Dear Pot Lawyer,
Is Oregon in Jeff Sessions’ crosshairs?
Absolutely. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently sent out a series of threatening letters to the governors of Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. Our Governor Kate Brown received her missive on July 24. It begins with the usual nonsense that cannabis is bad and its users should feel bad, and then notes that the infamous Cole Memorandum didn’t actually preclude enforcement of federal anti-cannabis laws. Sessions leaves this threat dangling as he turns his focus to a January 2017 report by the Oregon State Police titled “A Baseline Evaluation of Cannabis Enforcement Priorities in Oregon.”
The attorney general cherry-picks a few choice quotes and statistics from the report, but to be fair, the report as a whole does paint a fairly bleak picture of Oregon’s success in complying with the Cole Memorandum enforcement priorities. In particular, there’s substantial evidence that there are a large number of registered medical grow operations—particularly within Oregon’s Jackson and Josephine Counties—that could illegally be sending cannabis out of state. The report found an association between the number of Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP) registrants in a county and the amount of black market diversion. Selfish and thoughtless criminals are exploiting Oregon’s medical program, which is desperately needed by many legitimate patients, for financial gain.