Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “It’s basically a way to try to deal with a law that’s just antiquated. The federal law is an absolute prohibition. It treats marijuana as a Schedule I drug, which is the same as heroin and cocaine, and says it has no research use, it has no medical use. Which frankly, we’d like to be able to do more research around it, and we have a lot of evidence starting to grow that there are medical uses for marijuana.

“And besides, folks in Massachusetts — just like folks in Colorado — got together and said, ‘Here’s how we want to treat marijuana in Massachusetts.’ And now that that’s the case, we think the federal government just ought to back off.”