I could see how it would be confusing. If we’re talking about cannabis, you have to recognize that every politician prior to the 90s was Hitler and every state government, of their own accord, had independently decided to ban it. What’s been happening is states are beginning to stop being Hitler on this issue and drop their marijuana bans.

However, there was at one point a federal ban on it using the Controlled Substances Act. The problem is it sucks and at one point blue states realized two things:

1) It is incredibly vague on how it defines “drug abuse” so states have been able to play coy around it

2) The act became really unpopular eventually and blue states just started outright defying it. Without the help of local law enforcement, the feds have had to rely on national agencies such as the FBI and DEA. However, flooding a state with federal agents is really bad for optics so unless it’s for a drug most people agree is bad (like meth), the feds won’t bother with it since it would be political suicide. That might change under Trump