Jeff Sessions to crack down on legalized marijuana, ending Obama-era policy

Of the KKK, Sessions once said he thought they were "OK until I found out they smoked pot."

If anyone wonders why today, Sessions might be eager to go against the momentum of 29 states + DC legalizing medical marijuana, one only has to hearken back to the words of John Ehrlichman, who was counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs in the Nixon administration when this folly of war was started:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

That about sums it up for me. Nothing seems to have changed since then. Different players, same MO.

Popehat seems to think that the concerns over this are overblown:

Okay. But what does that really mean?

As long as Rohrabacher-Farr remains in every federal appropriations bill, Department of Justice policy is mostly symbolic — the Department of Justice will still be prohibited from spending money on prosecuting people for medical marijuana activities that are legal under state laws. (That doesn't limit prosecutions of non-medical personal use activities, though — but it will be difficult to tease them apart.) And, practically speaking, it's utterly impossible for the Department of Justice to prosecute more than a very tiny fraction of marijuana cases. They don't have the resources.

...

Your main concern will be that businesses and institutions will be slow to support an activity that the citizens of your state have chosen to make legal.

https://www.popehat.com/2018/01/04/lawsplainer-attorney-gene...

This reminds me of when the Conservative government in Canada did similar chest puffing activities. But local police refused to enforce the law. It'll also be interesting to see what state attorney's do. Will they sue the federal government? Will they make it harder for federal prosecutors?

This isn't something you can easily back away from...