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Things are changing fast over in the Trump camp, and no one he’s nominating for a cabinet position is a sure thing (goodbye Matt Gaetz) but things are starting to settle down and no one else is causing as much hoopla as the Attorney General pick, so we might as well see what they think about marijuana.
Unfortunately, after things looking up with RFK and Gaetz both being pro-legalization, everyone else is pretty staunchly against any major changes. Both Trump’s pick for the head of the CDC (Representative Dave Weldon from Florida) and the leader of the FDA (surgeon Marty Makary) believe marijuana is a gateway drug. Rep. Weldon has gone so far to say that it’s “virtually lunacy” to think that cannabis has medical value. “I don’t, in my clinical experience, recall ever seeing a medical indication for marijuana.”
As for Makary, in September he said “people think marijuana today is the marijuana of hippies and that it’s entirely safe–but marijuana today is roughly 20 times more potent.” So, some pretty typical Republican talking points. They may not be wrong, but they also are only presenting a portion of the story.
Then, we have Matt Gaetz’s replacement pick, Pam Bondi, the former Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2019. While there, she defended the state’s ban on smoking marijuana from their medical availability, which was rejected by a judge. In 2014, she was not in favor of the medical marijuana vote that went in front of Floridians, saying it “would make Florida one of the most lenient medical-marijuana states.” However, when voters approved the effort, she didn’t go out of her way to block it from becoming legal, at the very least.
Under Trump’s guiding thumb, it’s unclear how active she’ll be against marijuana, but it seems evident that she won’t go out of her way to aide in the legalization of the plant.
Finally, Dr. Oz is being nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and he has a very supportive view towards medical marijuana. “We ought to completely change our policy on marijuana. It absolutely works,” he said in 2020. If marijuana does move to Schedule III, he would be in line to help promote the use of marijuana in treating illnesses.
