Jeff Sessions’ quixotic attack on legal weed is probably about to fall apart… and then quietly get worse

Speaking recently to an Alabama lawyer who played a big part in helping President Donald Trump secure victories in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, I couldn’t help but ask a couple of questions about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ job as the nation’s top law enforcement official. Sessions is extremely qualified for the post and proved himself loyal to Trump as one of the campaign’s earliest endorsers– but the AG’s no-win attack on liberalized marijuana laws remains a total head-scratcher.

According to the lawyer I spoke with, a close associate of Sessions, it’s also purely generational.

That didn’t come as a huge surprise to me of course. Sessions, a 70-year-old conservative from Alabama, has made extremely clear that his views about marijuana come straight from government propaganda pushed against the drug so heavily around the middle of the last century.

The lawyer’s knowing smile, nod and the admission that the topic of Sessions’ anti-marijuana positions was heavily discussed ahead of his appointment was, however, a little surprising. Many of Trump’s advisers evidently expressed concern about Sessions’ desire to tilt windmills where weed is concerned and warned that it would be better for the incoming AG to focus attention elsewhere early in the administration– even if he had resolved himself to attacking voter-approved marijuana legalization in the future.

Sessions made the decision to forge ahead with his anti-marijuana crusade– because the laws the law, and all that.

Of course, convincing other top law enforcement officials that enforcing an unpopular federal law to the detriment of states’ rights is a little more difficult than declaring a federal crackdown on marijuana.

A report out last week from The Associated Press revealed that the “beleaguered” attorney general is having a tough time getting his own Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety to state that liberalized marijuana enforcement policies implemented under the Obama administration actually cause any trouble.

From the report:

The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general’s aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group’s report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.

It encourages officials to keep studying whether to change or rescind the Obama administration’s more hands-off approach to enforcement — a stance that has allowed the nation’s experiment with legal pot to flourish. The report was not slated to be released publicly, but portions were obtained by the AP.

Where does that leave Sessions?

Well, he could drop the issue and focus on other Justice Department priorities for the time being. But I wouldn’t count on that.

Instead, the attorney general is going to use his ramped-up civil forfeiture policies and here-and-there DOJ attacks on marijuana businesses in an effort to make commercial efforts to produce and sell the drug in the light of the regulated marketplace a terrifying legal gamble.

As Reason’s Jacob Sullum, suggested:

 Sessions could cause a lot of trouble for the newly legal cannabis industry without bothering to retract the Cole memo, which is vague and ambiguous enough to accommodate policies ranging from laissez-faire to prosecution and forfeiture threats that put many or most marijuana merchants out of business. There are several reasons to think Sessions’ approach will land somewhere in the middle.

Sessions has been in charge of the Justice Department for six months, and so far his hostility toward marijuana legalization has not gone beyond rhetorical expressions of concern. It has not resulted in prosecutions, forfeitures, or even threatening letters to cannabusinesses. Nor has Sessions signaled that he plans to challenge state marijuana laws in federal court. Instead he punted the issue to a committee, which settled on a wait-and-see position that the A.P. describes as “tepid” and “vague.” By contrast, Sessions acted swiftly to step up the war on drugs in other ways, reviving federal “adoption” of civil forfeitures initiated by state or local agencies and establishing a tougher charging policy that is apt to result in more mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Sessions may recognize that a full-blown cannabis crackdown would not necessarily deliver results he would like. Since all but one of the eight states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use allow home cultivation, shutting down state-licensed cannabusinesses would undermine federal enforcement priorities by making production and distribution less visible and harder to monitor. Likewise a lawsuit that successfully challenged state licensing and regulation of marijuana merchants as contrary to the Controlled Substances Act.

If this is what happens, its big government at its worst coming from a supposedly conservative administration. Distaste for marijuana may be a generational issue– but distaste for big government being used to bludgeon people into submitting to moral standards with which they disagree is not.

The post Jeff Sessions’ quixotic attack on legal weed is probably about to fall apart… and then quietly get worse appeared first on Personal Liberty®.