For more than a century marijuana has been treated as a dangerous drug, at times hyped so far beyond the pale that state propaganda efforts like Reefer Madness became unintentional cult comedy classics. But there’s nothing funny about the victims of cannabis prohibition. That regressive policy has meant harsh sentences routinely handed out for minor possession, jobs lost through drug testing, criminal records created, and lives destroyed. It’s only been in the last 15 years that any real progress against that institutional stupidity has been made. A constituency of state’s rights, libertarians, and healthcare activists began to get legalization on local ballots, where many such measures have now been passed. The result is a multi-billion dollar business—and the public revenues that come with it.
But now, if Jeff Sessions stays true to his many words over the years, everyone in the legal end of that business is in big trouble:
By nominating Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III for attorney general, President-elect Donald J. Trump is about to put into the nation’s top law enforcement job a man with a long and antagonistic attitude toward marijuana. As a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions said he thought the KKK “were OK until I found out they smoked pot.” In April, he said, “Good people don't smoke marijuana,” and that it was a "very real danger" that is “not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.” Sessions, who turns 70 on Christmas Eve, has called marijuana reform a "tragic mistake” …
The War on Drugs is a lot of asinine and scary things. It’s a war on personal freedom, it’s certainly a war on “small government” and state’s rights, and it’s also a war on people and freedom by any measure. But the war on some drugs, and especially the cannabis part of it, is still more than all that: it’s part and parcel of a political operation aimed at disenfranchising progressive-leaning voters.
John Erhlichman and others have written that Nixon specifically started and pursued the War on Drugs to target the young, the liberal, and the brown—all groups that tend to vote more for Democrats than Republicans. The drug war reduces democratic-leaning voters by locking up tens of thousands at any given time and by leaving millions more unable to vote even when released, depending on the state. In Maine and Vermont for example, felons never lose their right to vote, even while serving time. In the key swings states of Florida, Iowa, and Virginia, on the other hand, a convicted felon loses his or her right to vote permanently.
Drug prohibition in general has been a monumental disaster in just about every measurable way starting with alcohol in 1929. As years rolled by with no sanity in sight on the issue, individual states began putting legalization of marijuana on their respective ballots. It didn’t escape public notice that in states where cannabis was decriminalized, the ominous warnings about the impending doom of all that is Good and Right did not come to pass. Legal marijuana use, it turned out, wasn’t a big deal, had no negative impact on the communities where it was legalized, and created a whole new field for investors and entrepreneurs.
The problem is that the use, possession, sale, cultivation, and transportation of cannabis remains illegal at the federal level. Marijuana is still a Schedule 1 controlled substance, along with heroin and LSD. That means every doctor who writes scripts and every dispensary that fills them are committing federal felonies and could arguably be engaged in racketeering. From time to time the DEA and other police forces even raid such state-sanctioned groups for fun and show, all dressed up in black gear and automatic weapons like SEAL Team Six hitting bin Laden.
The White House has been mostly silent on the matter, but neither the president or his attorneys general seem to have made enforcing federal laws in states where voters have opted for legalization any kind of priority. Congress has recently opted to leave it in the hands of local and state government.
But the damage is done and continues to be done. There are as we speak more than 2 million people in U.S. prisons and another 5 million or so on parole or probation of some kind. Currently, it is estimated that 6 million Americans are unable to vote due to felony disenfranchisement. Almost one-quarter of those locked up or on probation are for drug or drug-related offenses, and much of that last group is for marijuana.
In short, keeping marijuana illegal and enforcing those laws, regardless of state’s rights or ballot results, helps conservatives and hurts Democrats. And Jeff “Beau” Sessions the Third is just the neo-confederate throwback to breathe new life into dying prohibition laws—and carve off another sliver off potential progressive voters.