What happened
On a disappointing day for stock market investors -- one in which a hopeful morning rally turned into another afternoon crash -- marijuana investors are even more pessimistic than most.
By the time trading was over for today, shares of Aurora Cannabis (ACB -2.79%) had lost 2.3% of their value, followed by Curaleaf Holdings (CURLF -2.43%) with a 5.6% loss, and Green Thumb Industries (GTBIF -2.91%) down 7%.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
What's got weed investors bummed out today? It's President Biden, man. Turns out, he may not legalize marijuana after all.
Marijuana legalization, if you recall, was a centerpiece of the Biden-Harris campaign platform in late 2020. But in a poll jointly (heh) conducted by YouGov and The Economist, and reported on today by MarijuanaMoment.net, it turns out that 54% of voters agree the Biden administration has made "little to no progress on cannabis decriminalization" in its first year in office.
And they're not holding their breath waiting for marijuana legalization to happen in 2022, either.
Now what
Despite multiple promises in Congress to advance the cause of cannabis legalization in 2022, any bill the House and Senate pass still has to go to the president's desk for signature -- but voters aren't at all optimistic about what will happen when it gets there.
"58% of respondents," reports MM, say "the president will make little to no progress on marijuana decriminalization" in 2022 -- an even higher number than agreed he did little or nothing in 2021. And they're not happy about that, because also 58% of those polled -- a clear majority -- said that they personally wish the president would legalize cannabis this year.
This is all especially depressing for investors in marijuana stocks. Without legalization, you see, most of these companies are continuing to lose money as they try to navigate an uncertain legal environment. (Green Thumb, but the way, is the happy exception to this rule -- a cannabis company that's got two straight years of profits under its belt.)
Most cannabis companies aren't as lucky, however. Hoping that marijuana legalization would be the thing to turn their companies profitable, they may now need to wait till 2023 to find out if that will happen.
