War on Drugs could become much worse with Trump's selection of Sen. Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General
Sessions is a vocal opponent of marijuana legalization whose elevation to attorney general could deal a blow to state-level marijuana legalization efforts across the country.
At a Senate drug hearing in April, Sessions said that “we need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it’s in fact a very real danger.” [...]
Sessions further argued that a lack of leadership from President Obama had been one of the drivers of the trend toward marijuana legalization in recent years. “I think one of [Obama's] great failures, it's obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana,” Sessions said at the hearing. “It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started ‘Just Say No.’ ”
He added that lawmakers and leaders in government needed to foster “knowledge that this drug is dangerous, you cannot play with it, it is not funny, it’s not something to laugh about . . . and to send that message with clarity that good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/18/trumps-pick-for-attorney-general-good-people-dont-smoke-marijuana/ (Trump’s pick for attorney general: ‘Good people don’t smoke marijuana’)
Forget, also, any federal criminal-justice reform, which was on the cusp of passage in Congress before Mr. Trump’s “law and order” campaign. Mr. Sessions strongly opposed bipartisan legislation to scale back the outrageously harsh sentences that filled federal prisons with low-level drug offenders. Instead, he called for more mandatory-minimum sentences and harsher punishments for drug crimes. The one bright spot was his working with Democrats to reduce the 100-to-1 disparity between punishments for crack and powder cocaine offenses.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/o...as-attorney-general-an-insult-to-justice.html
When Jeff Sessions sits before his colleagues in the United States Senate for his confirmation early next year, you're certain to hear again about a joke he told decades ago. It came up in his last confirmation hearing in 1986, when the Senate rejected his appointment to the federal bench.
Paraphrasing here, but what Sessions is said to have said went something like this ...
I didn't think the Klan were such bad guys until I found out they smoked marijuana.
Source: http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/11/with_sessions_appointment_does.html (With Sessions appointment to AG, does marijuana legalization go up in smoke?)
Sessions criticized President Barack Obama for not being tough enough on marijuana, saying the U.S. could be at the beginning of “another surge in drug use like we saw in the ’60s and ’70s.”
“You have to have leadership from Washington,” Sessions said. “You can’t have the president of the United States of America talking about marijuana like it is no different than taking a drink. . . . It is different. And you are sending a message to young people that there is no danger in this process. It is false that marijuana use doesn’t lead people to more drug use. It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal. I think we need to be careful about this.” [...]
Aaron Herzberg, partner and general counsel of Calcann Holdings, LLC, a California medical marijuana real estate company, called Sessions “the worst pick that Trump could have made” and warned that marijuana legalization in states such as California, Florida and Washington “may be in serious jeopardy” if Sessions is confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“It appears that he is intent on rolling back policy to the 1980s Nancy Reagan’s ‘just say no’ days,” Herzberg said.
Sessions received an “F” on the 2016 congressional scorecard released by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a pro-legalization group.
Erik Altieri, the group’s executive director, called Sessions “a militant marijuana prohibitionist” and said his nomination “should send a chill down the spine of the majority of Americans who support marijuana law reform.”
While no one’s certain exactly what Sessions would do as attorney general, his nomination is clearly good news for opponents of legalization.
“Well, let’s just say that if I had marijuana stocks right now, I’d be shorting them,” said Kevin Sabet, president of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. “This is a man who we know is staunchly anti-legalization. There’s no way around that. Things are about to get interesting.”
Source: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nation-world/national/article115643838.html (Will Alabama’s Sessions support states’ rights – when the issue is marijuana?)
), then I hope we can also agree that regardless if an inanimate object is deemed efficient or not, it doesn't preclude the fact there must be motive and intent for said object to be used in such a matter. The problem always was and always will be people, not the guns.
