US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

What bothers me is that all these things are only happening because it's an election year and the incumbent doesn't have great polling numbers.

Well, politicians doing what people want in order to get reelected is kinda the point of democracy.

{{Citation needed}}

There's no need to talk down to me.

My point was that they could be doing what people want for the entire duration of their term, rather than in the last few months. To use an analogy, it's like a student getting bad grades all year and then doing a bunch of extra credit assignments when they're worried about failing the class.

Your chief complaint is not new, it's nearly as old as democracy itself.

Different forms of democracy have various trade-offs, what your describing is the trade-off of representative democracy.

They only dangle the carrot when they need something, ie reelection.

You obviously haven’t been paying attention as these rule making processes started literally years ago that’s how much red tape there is to get through.

And even if what you are saying was true (it isn’t) isn’t that the entire argument for democracy in the first place? “Politicians make good policy because they want to get re-elected” is how we should hope things work.

Is also partly the fault of voters for being so darn susceptible to recency bias. Do a lot of good at the start and then reach a lull and everyone's gonna hate. Timing can and has cost elections.

Bunch of Holden Caulfields imo who just refuse to 'vote for phonies' and still haven't grown uo

This is misinformation.

Biden directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to reexamine the scheduling of marijuana in October 2022.

Nearly a year later in August 2023, the HHS wrote to the DEA recommending that marijuana be reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule III.

A month ago, the DEA was still "writing [their] recommendation" on what they should reclassify marijuana to (if any change was to happen).

And just now, April 2024, the DEA agreed with HHS (as reported by AP, DEA hasn't confirmed this yet).

So no, this isn't "just happening" now, this has been going on for years.

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-30/hhs-calls... [3]: https://twitter.com/DEAHQ/status/1772987478548287891

It started in October 2022 (a month before midterms), if anything a skeptic would say that's more confirmation timing is suspect.

Yeah, but based on the guiding principle of democracy (govt by the will of the people), you'd hope to see them do that immediately instead of waiting years and years to do it when it is most strategically advantageous. I know politics is gamey like that by nature, but it sucks to see. The lag time between a policy becoming overwhelmingly popular and it actually being implemented is often long enough to radically alter the course of millions of peoples' lives.

Yeah, if only every year were election year....

They've been working on this for two years, it was announced they'd do it in 2022.

While this is true, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At some point, we decided as a nation to only care about politics during election years. Participation rates for local elections is near an all time low. If people were more involved with the process, I would imagine that we would see more movement in Congress as a reaction to the will of the people.

If doing it at the end of his term gets him more votes than the beginning, that means the voters want to see it done towards the end.