Though marijuana is still a Schedule 1 illegal drug (which means it allegedly has no medical benefits), 28 states allow for regulated medical use of marijuana, and eight states allow some level of recreational marijuana possession, cultivation and use.
The Obama Justice Department generally looked the other way about this obvious conflict between federal law and state laws.
A Trump Justice Department, if led by Attorney General-nominee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, is guaranteed to appoint like-minded US attorneys who will certainly make legal recreational marijuana, and probably make legal medical marijuana, illegal again.
Here’s the Sessions “joke” about the Ku Klux Klan and marijuana that became well-known during his unsuccessful nomination to be a federal judge 30 years ago:
I didn't think the Klan were such bad guys until I found out they smoked marijuana.
Aside from the first-nature racism of his “joke,” Sessions was pretty emphatic that he was no fan of marijuana then, and is certainly no fan of marijuana legalization efforts now.
His usually fawning hometown newspaper has the story, below.
The Birmingham News story has a headline, “With Sessions appointment to AG, does marijuana legalization go up in smoke?”, and the story answers the rhetorical question:
Sessions believes strongly that marijuana is an evil substance and that the Obama administration's enforcement of drug laws has been weak. Now that Sessions could be in the driver's seat at the U.S. Justice Department, that could soon change.
Sessions also called the Obama DOJ policy of looking the other way on marijuana “beyond comprehension.”
Sessions may soon be in a position to do something to reimpose marijuana prohibition, which appeals more to his first-nature racism than to his faux-Christian prissiness (“good people don't smoke marijuana”), since criminalizing marijuana use, in the South and elsewhere, has the intended effect of criminalizing and disenfranchising black people.
There are strong reasons to oppose Sessions’ AG nomination, mainly that an Alabaman named for two Confederate traitors will naturally do nothing to protect civil rights guaranteed by federal law .
Trump’s vaunted white working-class supporters will have little complaint with that, but a bigly portion of them are marijuana users, medically or recreationally, and Sessions’ war on marijuana laws will not be popular with them.
Just one of many reasons they will come to regret their Trump vote.