Barney Frank, a former Congressman who was the author of the 1972 Mass. marijuana bill, told four members of the Cannabis Control Commission this week, “I told you so.”
Frank, who used a cane on Wednesday, unfolded a piece of paper and said to the members at a public hearing on proposed industry regulations, “You can see I am getting old, but there is one thing that I have found improves with age and that is the pleasure of being able to say, ‘I told you so. And it does not require pills before, during or after you do it.”
“It’s clear that progress is being made” at the federal level, Frank said. According to Frank, legislation removing restrictions on financial institutions from doing business with cannabis companies “has a very good chance to become law soon” because the amount of cash used in the industry creates public safety concerns.
“We talk a lot about the divisions, the anger, generational problems. I think an appropriate set of regulations that make it possible for adults responsibly to use marijuana for any purpose they choose, that that will go an important way towards healing one of the major divisions we have,” Frank said.
He added, “The fundamental inconsistency between the way marijuana is regulated and the way alcohol is regulated and cigarettes is one of the causes, I think, of the anger and distrust for the political system, so we have a chance here to kind of reconcile people in our society.”
Frank retired from Congress in 2013.
