The freshman representative from South Carolina introduced an Americans for Prosperity-endorsed bill to end federal pot prohibition and says legalization is an issue that unites America—“just like apple pie.”
On the second floor of the Cannon House Office Building, across Independence Avenue from the U.S. Capitol, Representative Nancy Mace is drinking rosé out of a can as her Havanese named Liberty—who is a very good boy, she assures—sits next to her in a leather chair. As the sun sets over The District, Mace talks about why cannabis should be legal.
“There's a million reasons to end federal prohibition and the only place where this is controversial is up here,” says Mace. “It’s an enormously popular idea. America is like: ‘WTF, D.C., why have you not done this yet?’”
In November, the 44-year-old freshman Congresswoman, who represents South Carolina’s coastal swing district spanning Charleston to Hilton Head, introduced the States Reform Act, a bill that would end the federal government’s 85-year prohibition on marijuana. Mace is certainly not the first politician to introduce a cannabis legalization bill, although it’s been impossible to get one passed by both chambers of Congress.
But Mace already has one of the most powerful conservative groups in the world in her corner: Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. And now she has one of the world’s largest companies supporting her bill: Amazon.
In June, the retail giant announced that it would exclude marijuana from most of its employee drug testing and started lobbying to legalize cannabis. Six months later, the company met with Mace and now says it will support her States Reform Act. “They don’t want to sell it,” Mace says, noting that employment is the driving force behind the support. “It opens up the hiring pool by about 10%.” Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, adds: “This bill offers comprehensive reform that speaks to the emergence of a bipartisan consensus to end the federal prohibition of cannabis.”
Philosopher King: Libertarian billionaire Charles Koch and the political advocacy group he founded will spend millions advocating for legalization.
GUERIN BLASK FOR FORBESMace’s bill is just the latest effort to end the federal government’s ban on marijuana, but the first to come from a Republican. The Safe Banking Act, which would give cannabis companies greater access to the financial system and is sponsored by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Ed Perlmutter, both Democrats, has passed the House five times but was nixed from the federal defense spending bill in December. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Cory Booker proposed a bill to legalize marijuana last summer, but it hasn’t been formally introduced yet. Representative Jerry Nadler’s More Act passed the House, yet the Senate still hasn’t picked it up.
Meanwhile, Koch’s political advocacy group Americans For Prosperity is fully behind Mace’s new bill. AFP will spend millions to lobby “to make this the most highly resourced effort in the history of this issue,” says the group’s chief government affairs officer Brent Gardner, to achieve Mace’s vision of legalization: end federal prohibition, institute a low federal excise tax, regulate pot in a similar fashion to alcohol, and allow states to create their own laws. The cannabis industry also adores Mace and her bill, which is pro-business. (She proposes a 3% federal excise tax—compared to Schumer’s 10% tax—which would generate an estimated $3 billion in annual tax revenue by 2030.) Still, her bill is unlikely to become law, and Mace is under no pot-addled delusion that its passage is a sure thing. Her broader goal is to get as many Republicans as possible on board with cannabis reform and show the GOP that legalization is a good campaign issue in 2022 and beyond.
“It’s American, it’s uniting,” Mace says. “There are three things that really bring people together—animals, Britney Spears and cannabis. Those are the three things I've found that have struck a chord with the American people and that can bring people together at the dinner table—just like apple pie.”
And yet for decades the federal government has categorized marijuana as one of the world’s most dangerous and addictive drugs. But 36 states currently allow for some kind of medical use, while 18 states allow anyone over 21 to buy pot. Despite the challenges of running a federally illegal business, Cowen estimates that the United States had $25 billion in legal sales in 2021 and expects the industry will become a $100 billion juggernaut by 2030.
Mace’s States Reform Act would remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act—it’s currently designated a Schedule I drug along with LSD and heroin— and regulate it like alcohol. The federal government would impose a nationwide 21-year age limit for cannabis consumption, with an exception for medical use. The bill would also allow for states to make their own rules and laws around cannabis, including banning sales and use within state borders.
High Priorities: In addition to $3 billion in tax revenue, Mace's bill is intended to open employment opportunities and heal some of the racial inequities from the war on drugs.
ERIC CONNOLLYBoris Jordan, the billionaire chairman of Massachusetts-based Curaleaf, which has 125 dispensaries across 25 states and is expanding to the U.K., Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal, likes Mace’s bill. “It’s much more business-friendly” than Schumer’s proposal, says Jordan. He says the low tax rate and the opening of interstate commerce—currently, marijuana cannot cross legally from one state to another—are two of the best aspects of the bill. “The reason I'm excited about it,” he says, “is because it's the voice of reason in Washington.”
Mace clearly knows how to please—and provoke—people on both sides of the aisle. In many ways, she’s your typical Republican: she loves guns, low taxes and free trade, but hates Dr. Fauci and warns that socialists want to take over America. Similarly, she called on Republicans to “rebuild our party” after the January 6 insurrection and opposed efforts to overturn President Biden’s win. But she also voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney from GOP leadership and voted against forming a bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot.
And she is known for skirmishes with Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom she refers to as “performance artists,” not politicians. In November, after Mace criticized Lauren Boebert, a Republican representative from Colorado, for calling Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota who is Muslim, a terrorist, Greene tweeted that Mace is “the trash of the GOP conference.” Mace returned fire, tweeting a series of emojis—a bat, a turd and a clown—to call Greene bat-shit crazy.
“They want to have Twitter followers,” Mace says, sitting in her office beside a pile of books, including her own, In the Company of Men: A Woman at The Citadel, and The Lords of Discipline, a novel set at the school by South Carolina’s most celebrated author, Pat Conroy. “They want to say the craziest thing to get the TV interviews and then raise a bunch of money, but then they don't do anything with it.”
The Representative from the Palmetto State has, however, softened her tone with Trump. His “policies were phenomenal,” she says, but his “rhetoric” is “an issue.” In response, the former president added Mace to his proverbial enemies list—in November, Trump called for “good and smart America First Republican Patriots” to run against Mace and 11 other Republicans in Congress.
Then again, Nancy Mace has been well-trained for conflict. Born at Fort Bragg to an Army major and a schoolteacher, she became the first woman to graduate from The Citadel’s Corps of Cadets in 1999. After earning a master’s degree in journalism and communications, she started her own PR and marketing firm and then pivoted to politics. In 2015, she worked for Trump’s campaign and eventually became a South Carolina statehouse representative before being elected to Congress in 2020.
Mace’s path to pot was defined by her resilience. In 1994, when Mace was a 16-year-old high school student, she was raped by a classmate. She dropped out of high school on her 17th birthday and started working at a local Waffle House. She was put on prescription medication to deal with her depression and anxiety, but it didn’t help.
![Nancy Mace and father by Paula Illingworth-AP[45]](https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/61ef170ffb3246df619371d7/Nancy-Mace-and-father-by-Paula-Illingworth-AP-45-/0x0.jpg?fit=bounds&format=jpg&width=960)
Soldiering On: The first woman to graduate from the Citadel, Mace credits cannabis with helping her cope with depression after being raped as teenager.
PAULA ILLINGWORTH/AP“It made me want to end it all,” she says.
Then she started smoking cannabis for about a year to help curb her anxiety. “It helped me get through some really difficult times,” says Mace, who quickly adds that no one should self-medicate nor use medical marijuana without a prescription.
Mace’s bill also attempts to heal some of the inequities of America’s war on drugs, which disproportionately affects people of color. She estimates that if her bill were to pass, and some 2,800 federal prisoners incarcerated for non-violent cannabis crimes were released and another 1,100 or so people who get put in prison for similar crimes each year are not incarcerated, the government would save nearly $600 million over five years.
CANNABIS LAWS BY STATE
“This has been a very long, very painful, expensive and harmful federal war,” she says. “And when you look at the statistics, there are great disparities between Black and Brown and white communities. [Ending federal prohibition] would bring more opportunity and parity, and end and cure some of the grievances in the war on drugs.”
That includes who is leading the charge. Cannabis legalization has historically been a progressive issue, but Mace wants to make it a Republican talking point. Kim Rivers, the CEO of Florida-based Trulieve, which has 160 dispensaries across eight states, welcomes Mace’s approach. “Cannabis is not a red or blue issue,” says Rivers. “And cannabis reform has done well consistently in conservative states. It sends a significant message that cannabis is not partisan.”
Mace’s bill is also being touted as a lifeline to farmers who grow cannabis. Randal Meyer, a lobbyist and member of the Cannabis Freedom Alliance, a group that includes AFP, says the bill’s stance on free trade, allowing companies to import and export marijuana, would be a boon for U.S. growers.
“American cannabis is the most valuable cannabis in the world,” says Meyer. “We're essentially sitting on a cash crop that we don't export to people who are willing to pay four or five times what American consumers would pay for the same quantity.”
Despite all of this momentum, Mace knows the States Reform Act is unlikely to go forward before the midterm elections, but her goal is to show a “proof of concept” that there are enough votes on the Republican side to get meaningful reform across the finish line in Congress.
When asked what it means that cannabis is now more popular than President Trump in red states—74% of Mississippians, for example, voted for the state’s medical marijuana ballot initiative while nearly 58% of Mississippians voted for Trump—she says it’s a signal to Republicans that they need to get on board with legalization.
“It means that if you don't do it, you're full of shit,” Mace says. “There's no reason not to do this. And if you are anti-marijuana, this is not forcing you to do it. It's not forcing your state to legalize it. But if it is legal in your state, then we're going to tax it and regulate it.”
I am a staff writer on the vices beat, covering cannabis, gambling and more. I believe in the many virtues of vices. Previously at Forbes, I covered the world’s richest people as a membe
