Dear Pot Lawyer,
With everything that's been going on in Washington these days, what's the latest on federal weed law?
The big news last week was a bipartisan group of senators sticking it to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The committee voted to continue shielding state medical cannabis programs from federal interference. This protection is indirect but effective: The senators didn’t vote to change federal law, but instead simply voted not to allocate any budget to Sessions’ Department of Justice (DOJ) for prosecution of medical cannabis actors. In other words, the fiscal year 2018 budget should maintain the status quo, dating back to 2014. Nice work by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The reason this decision felt especially gratifying to pot boosters is the fact that Sessions had written his old colleagues in the Senate last month, imploring them not to extend these protections. Said Sessions, “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.” Your Attorney General also has warned of an America with “marijuana sold at every corner grocery store” causing “significant negative health effects.” Sessions, of course, has taken piles of money from Big Tobacco, whose products are sold in every corner grocery store and are certainly not the healthiest.
The DOJ attempted to fight this enforcement spending restriction a few years back, when it sued a medical cannabis dispensary. That one didn’t go so well.