Sessions stands against conservatives including Trump to fight marijuana (Hudak/WaPo)
By John Hudak January 5
John Hudak is senior fellow in governance studies and deputy director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. He is author of “Marijuana: A Short History.”
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.
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So it seems that Sessions, who has spent a career as a drug warrior — putting people in jail on drug charges as a state and federal law enforcement official and voting in favor of harsh drug policies as a U.S. senator — is acting on his own accord with this policy reversal. But at the same time, Sessions has promoted a traditional, conservative ideology that opposes unchecked federal intervention, champions states’ rights and espouses free-market economics.
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more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sessions-stands-against-conservatives--including-trump--to-fight-marijuana/2018/01/05/65dfc73a-f188-11e7-97bf-bba379b809ab_story.html?utm_term=.2f4f5b438670
