WaPo | Jeff Sessions hates marijuana. Hates it, with a passion that has animated almost nothing else in his career. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he has said. He even once said about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.”
He says that was a joke, but even so, it still says something about where he’s coming from.
So
if you’re wondering why Sessions has endured the humiliation of being
demeaned and abused by President Trump and stayed on as attorney
general, one big answer is the policy change he announced this week,
that he is rescinding an Obama-era directive that instructed federal
prosecutors not to prioritize prosecuting businesses like dispensaries
in states that had legalized cannabis. Sessions is finally getting the
chance to lock up all those hippies, with their pot-smoking and their
free love and their wah-wah pedals and everything immoral they
represent. He’ll show them.
WaPo | Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he will rescind a Justice Department memorandum
— known as the Cole Memo — that granted protection to state-legal and
regulated marijuana companies. In doing so, Sessions has not only
brushed aside science, logic and the prevailing public opinion, but he
has also contradicted the opinion of the president he serves and his own
party’s governing values.
Sessions’s decision empowers U.S.
attorneys to begin prosecuting an industry that has complied with state
laws and regulations and has, since 2013, been granted an effective
waiver from federal intervention. During this time, the legal marijuana industry has become a multibillion-dollar venture, employing tens of thousands of Americans from coast to coast.
This decision to reignite the drug war comes as little surprise. Sessions once said
that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He has shown a deep ignorance
of the realities of the drug war, which has been ineffective and costly
and has disproportionately affected minority communities. And he has
committed to numerous claims that have been dispelled by science, such
as cannabis’s gateway effect and the idea that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.
