State officials are urging Jeff Sessions to tread lightly when it comes to trying to impose any kind of crackdown on the cannabis community.
Earlier this week, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf fired off a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying “we do not need the federal government getting in the way” of medical marijuana.
The letter comes after Sessions sent a message of his own to Congressional leaders last month asking them to rescind the only protection the medical marijuana community has to keep it safe from the despicable clutches of Drug Enforcement Administration.
“Your action to undo the protections of the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which prevents the use of federal funds to disrupt states’ efforts to implement “their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana” is misguided,” Wolf wrote.
The governor then threatened to slap Sessions with a lawsuit if federal drug agents should start harassing the state’s medical marijuana patients.
“If you seek to further disrupt our ability to establish a legal way to deliver relief of medical marijuana to our citizens,” he continued, “I will ask the Attorney General of Pennsylvania to take legal action to protect our residents and state sovereignty.”
Despite his ramblings about wanting to combat the opioid problem in the United States, Attorney General Sessions has done more to launch a war against legal marijuana than anything pertaining to this problem. In addition to asking key members of Congress to not renew the medical marijuana protections this September, Sessions also recently assembled a violent crime task force that is responsible for providing him with enforcement recommendations. The details of this shady endeavor are supposed to be revealed sometime before the end of summer.
Although no one is certain how the conflict between the Trump administration and state marijuana laws is going to shake out, there is enough evidence to suggest that change is on the horizon.
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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told a Senate committee earlier this week that the Justice Department could reverse an Obama-era memo that allows state to experiment with marijuana legalization. But for now, he admits, it is business as usual.
“Maybe there will be changes to it in the future,” he said, “but we’re still operating under that policy which is an effort to balance the conflicting interests with regard to marijuana.”
Federal lawmakers introduced a bill on Thursday aimed at legalizing medical marijuana at the national level. Marijuana advocates say the time for this legislation is more important than ever, as a concrete policy is the only way to protect legalization without continuously being challenged by the forces under the Department of Justice.
