Congress Will Continue to Block Washington D.C.’s Ability to Regulate or Sell Legal Weed

Despite Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions’ big talk about walls, shuttered health clinics, and legal weed crackdowns, the first federal budget of 45’s term contained little to no funding for the border wall or medical marijuana shutdowns, and a less than 1% cut to Planned Parenthood’s funding. In general the new budget is a win for reason and common sense – that is, unless you’re a cannabis consumer in Washington D.C.

In the three years since voters in Washington D.C. passed Initiative 71 to legalize recreational cannabis, Congress has used the federal budget to block the District’s ability to tax, regulate or create an industry for legal weed. Now, According to MassRoots, the new budget has doubled down on the anti-weed action and added a new piece of nomenclature that seals up an existing loophole that could have allowed D.C. City Council to use reserve funds to set up a legal weed industry.

In the years since D.C.’s 2014 legalization, the D.C. budget riders have blocked City Council from using funds from the current year to create a cannabis marketplace, but this year, a new sentence in the budget drops the annual specificity and bars the District from using…