Lex Mitior and the Politics of Cannabis Relief: Risk, Race, and Retroactive Justice

Can the United States undo its punitive drug past as cannabis laws liberalize? Drawing on lex mitior , I develop Conditional Retroactive Justice Theory to explain when citizens support reversing the continuing consequences of prior cannabis enforcement after legal change. Using data from a national probability-based survey ( N = 1,009) and survey-weighted models with state-clustered jackknife standard errors, I find that perceived public-safety risk is strongly associated with lower support for cannabis relief. Black respondents report greater support than White respondents, and the negative risk association is significantly weaker among Black respondents. Respondents who came of age during the medical- and recreational-legalization eras report greater support than those who came of age during the War on Drugs, whereas the primary current state-policy indicators are not statistically significant. Findings indicate that support for retroactive relief does not follow automatically from legalization but varies with perceived risk, racial identity, and formative policy environments.