The Sessions Marijuana Crackdown Is Backfiring

Since Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked the cannabis-friendly Cole Memo on Jan. 4, two state legislatures have voted to legalize marijuana, a third held fast to its legalization plans, and a Republican senator hinted he’d introduce a federal legalization measure.



It’s been a week since Jeff Sessions shook the marijuana world to its core, or tried to.
On Jan. 4, the attorney general followed up a year’s worth of open threats and obvious fighting words aimed at cannabis legalization — a plant which Sessions really, really does not like — with his boldest move yet: the revocation of the “Cole Memo,” the Obama-era policy missive that triggered a period of even more furious growth in already-booming legal marijuana.

Without the Cole Memo steering prosecutors away from state-legal cannabis and giving banks some assurance that their marijuana accounts would not be seized, surely the inexorable trend towards allowing medical cannabis or outright legalization would be halted.

The impact of Sessions’s crackdown, however, was immediate and decisive, but not in the way Sessions expected. The very next day, Vermont lawmakers voted to legalize marijuana, a feat followed up by legislators in New Hampshire, who on Monday approved a plan that would allow adults to possess small amounts of cannabis and grow up to six plants at home.

Two days after Sessions’s big day, commercial sales of marijuana began in San Francisco, where lawmakers all but dared him and other federal officers to do something about it, and other politicians converted the attorney general’s move into a talking point.

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