Amazon officially lobbies on cannabis

Amazon, which publicly announced its support for the legalization of cannabis at federal level last month for the first time, spent 5 million in the second quarter of 2021 to lobby on this and other issues. The company had never lobbied on cannabis legalization before.

In the US, cannabis and federal lobbying began to accelerate in 2019, when the Democrats took control of the House. At least 22 cannabis-related interests newly registered to lobby in the first half of 2021, double the number that registered to lobby in all of 2020.

Among the companies officially registered to lobby on the subject, we find some of the world's largest cannabis companies, including Canopy Growth or Curaleaf, others who already have a foothold in cannabis without it being their main activity, such as Altria, but also companies from outside the business that would like to take a share of this market, such as Paypal.

Amazon, for its part, recently announced that it would stop testing its employees for cannabis, unless they were in positions under the Department of Transportation, and that its «public policy team will actively support the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021 (MORE Act), federal legislation that would legalize cannabis at the federal level, expunge criminal records and invest in affected communities.».

The MORE Act has been reintroduced to Congress in May, while the adopted the previous version of the law at the end of 2020.

Cannabis reform advocates have largely shifted their energy to Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act (CAOA), announced this month by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senators Cory Booker and Ron Wyden. While both the MORE Act and CAOA end the federal criminalization of cannabis by removing it from the federal Controlled Substances Act, MORE proposes little else in the way of regulation.

Conversely, CAOA is the most comprehensive cannabis reform proposal to date in Congress. Senators also took the unprecedented approach of releasing a discussion draft of their bill, providing specific regulatory details, before drafting final legislation.