Pot crowd not high on likely AG confirmation
Industry fears Sessions
WASHINGTON — Marijuana legalization backers fear the worst for their fast-growing industry as the U.S. Senate prepares to vote tomorrow to approve a longtime pot opponent, Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, as the nation’s next attorney general.
All signs indicate that Sessions, who last year said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” has lined up the votes to get confirmed as the highest law enforcement officer in the land.
No one’s sure exactly what that would mean for Massachusetts and the seven other states that have approved recreational marijuana, or the 28 states that allow the drug to be used as medicine. Sessions has done nothing to clear the uncertainty.
At his confirmation hearing in January, Sessions gave conflicting signals on whether he would follow the lead of former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in allowing states to tax and sell marijuana without federal interference, or whether he’d lead a new national crackdown by enforcing the federal law that bans all possession and sales of pot.
“There’s a lot of nervousness,” said Adam Spiker of the Southern California Coalition, a marijuana trade association group. “First and foremost, he’s made it real clear that he is not a fan of the product or the industry.”
“Our group is comprised of hundreds and hundreds of businesses that want to stop looking over their shoulder,” Spiker said. “They want to be treated like any other business.”
Kevin Sabet, who heads the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, is among the many who say it’s impossible to predict what Sessions might do.
“I think there will be changes, but no one can say how those changes will manifest themselves,” he said yesterday.
In Washington state, where voters were the first to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012, along with Colorado, many politicians worry about a possible crackdown.
As a presidential candidate, Trump said that he would leave the question of legalization to individual states. But his choice of Sessions in November set off immediate panic among legalization backers.