On the second floor of the Cannon House Office Building, across Independence Avenue from the U. S. Capitol, Representative Nancy Mace is drinking rosé out of a can as her Havanese named Liberty—who is a very good boy, she assures—sits next to her in a leather chair. As the sun sets over The District, Mace talks about why cannabis should be legal.“There’s a million reasons to end federal prohibition and the only place where this is controversial is up here,” says Mace. “It’s an enormously popular idea. America is like: ‘WTF, D. C., why have you not done this yet?’”In November, the 44-year-old freshman Congresswoman, who represents South Carolina’s coastal swing district spanning Charleston to Hilton Head, introduced the States Reform Act, a bill that would end the federal government’s 85-year prohibition on marijuana. Mace is certainly not the first politician to introduce a cannabis legalization bill, although it’s been impossible to get one passed by both chambers of Congress. But Mace already has one of the most powerful people in the world in her corner: Charles Koch. And now she has one of the world’s largest companies supporting her bill: Amazon. In June, the retail giant announced that it would exclude marijuana from most its employee drug testing and started lobbying to legalize cannabis. Six months later, the company met with Mace and now says it will support her States Reform Act. “They don’t want to sell it,” Mace says, noting that employment is the driving force behind the support. “It opens up the hiring pool by about 10%.” Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, adds: “This bill offers comprehensive reform that speaks to the emergence of a bipartisan consensus to end the federal prohibition of cannabis.”Mace’s bill is just the latest effort to end the federal government’s ban on marijuana, but the first to come from a Republican. The Safe Banking Act, which would give cannabis companies greater access to the financial system and is sponsored by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Ed Perlmutter, both Democrats, has passed the House five times but was nixed from the federal defense spending bill in December. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Cory Booker proposed a bill to legalize marijuana last summer, but it hasn’t been formally introduced yet. Representative Jerry Nadler’s More Act passed the House, yet the Senate still hasn’t picked it up. Meanwhile, Koch’s political advocacy group Americans For Prosperity is fully behind Mace’s new bill. AFP will spend millions to lobby “to make this the most highly resourced effort in the history of this issue,” says the group’s chief government affairs officer Brent Gardner, to achieve Mace’s vision of legalization: end federal prohibition, institute a low federal excise tax, regulate pot in a similar fashion to alcohol, and allow states to create their own laws.
All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2022/01/25/republican-congresswoman-nancy-mace-is-on-a-mission-to-legalize-cannabis-and-amazon-just-got-behindher/
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