Jeff Sessions isn’t giving up on weed. He’s doubling down
Congressional dysfunction may do what the pot-hating attorney general hasn’t managed to do all year: Remove protections for the booming legal weed industry
Saturday, December 16, 2017
When president-elect Donald Trump announced Senator Jeff Sessions would be his attorney general, advocates for marijuana law reform were suddenly seized with panic. The longtime Alabama senator, they knew, had once joked that he considered the Klan to be OK guys until he found out they smoked pot. Only they weren’t quite sure he was kidding. In August, the DOJ’s Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, which had been at work behind closed doors since April, reported back with no new policy recommendations to curb legal marijuana programs, advice that would have remained secret if the Associated Press hadn’t obtained the documents. Federal prohibition on marijuana was practically unenforceable without state and local police doing the feds’ dirty work.