People convicted of possession in Federal Court may not be a random sample of simple users and may in fact have committed more serious crimes that the prosecutor couldn't prove--like convicting Capone of tax evasion. Still that's not the way the system is supposed to work and I approve overall of the change.

I support the policy, but the impact will be very small. There are few standalone federal convictions for marijuana possession.

Simple marijuana possession convictions are very rare today and sentences are pretty short. So, there's some notional value to removing a rarely enforced law from the books, but it would affect few recently convicted people. People who were sentenced a long time ago already paid the direct penalty of incarceration and the secondary costs of being labeled a felon. A long delayed pardon has few costs, but benefits might accrue mostly to politicians.

I can’t answer this because the HOW here is so important. The impacts of rescheduling are going to be fundamentally different than the impacts of federal legalization that (for example) allows commercial cultivation and retail sales, interstate commerce, etc. The likely effects of federal legalization itself will hinge critically on how the legal regime is designed and regulated as these specifics will shape price/availability, potency/product variety, and the functioning of illegal markets.

At minimum, this would make it easier to conduct credible research on the costs and benefits of marijuana consumption, so society could have a more clear picture of the implications of expanded use.

Evidence is still relatively new here but so far evidence on recreational legalization and MML laws suggest legalization has either no effect or may even reduce crime. Although Blacks make up a disproportionate share of marijuana arrests, it is not clear whether passage of such color-blind laws will actually decrease racial disparities in arrests for marijuana. Finally, marijuana has medicinal purposes so it is debatable whether it should be a schedule I drug to begin with.