This
week’s confirmation hearings for Sen. Jeff Sessions,
President-elect Trump’s pick for attorney general, did little to
ease cannabis advocates’ fears that the incoming administration
could put state-legal cannabis programs at risk.
Asked
by one senator about state cannabis laws, Sessions “gave a
wishy-washy non-answer that provides little comfort to medical
marijuana patients, state officials, and others,” Bill Piper,
senior director of the Drug Policy Alliance’s office of national
affairs, said Thursday in a conference call with reporters.
“He
was clear that federal law makes possession and distribution a crime
and that he would enforce federal law,” added Alison Parker, the US
director of Human Rights Watch.
Since
the election, the cannabis community has been forced to read tea
leaves in an effort to predict how the Trump administration might
approach state-legal cannabis. While Trump in the past has professed
support for states’ rights and medical marijuana, his nomination of
Sessions, a staunch drug war proponent, left many scratching their
heads.
Quizzed
this week on the relationships between state cannabis programs and
federal law, Sessions played his cards close to his chest.
“One
obvious concern is that the United States Congress made the
possession of marijuana in every state, and the distribution of it,
an illegal act,” he said in response to a question from Sen. Mike
Lee (R-Utah). “If that’s something that’s not desired any
longer, Congress should pass a law to change the rule.”
As
Reason’s Eric Boehm wrote, that answer is technically correct—but
it still doesn’t tell us much.
As
a matter of basic civics, yes, Sessions is right about all that.
Congress should be the ones to decide when marijuana is legal or
illegal at the federal level and the Justice Department is supposed
to enforce the laws, not make them. That’s hardly a controversial
or revealing statement.
Practically,
though, Sessions would have tremendous power as attorney general to
decide exactly what “enforce laws effectively as we are able”
means. Without needing approval from Congress, Sessions could send
federal agents to arrest growers, shut down dispensaries, and freeze
the bank accounts of marijuana businesses.
For
now, a Congressional provision known as the Rohrabacher-Farr
amendment prevents federal prosecutors from going after state-legal
medical cannabis operations. But that measure is set to expire in
April of this year, and its protections currently don’t extend to
adult-use programs.
If
confirmed, Sessions would oversee the US Department of Justice,
setting policies and enforcement priorities for federal prosecutors
across the country. The Justice Department also is the parent agency
of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Even
if Sessions were to decline to target cannabis nationally, he could
sign off on initiatives by federal prosecutors at the state level,
such as when former US Attorney General Eric Holder approved a 2011
crackdown on California cannabis businesses.
Such
arbitrary enforcement of federal law is “not good for the marijuana
industry or patients that benefit from these programs,” said
Jonathan Banks, a criminal justice research associate at the Cato
Institute.
“More
than half the states have legalized some sort of marijuana use,”
Banks said, “and there was nothing in that hearing that led us to
believe that [Sessions is] going to be any better than he has been in
the past.”
The
Alabama senator’s past statements condemning cannabis have been
widely reported at this point. “Good people don’t smoke
marijuana,” he once said. He’s also joked that he thought members
of the Klu Klux Klan “were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”
Not
everyone felt threatened by the responses from Sessions, however.
Troy Dayton, co-founder of the Oakland, Calif.-based Arcview
Group, said the AG nominee “left the door open [to enforcement of
federal law] but indicated it would be a low priority. That’s a
huge victory considering [Sessions’] previous inflammatory
statements about this topic,” Bloomberg reported.
“He
also recognized that enforcing federal marijuana laws would be
dependent upon the availability of resources, the scarcity of which
poses a problem,” Robert Capecchi, the Marijuana Policy Project’s
director of federal policies, said in a statement. “He was given
the opportunity to take an extreme prohibitionist approach, and he
passed on it.”
Tom
Angell, chair of legalization advocacy group Marijuana Majority, said
in a statement he’s “hopeful the new administration will realize
that any crackdown against broadly popular laws in a growing number
of states would create huge political problems they don’t need and
will use lots of political capital they’d be better off spending on
issues the new president cares a lot more about.”
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