Jeff Sessions’ Coming War on Legal Marijuana

Jeff Sessions’ Coming War on Legal Marijuana
Last week, Trump names Senator Jeff Sessions as his AG pick and this a VERY alarming pick to say the least. This guy is 100% anti-pot. His words on the matter are downright terrifying.

By nominating Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III for attorney general, President-elect Donald J. Trump is about to put into the nation’s top law enforcement job a man with a long and antagonistic attitude toward marijuana. As a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions said he thought the KKK "were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

Now that was back in the 80's and times are different you might be saying. Well Sessions didn't get the memo. Just this past April he said the following:

In April, he said, “Good people don't smoke marijuana,” and that it was a "very real danger" that is “not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.” Sessions, who turns 70 on Christmas Eve, has called marijuana reform a "tragic mistake" and criticized FBI Director James Comey and Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch for not vigorously enforcing a the federal prohibition that President Obama has called “untenable over the long term.” In a floor speech earlier this year, Senator Sessions said: "You can’t have the President of the United States of America talking about marijuana like it is no different than taking a drink… It is different….It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal.”

Not very inspiring quotes are they? Granted Sessions hasn't shared his plans for marijuana enforcement yet, but his history doesn't put me at ease and Trump doesn't look like he'll be much of a check on him.

But Trump's exact views on the issue remain elusive and mixed at best. At the annual conservative CPAC gathering in February 2015, then-candidate Trump expressed support for medical marijuana, but drew the line at recreational adult use: “I say it's bad," he said, in answering a question about Colorado’s recreational marijuana law. "Medical marijuana is another thing, but I think [recreational marijuana is] bad. And I feel strongly about that." When the moderator, FOX News’s Sean Hannity, pressed Trump on the states’ rights aspect, Trump replied, "If they vote for it, they vote for it. But they've got a lot of problems going on right now in Colorado. Some big problems. But I think medical marijuana, 100 percent.”

Man I hope the State's rights issue really hits home on Trump and he comes around for this one because Congress doesn't look like they'll be much help either.

And so far, Congress has shown no interest in trying to stop the Sessions nomination, at least on this issue. Even members who are in favor of protecting states from federal interference on the marijuana issue have said they support Sessions’ confirmation as attorney general: “I strongly support Jeff Sessions as Attorney General,” said Representative Tom McClintock, Republican from California. “He is a strict constitutionalist who believes in the rule of law. I would expect that he will respect the prerogative of individual states to determine their own laws involving strictly intra-state commerce.”

Yes a strict Constitutionalist who promotes the unconstitutional war on drugs... Plus it doesn't help that getting marijuana reform through Congress is all but a no go. Especially with it being Republican controlled.

So what could the damage be? Well Sessions is quiet about that, but the person who bought and paid for him, Kevin Sabet, has some ideas.

Sessions won’t say, but Smart Approaches to Marijuana, an anti-marijuana group that spent about $2 million last year fighting legalization, has a wish list.

“At the very least, the incoming Attorney General should enforce the terms of the DOJ’s own memoranda,” said Jeffrey Zinsmeister, executive vice-president and director of government relations for SAM, referring to the Cole Memo and citing a GAO report that claimed “the DOJ was not even collecting the information necessary to follow-up on its own marijuana enforcement priorities, much less enforce federal law on marijuana. ”

His group, said Kevin Sabet, SAM's founder and president, "looks at marijuana use as a public health issue, not a moral issue. We don't think people should be in prison for using marijuana, and we don't want to see arrest records for young people caught smoking marijuana." But there are more aggressive steps the new attorney general could take, according to SAM officials, to crack down on purveyors of marijuana.

“The DOJ could write a letter to governors in legalized states stating that any state issued licenses regulating marijuana sales is a violation of the Controlled Substances Act, and say they have 90 days to revoke licenses. It could issue a new memo to the states that have not implemented marijuana sales yet and say that they advise those states not to allow them. DOJ could also say that in the next six months they will enforce the 2013 Cole Memo and determine if states have violated its terms. It would be hard to argue that they haven’t,” Zinsmeister said.

FYI on the Cole Memo:

One solution would have been to reclassify marijuana out of Schedule I—the list of drugs like heroin considered the most dangerous and addictive and which are deemed to lack any medicinal value—but that didn't happen because of entrenched opposition from the Drug Enforcement Administration and an apparent lack of will at the White House to go to war with its own DEA. Instead, the DOJ wrote a memo as a short-term work-around, drafted by a deputy attorney general named James Cole.

Published in August 2013, the four-page Cole Memo was addressed to all U.S. attorneys and said, “In jurisdictions that have enacted laws legalizing marijuana in some form... conduct in compliance with those laws and regulations is less likely to threaten the federal priorities…” Translation: Don’t go out of your way to prosecute marijuana cases. It was a half-hearted solution that had the effect of giving states some breathing room, but marijuana activists knew that it was just a memo, lacking the force of law.

So there you have it. After 8 states voted on legalizing medical or recreational marijuana back in November, we all have to sit in fear over our rights and desires being systematically trampled by an administration that doesn't care what the people think on this issue. Anyone got anything to say to put my fears at rest?

a reply to: Krazysh0t

This is exactly why I didn't vote for Trump. This man and his scum bag entourage are worse than Hillary (and I despise Hillary). The war on drugs is a war on the Bill of Rights.

Darn potheads

Arrest them all and put them in camps do they can be re-educated and see the errors of their ways.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Donald Trump and company are pro private prison. That says it all!

So will Mr. Sessions be making the decisions about the policy, or would that be Mr. Trump?

If only Hillary would've campaigned on full federal legalization.
She would have won in a landslide.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Politicians don't fear this because as they've shown, they are ABOVE the law, everything from Assault to Homicide.. And some weird snip in-between...

Uruguay is OPEN... at $3.00 gr. and a 22-1 Exchange rate..

Run Willie


Run Snoop Dog


They are coming for you

If they are worried about a substance causing a disturbance then why not go after alcohol? Just looking at the number of drunk driving deaths and domestic violence cases it should have never been made legal again. But if you figure out a way for the government to tax it and big pharma controlling it then pot will be legal.

originally posted by: RickinVa
Darn potheads


Arrest them all and put them in camps do they can be re-educated and see the errors of their ways.

heil trump!!...heil trump!!

originally posted by: jimmyx

originally posted by: RickinVa
Darn potheads


Arrest them all and put them in camps do they can be re-educated and see the errors of their ways.

heil trump!!...heil trump!!

I guess you do not see sarcasm when it smacks you in the face

originally posted by: RickinVa
Darn potheads

Arrest them all and put them in camps do they can be re-educated and see the errors of their ways.

That's what I'm saying. We need drunk drivers to kill people just driving home from work. It thins the herd. Less economic burden.
Weed heads sitting on their couch and eating cheetos are a damn menace.

+1 vote for pothead concentration camps.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Terrible news.

It's pretty insane though that we still have a "representative" government while one man's opinion on an issue has so much power. That in itself is the problem.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

I am pretty sure he can close dispensaries and growers and take their assets.

You do realize that he is being appointed as Attorney General right? The AG enforces laws, he/she does not create them. He cannot enforce laws that don't exist or that he arbitrarily makes up.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
Anyone got anything to say to put my fears at rest?

When has the legality of weed ever impacted your decision to smoke it?

originally posted by: Krahzeef_Ukhar

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
Anyone got anything to say to put my fears at rest?

When has the legality of weed ever impacted your decision to smoke it?

exactly...cos no one smokes it if it is illegal

a reply to: Krahzeef_Ukhar

It will impact the thousands of people who now earn a living (legally) in the business.

a reply to: JDeLattre89


Yes but.... what are the existing Federal law covering cannabis. Go ahead and look it up. I'll wait.

a reply to: JDeLattre89

Current law dictates that MJ is illegal at the Fed level, which trumps the State level. The Fed can ruin the whole game whenever they feel like it.