of the associated vices. Why? Because addiction is a tyranny, and a free, self-governing people cannot sustain commerce in addictive things. Controlling vice is a definitive feature of self-governance.
That was the idea, anyway. Today, the virtue of sobriety—meaning self-control, not necessarily tee-totaling—is increasingly questioned. Americans instead see indulgence as unproblematic, regardless of the vice.
As a result, business is booming. More than 17 million Americans now smoke marijuana daily or near daily. Shady clinics advertise everything from testosterone to ketamine on social media, few questions asked. Performers on OnlyFans make more in a year than an entire NBA roster. You can buy magic mushrooms mere blocks from the White House.
Which is why the new political consensus on marijuana matters. It assumes that voters can be won with promises of liberalized vice—that for them, a relevant political good is the ability to get stoned.
In a sense, it is unsurprising that Donald Trump—the Playboy president, whose politics Ross Douthat once argued reflect Hugh Hefner’s—would be the Republican politician to make this gesture. But even Trump has the old school instinct to feel guilty about it. This is why the criminal-justice pretext matters: nobody wants to admit that legalization is mostly about getting votes by enabling people’s base impulses.
But don’t be fooled: appealing to those impulses is precisely the point. It also brings us further down a slippery slope. As politicians increasingly treat Americans as incapable of self-governance, the flood gates of vice politics—of leveraging people’s passions for political gain—open wider. It is hard to imagine how they will be closed again.
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