We, the Delaware Democratic Socialists of America, fully and wholeheartedly support Delaware’s House Bill 1 and House Bill 2 legislation, which will respectively legalize cannabis in Delaware and make it a taxed, regulated industry like any other.
Cannabis prohibition in Delaware has proven immensely costly in terms of dollars, human potential and time better served focusing on actual crimes, and it has been especially costly to Delaware’s Black and brown communities. We commend state Rep. Ed Osienski for his leadership on this issue for a number of years, and we look forward to working alongside him and many other hardworking legislators in Dover, including all of our members and endorsed non-members in the General Assembly, who have persisted in this hard work of change despite Gov. John Carney’s steadfast opposition. We hope that Carney will “wake up and smell the flowers,” realize that legal cannabis is an inevitability in Delaware and throughout the country, and have a change of heart from his current prohibitionist stance. However, failing that, we fully hope and expect our General Assembly to have the courage to override his veto pen.
Cannabis is a drug considerably less harmful than the legal and regulated alcohol, a drug whose prohibition has been widely regarded as a failure and a shameful chapter in our nation’s history. In fact, after the repeal of alcohol prohibition, former Prohibition agents looking for new targets concocted racist myths about marijuana use among Mexican farm workers, even though the plant and its extracts had been available in pharmacies throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Study after study has shown cannabis to be an effective medicine for many ailments and more benign as a recreational drug than perfectly legal substances such as tobacco.
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Legalizing cannabis through HB1 — but especially with the provisions in HB2 that provide for social justice, racial justice, and marketplace competitiveness issues — is critical. While Delaware has taken important steps in decriminalizing cannabis and has legalized its medical use for a limited number of conditions, its sale for recreational purposes remains a crime and its possession for recreational use remains a civil violation. The illegality of recreational possession and sales permits law enforcement to harass Black and Brown people.
Furthermore, Delaware’s medical cannabis patients pay the highest prices in the nation and face chronic shortages due to the anti-competitive nature of our state’s market, which allows for only a small handful of distribution licenses in the entire state. HB 2 allows for 30 such licenses and ensures that licenses for distribution and cultivation, as well as tax revenue, will go to the same communities which have been marginalized by cannabis prohibition. We recognize that no legislation is perfect and that there are provisions we would like, such as public consumption lounges, that are not included in HB1 or HB2.
We urge all of our state legislators as well as the governor to put cannabis prohibition into the “ash heap” of Delaware history and take these significant steps forward.
Phillip Bannowsky and Jonathan Tate are co-chairs of the Delaware Democratic Socialists of America.
