The place There’s Smoke: The Biden Administration’s hardline strategy to prior hashish use stays excessive.
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To work within the government department, federal legislation supersedes state legislation on the subject of smoking pot.
Potential White Home interns shouldn’t plan on having any enjoyable. For these making use of to President Joe Biden’s White Home intern program for the autumn, prior hashish use—even in a state the place it’s authorized—may very well be a disqualifier.
Beneath the eligibility necessities, printed this week in a frequently-asked-questions page on the White Home intern program web site, a candidate who makes it via the applying course of should fill out what’s often known as Normal Kind 86 to see in the event that they meet safety necessities. Among the many components that may negatively have an effect on an applicant’s eligibility are a connection to a international authorities, a prison report, unpaid taxes and money owed and prior drug use—“together with marijuana, no matter whether or not the marijuana use was permitted underneath state legislation.”
This could come as no shock—this isn’t a brand new coverage for the Biden White Home. Again in March 2021, The Daily Beast broke a story about how a handful of Biden Administration staffers have been fired for marijuana use. (Then-White Home press secretary Jen Psaki later confirmed that five staffers were terminated.)
The message was clear: Within the government department of presidency, federal legislation supersedes state legislation and marijuana remains to be a banned substance. After the weed-related firings, Politico referred to President Biden’s strikes as being the “Identical Outdated Joe.” When he was a Senator, Biden helped usher within the 1994 crime invoice, the overly punitive legislation that created obligatory minimal sentencing for drug convictions.
The White Home didn’t reply to a request for remark. Marijuana Moment first reported the main points of state-sanctioned hashish use nonetheless being an impediment for the White Home intern program.
Whereas Biden stays against hashish legalization, on the marketing campaign path in 2020, he did recommend that he supported decriminalization. Final yr, Jen Psaki instructed reporters that Biden helps a state’s proper to legalize leisure marijuana however hasn’t modified his thoughts about federal legalization. Now that 37 states have some type of authorized gross sales and nearly all of People assist legalization, a coverage like this appears “ridiculous,” says Weldon Angelos, a marijuana legislation reform activist who visited the White Home in April. “That’s horrible they’re nonetheless utilizing that criterion and it’s hypocritical to what Biden stated on the marketing campaign path,” he says.
In April, Angelos, who based the nonprofit the Weldon Challenge that seeks to get individuals out of jail, met with President Biden’s senior advisors to debate granting clemency to people who find themselves serving time for non-violent federal marijuana offenses. There are roughly 2,700 federal hashish prisoners and Angelos says Biden’s workforce assured him that “that is going to occur.”
Angelos has good causes to place confidence in the Oval Workplace. In 2016, President Obama granted Angelos—who was serving 55 years for promoting about $1,000 value of weed to an informant—a decreased sentence after 13 years of jail time. Then in 2020, President Trump gave him a full pardon.
Angelos then teamed up with political advocacy group People For Prosperity (based by billionaire Charles Koch), and different pro-legalization organizations to type the Hashish Freedom Alliance, whose members at the moment are lobbying Congress to raise America’s federal marijuana ban.
“[The policy] doesn’t make sense,” Angelos says. “In states the place it’s authorized, it’s no totally different than alcohol.”
Prior marijuana use doesn’t all the time get in the best way of employment on the White Home—so long as you might have one of many prime two jobs. Presidents Barack Obama and Invoice Clinton admitted to lighting up of their youth, as did Vice President Kamala Harris.
However in 2017, Alyssa Mastromonaco, who served as President Obama’s Deputy Chief of Workers, chronicled her shut name with unemployment after admitting to the FBI that she smoked weed more than 500 times.
“That evening I went dwelling and flushed all of the pot I had stashed in my underwear drawer,” she wrote in Vice. “Although my utilization peaked effectively after school, pot had been a pal for a really very long time.”
The feds determined that Mastromonaco wasn’t a safety threat and she or he stored her job, though she did get drug examined repeatedly all through her tenure within the Obama Administration. “I used to be very fortunate to have the ability to maintain my job on the White Home,” Mastromonaco recalled. “Everybody ought to get the identical likelihood that I did.”
