Congress Tells Jeff Sessions No Funding to Fight Legal Cannabis States

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Let’s start with an update on the Spring Fling Philly Smoke Session we talked about last week. If you don’t remember this was the underground party where police arrested 22 people and confiscated 50 pounds of marijuana, 100 pounds of THC-infused edibles, $50,000 in cash, and four handguns.

The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas has already reduced the organizer of the event; Mr. Poe’s bail from $250,000 down to $10,000 but has required him to undergo random drug screenings while he awaits trial. 

Poe has also been ordered not to plan, run, or attend another marijuana party while he awaits trial.

Well it seems the churches smoke session has opened the doors for a legal argument by nearly 15 cannabis clubs who find themselves being persecuted in the same town.

Lawyer Rob Corry says public statements in the news suggest that the city allowed Elevation Ministries to have marijuana consumption at its grand opening because of the member-only nature of the event, rather than because of the group’s religious status.

Corry pointed out that if Denver says in order to gather similar to a club you have to be religion that would be discriminatory.  The town responded saying it is a case-by-case basis and that there’s no single model that one can simply adopt

However, Corry maintains that this is a departure from previous policy, pointing to the shutdown of Club Potus. In a statement he is quoted as saying “Government cannot occur on a case-by-case basis. In other words, Denver does not get to make up its own standards as it goes along and shut an identically situated club down while leaving another functioning,” 

First reported by political correspondent Tom Angell, the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) now states on its website that three recent studies, two of which it funded, suggest “medical marijuana products may have a role in reducing the use of opioids needed to control pain.”

The website update is one of the first signs of a shift in the federal government’s view on the issue. Three studies appear to have served as the basis for NIDA’s admission.

First, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) printed an article called “Medical Cannabis Laws and Opioid Mortality”, which confirmed that providing patients access to cannabis would be less dangerous than providing access to addictive prescription painkillers. The study showed that states where marijuana was legalized – there were 25% fewer fatal overdoses from opioids than non-legal states and that the year-over-year decline saw 34% fewer opioid-related overdose deaths.

The RAND Corporation printed an article called “Do Medical Marijuana Laws Reduce Addiction and Deaths Related to Pain Killers?” This supported the JAMA article and added that hospital admissions due to opioid use also declined 28 to 35% in legal states compared to non-legal states.

And finally the journal of Health Affairs published an article titled “Medical Marijuana Laws Reduce Prescription Medication Use In Medicare,” where researchers found that people filled fewer prescriptions for conditions for which marijuana could be used as an alternative treatment option in legal states. Medicare prescriptions for drugs that treat pain, anxiety, sleep disorders, seizures, nausea, and depression dropped significantly in the years following medical marijuana legalization and the decline amounted to $165 million dollars in savings for Medicare in 2013 alone.

Congress has blocked the Justice Department from spending any money that interferes with state medical marijuana laws.

In the newly unveiled budget, lawmakers extended the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, that allows states to carry on with crafting their own medical marijuana policies without fear of federal intervention.
Lawmakers thankfully have been renewing the medical marijuana provision in every consecutive budget since it first passed in 2014. 

This of course puts Jeff Sessions in a tight spot as he issued an ominous warning in February reminding states that it remains a violation of federal law to distribute marijuana throughout any place in the United States, whether a state legalizes it or not.