Marijuana stocks opened higher on Monday -- and granted, with stock markets glowing green across the board, it looks like pretty much everything opened higher. But for Canopy Growth (NASDAQ: CGC), Tilray (NASDAQ: TLRY), and Aurora Cannabis (NASDAQ: ACB) -- up 7.9%, 7.5%, and 6.7%, respectively, as of 1 p.m. ET -- there was actually a bit of industry-specific optimism backing up their rally.

On Friday, Lester Black, a journalist who has covered the cannabis sector for many years, predicted in a column on the data-centric news site FiveThirtyEight that marijuana might very well be decriminalized "by the end of [President Biden's] current term in office."

As you can imagine, this prediction was music to marijuana investors' ears -- maybe not immediately, in the middle of Friday's stock market sell-off -- but certainly on Monday as the market began to stabilize. As Black explained, President Biden's order for the U.S. government to "expeditiously" review the case for rescheduling marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a less restrictive level is something less than a move for full-scale legalization -- but also "more than just an empty gesture." In fact, he said, it has "triggered a process that could end federal pot prohibition as we know it." 

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Source Fool.com