Everyone Thinks Legal Weed is Inevitable. Everyone Is Wrong.

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In next November’s elections, residents of Massachusetts will have the opportunity to do something strange and unprecedented: re-ban marijuana. The state legalized recreational pot in 2016. But last week, organizers submitted the requisite 74,000 signatures to place on the ballot an initiative that would end the legal sale of the drug without reimposing penalties for mere possession.

Few people are optimistic about the passage of the Massachusetts initiative, though the state’s recent, unexpected defeat of psychedelic legalization gives some reason to doubt a foregone conclusion. But the mere fact that repeal is under consideration at all must be a surprise to the millions of Americans who have long taken the nationwide legalization of marijuana as an eventual historical necessity. It’s not just Massachusetts, either: across the country, signs have emerged that the seeming inevitability of full federal legalization may not be so inevitable after all.

Massachusetts isn’t the only state where supporters are trying to get repeal on the ballot. There’s also an active effort in Maine. In 2026, Idaho voters will be asked whether they want to prohibit legalizing marijuana by ballot initiative, making the state’s prohibition even stronger. In the 2024 elections, voters in Florida and North and South Dakota shot down legalization ballot initiatives (North Dakota for the third time).

And then there’s the other bombshell: in ending last month’s government shutdown, Congress also quietly re-banned a type of marijuana that had been legal nationwide for almost a decade.

That saga started with the 2018 Farm Bill, which tried to legalize hemp, a form of the cannabis sativa plant grown primarily for its fibers and other industrial applications. The relevant difference between hemp and regular marijuana is the concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive molecule in pot—hemp is supposed to have almost none. To avoid accidental federal legalization, the law permitted growing hemp only with an extremely low concentration of delta-9 THC, the most common isomer of THC.

Savvy growers soon found workarounds. These included, among other strategies, growing hemp plants with high concentrations of delta-8 and delta-10 THC, which are essentially identical in effect to delta-9. The result: legal weed stores across the two dozen states where pot remains illegal. (I’ve seen them in Chattanooga, Charleston, and Pittsburgh.) Intoxicating hemp-derived products were worth nearly $3 billion as of 2023.

The new provision—which bans hemp with high levels of all kinds of THC, not just delta-9—passed by a three-to-one margin against a last-minute effort by Senator Rand Paul to torpedo it, and with the backing of 39 state attorneys general, Democrat and Republican. Which is what’s so remarkable about the vote: Congress passed, on a bipartisan basis, a new nationwide ban that significantly reduced the availability of a product that is, for all intents and purposes, marijuana. When the law takes effect next year, Americans will, for the first time since federal prohibition in 1937, have less access to pot than they used to.

Whether you favor or oppose legalization, that’s a startling change, given the broader context of the push to relax marijuana laws. Since California legalized “medical” marijuana in 1996, the drumbeat for liberalization has been relentless. Pot is now legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia; 15 more states have “medical” programs. Public support for legalization, which stood at about 25 percent from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, began rising after California’s medical law passed. A majority first supported legalization in 2011; in 2023, the figure peaked at 70 percent, including a majority of Republicans.

But even public sentiment is shifting. Support for legalization has dipped—about a six-point decline between 2023 and 2025, according to Gallup. But that represents a significant drop-off among Republicans, a majority of whom oppose legalization for the first time since 2016. 

All this is a remarkable departure from a few years ago, when nationwide legalization seemed inevitable. Senator Cory Booker, explaining his push for federal legalization in 2017, said that the cause was “on the right side of history.” “The train has left the station,” an attorney with the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance could comfortably say in 2019. “Americans of all political affiliations and almost all demographics support marijuana legalization.” Of the 24 states where pot is legal, 14 saw legalization come into effect between 2020 and 2023.

It’s hard to disconnect this phenomenon from the sense of liberal cultural supremacy that ruled during the second Obama administration and—in a more extreme form—through the first Trump administration into the early years of Biden’s presidency. Legalizing marijuana was not merely about getting access to a euphoria-inducing substance. It was about correcting the benighted error of prohibition, an atavistic expression of prejudice that needed to be stamped out. It’s not an accident that works like The New Jim Crow inaccurately blame the alleged evils of mass incarceration on marijuana prohibition specifically.

Legalization was a part of—and in many cases central to—not only criminal justice reform but also the whole program of moral uplift that would later be classified as “wokeness.” Could the breaking of the woke fever turn the tide on legalization?

A reasonable reader might, at this point, be skeptical. Yes, of course, legal pot has taken some losses in recent years. But the decline in public support is small, and legalization is still a two-to-one issue. Does it really matter that marijuana is losing its mythic status? Is this even worth talking about?

These arguments aren’t without merit. But I think public support for legalization is much softer than advocates like to admit. And if a few blows reveal that marijuana legalization isn’t mandated by history, that support could start rapidly to reverse.

One of the interesting things about marijuana itself—as opposed to legalization of it—is how unpopular the drug is. About half of Americans drink alcohol, compared with only about 15 percent who smoke marijuana. Over the period of recreational legalization, we’ve gone from no Americans having access to recreational weed to a majority having it. Yet in the same period, the share of the population that self-identifies as marijuana smokers has risen by only 8 percentage points.

Yes, liberalization has been associated with startling increases in the amount of marijuana consumed. But unlike with alcohol, the distribution of marijuana consumption is largely bimodal: either people smoke a lot, or they don’t smoke at all. Which means that a much smaller proportion of the population is personally invested in preserving legalization compared with what we’d see in the (extremely unlikely) event of an effort to reinstate alcohol prohibition.

Say a third of Americans oppose legalization, and another 15 percent strongly favor it because they smoke. What about the remaining roughly 50 percent? They’re nominally pro-legalization. But dig into the data, and the picture gets more complex.

When given a choice among policies, for example, voters have more nuanced views than full recreational legalization. In a 2024 Pew poll, support for recreational legalization is about 15 points lower than in other polls. In a 2022 Emerson poll (commissioned by anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana), just 38 percent supported legalizing “production, recreational use and sales, like in stores;” 18 percent wanted mere possession decriminalization, and 30 percent wanted just medical.

There’s also discomfort with marijuana’s effects. Slim majorities of Americans now say pot negatively affects society and its users. That’s reflected in the increasingly hostile coverage legalization is receiving in outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic. Both phenomena are propelled by highly salient downsides, especially the pervasive smell of smoke in big cities and the horrifying effects of today’s highly potent pot on kids’ mental health. While voters supported legalization in states like California, those same jurisdictions are often plagued by “marijuana NIMBYism,” with sale prohibited in three-quarters of the Golden State. People often favor legal pot in theory, but they don’t want it in their backyards.

In short: the middle 50 percent of legalization supporters may just be there because they felt like legalization was inevitable. Their support may be more alterable than everyone thinks.

After all, shorn of its association with the “right side of history,” marijuana is just another harmful product. And we ban harmful products all the time.

In a recent report for the Manhattan Institute, Carnegie Mellon’s Jonathan Caulkins dispels some prohibition myths—not just of drugs or alcohol, but of any of the myriad other products that are prohibited or permitted. As Caulkins explains, we don’t just prohibit hard drugs; we prohibit things like animals, fireworks, and raw milk. Treating prohibition as a great moral evil may be persuasive in the case of marijuana, but it sounds pretty silly when you’re talking about, say, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing—though the market for the latter is worth $15 billion to $36 billion per year.

Marijuana prohibition is obviously not precisely the same as IUU fishing prohibition. The criminal justice consequences of the former are probably more significant and more likely to be unjust—though, as I argued recently, legalization does surprisingly little to alleviate these problems. The point is that marijuana prohibition is not some unusual policy—it’s another example of something we do all the time.

It’s the most normal thing in the world for governments to ban addictive products that harm their citizens. As American culture returns to normalcy in some other ways, is it so hard to imagine that normalcy will return here, too?

Photo by Stephanie Keith 100584/Getty Images