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Comment by lev99 | Hacker News Reader

The article describes the desire for a media campaign against cannabis more than a war.

It's okay if the goverment makes statements about cannabis in a negative light. DOT talks about the dangers of driving. CDC talks about the dangers of vaping. The truth is cannabis isn't 100% harmless, and it's probably a good thing if our society has someone looking into the risks of this large social change we made.

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While it is OK for the government to make statements that portray things in a positive or negative light, it is not OK for them to do so in the absense of supporting evidence, or worse yet, in the presence of evidence to the contrary. The former is, charitably, called "marketing" - but the latter is more commonly known as "lying".

The Trump Administration has taken one of the most liberal positions on cannabis of any Republican president ever.

His stated positions on supporting states with medical laws, and his complete absence of federal raids on people following state cannabis laws, is very good for a republican president.

And his stated positions are in opposition from what his attorney general - the person responsible for enforcing laws - has said.

If it's not obvious yet, the President disagrees with the AG very publicly on multiple issues, the question is will the next AG take the same stance?

It's true that Trump has signaled for an end to the federal ban on marijuana, and that U.S. attorneys have since stopped targeting marijuana companies that are in legal states. However, this status quo was set by Obama-era rules (the "Cole memo" [0]). It's still up to President Trump to actually push through the legislation, which he has not been great at. But his public stance is definitely non-trivial, as it encourages those on the Republican side to support legislation that ends the federal ban, no matter what Attorney Sessions pushes for. Also, Sessions may at this point be seen as a lame duck anyway.

[0] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-marijuana-20...

In truth, it's hard to make a lot of evidence-based scientific statements given the government's propensity for not supporting marijuana in research [1]. We would be able to find out a lot more about health and societal implications if it could be openly studied in the first place.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/10/25/ag-sessions...

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