Here’s what we know about Jeff Sessions: he’s absolutely hell-bent on moving forward with a war on drugs—despite a lack of evidence that it’s linked to an uptick in crime and the fact that it’s incredibly unpopular with the American people. Sessions is particularly obsessed with marijuana, so much so that he has now asked Congress to allow him to prosecute medical marijuana providers, even though there are federal protections to prohibit the Justice Department from doing exactly that which have been in place since 2014.
The protections, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, prohibit the Justice Department from using federal funds to prevent certain states "from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana." [...]
Sessions argued that the amendment would "inhibit [the Justice Department's] authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act." He continues: I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.
Let’s get really clear on what Sessions is attempting to do here. He is justifying his rabid obsession with drugs and locking up people of color by appealing to his fellow conservatives and their sense of law and order. Except none of this is based in any reality. The historic drug epidemic to which he refers is actually not an epidemic of marijuana abuse but instead of opioid abuse. The opioid epidemic is disproportionately affecting white America, and there is new research to suggest that it’s hitting nearly all age groups in rural and urban areas. This is a massive crisis. And there is no evidence whatsoever that focusing on medical marijuana will yield any kind of success in eliminating drug use in this country. Of course, it all depends on how one defines success. If you are defining success as the reduction of drug abuse and overdoses—then no, this absolutely will not work. But if your version of success is criminalizing marijuana, which we know sends more black and brown folks to prison and for longer, harsher sentences than it does white people (regardless of the fact that both blacks and whites use the drug at equal rates)—then this plan is a home run.
A growing body of research (acknowledged by the National Institute on Drug Abuse) has shown that opiate deaths and overdoses actually decrease in states with medical marijuana laws on the books.
That research strongly suggests that cracking down on medical marijuana laws, as Sessions requested, could perversely make the opiate epidemic even worse.
When polled, it turns out that a majority of the American people support marijuana legalization and oppose the government trying to stop sales in states that have already legalized it. Cracking down on medical marijuana doesn’t seem to have support from anyone, not some Republicans, not even from Trump himself. When he was a candidate, he supported the right of states to decide on their own policies as well as state-level medical marijuana regulations. Then again, he gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “the devil is a liar.” No one knows what Trump really believes. Does he even know? It’s doubtful. What we do know, however, is that he and this entire administration specialize in deceit and harm. This is yet another dangerous attempt by Sessions to move forward with his plan to fill the nation’s prisons—mostly with people of color.