President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be attorney general of the United States, The Washington Post and other news outlets reported Friday. 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.
https://www.anoniem.org/.../?utm_term=.fc5fe7640306

With little more than the stroke of his own pen, the new attorney general will be able to arrest growers, retailers and users, defying the will of more than half the nation’s voters, including those in his own state where legislators approved the use of CBD. Aggressive enforcement could cause chaos in a $6.7 billion industry that is already attracting major investment from Wall Street hedge funds and expected to hit $21.8 billion by 2020.
http://www.politico.com/...n-legal-marijuana-214501

As a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions said he thought the KKK "were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”
http://www.politico.com/...n-legal-marijuana-214501

Sessions, who turns 70 on Christmas Eve, has called marijuana reform a "tragic mistake" and criticized FBI Director James Comey and Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch for not vigorously enforcing a the federal prohibition that President Obama has called “untenable over the long term.” In a floor speech earlier this year, Senator 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….It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal.”
http://www.politico.com/...n-legal-marijuana-214501

In a floor speech earlier this year, Senator 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….

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.” He voiced concern over statistics showing more drivers were testing positive for THC, the active component in marijuana, in certain states.

...

Sessions said at the hearing. “It [cannabis legalization] 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.”
https://www.washingtonpo.../?utm_term=.fc5fe7640306

to send that message with clarity that good people don’t smoke marijuana

^^agreed.

Living in one if the first states to have legalized recreational marijuana sales, I've seen firsthand how quickly it's become 'the new normal", with billboards, slick industry and consumer mags, regular columns in all the newspapers, events, etc etc.

Secondly, the taxable revenue generated through sales has injected some much needed life into the stagnant economy here.

While there are still plenty of issues to work out (mainly around quality control testing and taxation rather than damage control), i think it would be met with an insurmountable amount resistance to go back to the pre legalization model.

That said, this dinosaur needs to go the way of his kind.

"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."-Thomas Jefferson

Wow eg, you really don't like Senator Sessions do you

Don't worry, I don't think too much of him myself.

All I know is, if he tries to make any moves against cannabis, he'll face fierce opposition from the marijuana legalisation movement, and the American people (the majority of whom support legalisation). That's my only hope in this situation.

"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."-Thomas Jefferson

You see, the hidden issue, and it need not be hidden among us...the government always tries to paint itself as the mother hen, concerned about her errant chicks. And so, to keep you from crashing into other people on the freeway, to keep you from leaping out of buildings or committing society, we have to control these drugs. As a matter of fact, you know, this is absurd. More people die because of alcohol than all illegal drugs combined in a given year. The government is not your friend on this issue. The government is very concerned to control the mass mind. And marijuana -- my God, since the British Commission on Hemp, which was in 1889, I believe -- the British East India Company commissioned a study of hemp -- they have spent millions and millions and millions of dollars to find something, anything, you name it, wrong with cannabis. There is nothing wrong with cannabis. It is the most thoroughly tested, pawed over, and examined drug in human history. And they just come up with the lamest stuff. I mean, they tell you, you know, you're gonna have tits. Give me a break. They say, 'You won't be motivated in your job.' Like your job is supposed to be the (pinnacle) against which all things are to be measured.

And I think people on our side of this question have been tremendously naive, because people just think, 'We just have to convince them that it's harmless.' *It ain't harmless.* It is a knife poised at the heart of dominator values. It would make the modern industrial assembly line, political loyalites, the macho image projection -- all of these little tricks that they're running are severely eroded by cannabis. And they will stop at nothing to eradicate it. Look at the budget of the DEA -- what are they doing? They're giving, 65% is dedicated to cannabis eradication. Heroin gets 20%, coke gets all the rest. It's demonstrably absurd the way the money is spent, unless you have a secret agenda of some sort. And if your agenda is to supress the evolution of unwanted social attitudes in the American public, then you have to keep your eye on cannabis very very closely. The new guy who heads the War on Drugs, Martinez? This guy, I heard him on NPR this week, and his most passionate moment in the half hour interview was, he said, 'We have pushed the price of an ounce of cannabis past the price of an ounce of gold, and we're going to keep it that way.' Nothing about eradication, talk about keeping the price high. The fact that they refuse to tax it when they're starving for revenue shows that there must be a secret agenda. It doesn't make any kind of sense. -terence McKenna

Modern industrial civilization has very skillfully promoted certain drugs and supressed others. A perfect example is caffeine. Caffeine -- I hate to tell you this -- caffeine is a fairly dangerous drug. It isn't dangerous in that a cup of coffee will kill you, but a lifestyle built around caffeine is going to -- you're not going to live to be a hundred years old, or even seventy, unless you are statistically in the improbably group. Why is caffeine not only tolerated but exalted? Because, boy, you can spin those widgets onto their winkles just endlessly without a thought on your mind. It is *the* perfect drug for modern industrial manufacturing. Why do you think caffeine, a dangerous, health destroying, destructive drug, that has to be brought from the ends of the earth, is enshrined in every labor contract in the Western world as a right? The coffee break -- if somebody tried to take away the coffee break, you know, the masses would rise in righteous fury and pull them down. We don't have a beer break. We don't have a pot break. I mean, if you suggested, 'Well, we don't want a coffee break. We want to be a ble to smoke a joint at eleven,' they would say, 'Well, you're just some kind of -- you're a social degenerate, a troublemaker, a mad dog, a criminal.' And yet, the cost health benefit of those two drugs, there's no comparison. Obviously, pot would be the better choice. The problem is, then you're going to be standing there dreaming, rather than spinning the widgets onto the nuts. (laughter)

Coca leaves would be very good. I suspect in the near future we may see the legalization of coca as a sop to the mentality that wishes to see cocaine... Andy Weil, who's a good friend of mine -- we don't agree on everything, but -- a few years ago he had great enthusiasm for a coca chewing gum. And I never got on the bandwagon because I didn't see that we needed another high focus industrial stimulant on the market. But coca would be great, and certainly in the Amazon, if you're a petrone, you encourage your workers to chew coca. I mean, they're worthless without coca. Give them coca and put a machete in their hands and they will just flail for hours at the bush.

Another example that's interesting, that shows how blinded and unaware we are of how drugs have shaped our society...We all know that slavery ended in the United States in the Civil War. And most people, if you question them, think that slavery existed before the Civil War in many places back into ancient times. This is not true at all. Slavery died in Western civilization with the collapse of the Roman empire. During the Dark Ages and the medieval period, if you owned a slave, you owned *one* slave. It was the equivalent of owning a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. It was an index of immense wealth, and social status, and that slave would be a houseboy, or a cook or something like that, someone close in to you, taking care of you. It was inconceivable to use slave labor in the production of an agricultural product, until Europe acquired an insatiable desire for sugar.

Now, let's think about sugar for a moment. Nobody needs sugar. You can go from birth to the grave without ever having a teaspoon full of white sugar. You will never miss it. Throughout the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, sugar was a drug, a medicine. It was used to pack wounds, to keep wounds septic. And it was very expensive and there was very little of it. Nobody even knew where it came from. It was called cane honey, because they knew it came from some kind of jointed grass, but nobody had a clear picture of what sugar was.

Well, when you extract sugar from sugar cane, it requires, in pre-modern technology, a temperature of about 130 degrees. You cannot -- free men will not work sugar. It's too unpleasant. You faint, you die from heat prostration. You have to take prisoners and you have to chain them to the sugar vats. And so, before the discovery of America, in the fifty years before the discovery of America, they began growing sugar cane in the east Atlantic islands, Medeira and the Canary Islands. And they brought Africans, and sold them into slavery specifically for sugar production.

Now when we get American history, they tell you that slaves were used to produce cotton and tobacco. In fact, this is not quite the truth. They had to find things for slaves to do, because they brought so many slaves to the New World to work sugar, and they had so many children, that then they just expanded and said, 'Well, we've used slaves to work sugar, we might as well use them in cotton and tobacco production.' In 1800, every ounce of sugar entering England was being produced by slave labor of the most brutal and demeaning sort. And there was very little protest over this. It was just accepted. To this day, sugar cultivation in the third world is a kind of institutionalized slavery. Christian, you know, the Popes, the kinds of Europe, all of Christian civilization acquiesced in the bringing back of a practice that had been discredited during the fall of Rome, in order to supply the insatiable need for sugar. It was an addiction. It had no cultural defense whatsoever.

...

what I discovered is drug smuggling is like assassination. If the government isn't involved, it never seems to really happen. And governments have been using drugs for centuries as forms of secret revenue. This whole sugar thing that I laid out to you, those were decisions made by the crown heads of Europe in collusion with the Pope. It wasn't common people who set those policies in place.

During the 1960's, when the black ghettos began to come apart, suddenly number three China white heroin was cheaper and more available than it had ever been in any time in this history of the heroin problem in the United States. Why? Because the CIA saw, you know, all these black guys are getting up, a bunch of uppity niggers as the government calls them, you just smother it in heroin. Get everybody either hooked or making money...

And they don't care really about the effects of drugs, and one group, one faction will work against another. For example, I'm a great afficianado of hashish, and hashish became very hard to get in the United States in the late 70's. But as soon as the Russians invaded Afghanistan, suddenly there was massive amounts of excellent Afghani hashish, at prices that nobody had seen for fifteen years. Well, the reason was, the CIA knows that hashish is not really a problem. But what they wanted is, they wanted an income for the mujahadin. And they had to pay for all these weapons. So they just started bringing it in wholesale. And it wasn't even a smuggling operation. I mean, I received reports from people who said, you know, 'Smuggling? They're not smuggling. They're unloading it on pier 39, union local 1030 is taking off, you know, five hundred pound blocks of hashish by the tens of thousands.' And the day the Afghan war ended? They staged an enormous series of interlocking busts on their own infrastructure, and they closed it down, and they pulled it to pieces.

When Khomeni kicked out the Shah, the Iranian heroin business then fell under the control of the mulahs, and at that point, suddenly cocaine emerges as a major problem in the United States, because we just switched our supply lines. We could no longer depend on Iranian heroin, because we couldn't depend on these screwy Islamic fundamentalists, so we just turned toward all of these company assets in Honduras and Ecuador and Columbia. Very, very cynical.

You know, it's only been a hundred and twenty years since the so called opium wars. Very few people know what the opium wars, what was the issue in the opium wars. Well, it turns out the British government wanted to deal opium in China, and the Chinese Emperor told them to get lost. And they flipped. And they sent naval units, and they laid siege to several Chinese cities, and they forced the Chinese imperial court to agree that they could deal as much opium as they wanted on the wharves of Shanghai...

The Japanese, when they invaded Manchuria in the Second World War, they immediately began producing heroin and opium in vast amounts, not then as an economic strategy, but as a strategy to break the will of the Chinese population by encouraging addiction, and there was vast amounts of opium addiction. If any of you saw 'The Last Emperor,' you recall that his mistress was severely addicted to opium, and it depicted it in a number of scenes.

So governments have very cynically manipulated drugs, so that the drugs which make it possible for capitalism to function are cheap and freely available, and the drugs which erode dominator values, or cause people to question their situation, are savagely supressed.

-terence mckenna

Casey Hardison is an entheogenic activist, unauthorized researcher and psychedelic chemist who is best known for his indefatigable good mood and enormous energy. Casey attended entheogen-related conferences, wrote articles for the MAPS Bulletin, The Entheogen Review, and contributed to Erowid. After moving to Britain in 2002, Casey chose to fulfill a ten-year spiritual journey to make LSD, in part to make up for the drought caused by a major LSD bust in the United States. He was arrested and convicted of LSD, DMT, and 2C-B manufacture in Britain. -erowid

Casey acted as his own lawyer during his trial. Instead of arguing he did not commit the acts, he argued that--as long as he harmed no one--he had the human right to engage in his chosen entheogenic praxis. In essence, Casey challenged the drug laws as a discriminatory affront to free thought, therapeutic choice and free religion. The trial judge rejected these arguments and an eight-week trial ensued after which Casey was convicted on March 18, 2005 on 6 of 8 counts and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on April 22, 2005. On appeal, Casey submitted substantially similar human rights arguments but these were rejected and his sentence upheld on May 25, 2006.

Casey then submitted his human rights arguments simultaneously to the European Court of Human Rights and to the House of Lords, the highest court of appeal in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, this June 2006 appeal, though capturing the spirit of his perceived injustice, was not viewed as a proper legal argument but as an attack on policy.

In early 2007, the Secretary of State formally opposed Casey's request for Judicial Review and Casey replied in March 2007 (see Reply to Secretary of State's Defence CM 6941). Casey continued to work through the British justice system to question the legality of his imprisonment, filing an August 2009 appeal against conviction on the basis that new evidence shows prima facie that the UK Goverment administers the law arbitrarily, giving rise to the fundamental inequality of treatment he experiences. After serving his time, Casey was released from prison on May 29, 2013. Back in the United States, he remarked: "Freedom is Ace!"
-erowid

My earlier arguments (2005-2006), though capturing the spirit of my perceived injustice, were not viewed as proper legal arguments but as attacks on policy. This prompted me to delve deeper into law, shed in some respects my egoic attachments, righteousness and arrogance, integrate my insights and present the core legal arguments with minimal obfuscation by my upsets.

As a result of this paradigm shift I now view my legal arguments through the lens of equal rights and equal protection, recognizing that a fair balance must be struck between the public's right to protection and the individual's right to personal autonomy. Crucially, I have come to see that Parliament has crafted a beautifully evolutive and dynamic legal framework with inherent regulatory flexibility suitable to all eventualities, classes of persons and drugs, particularly alcohol and tobacco, but that Government has not been operating the law in a consistent and evidenced-based manner as Parliament intended. Consequently, Government has the balance tilted in favor of the majority who use alcohol and tobacco without a consistent and objective basis as is required by law.

I have asserted from the outset that my investigation, arrest and trial result from a majoritarian abuse of power in the unequal implementation by the UK Executive of a neutral Act of Parliament. I believe, and now have the evidence and Government admissions to demonstrate it, that the Executive under-regulates the conduct of the majority who prefer to exercise property rights in drugs property such as alcohol and tobacco and over-regulates the conduct of minorities who prefer to exercise property rights in other drugs property with substantially similar potential to cause harm.

This unequal treatment is contrary to the common law principle of equal applicability of neutral laws and illegal in terms of Government's statutory duties under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. As such, I believe this unequal treatment denies equal rights and equal protection to all citizens and contributes to tens-of-thousands of unnecessary deaths and imprisonments each year on both sides of the legal distinction and that neither the people nor Parliament intends these consequences.

I have launched Civil legal actions to challenge the UK Executive to honor their commitment to implement evidence-based policy making where like cases are treated alike and unlike cases are treated differently. Each step of the way, I receive concessions from the Executive, the Parliament and the Court which contribute toward my ability to launch an effective criminal appeal against conviction and/or sentence. -erowid

The United States Attorney General (A.G.) is the head of the United States Department of Justice per 28 U.S.C. § 503, concerned with legal affairs, and is the chief law enforcement officer and chief lawyer of the United States government. -Wikipedia

By Sharon Bernstein | SACRAMENTO, CALIF.
The prospect of Senator Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general has cast uncertainty over the country's nascent legalized marijuana industry, souring deals and disrupting share prices since the longtime critic of the drug was nominated.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirmed President Donald Trump's nomination of Sessions by a vote of 52-47 after strong opposition from Democrats.. The Republican senator from Alabama has opposed attempts to legalize marijuana and reduce drug sentences and once urged the death penalty for drug traffickers.

Trump named Sessions as his choice to lead the Justice Department on Nov. 18, shaking the exuberance of an industry that last year reached $7 billion in legal sales and generated half a billion dollars in sales taxes.

The choice of Sessions drove some businesses back underground and scared away investors, industry experts said. Growers are seeking advice on how to protect themselves from a crackdown, while other cannabis companies are seeking ways to shield their records from investigators.

"Everyone's back into wait-and-see mode," said Sasha Kadey, chief marketing officer for Greenlane, which distributes cannabis accessories such as vapor smoking devices. "Because one doesn't want to paint a target on one's back."
http://www.reuters.com/a...-marijuana-idUSKBN15O07M

Confederate hobbit Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the III was confirmed...

Looooool!

WASHINGTON ― Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday restated his opposition to marijuana use and offered an ominous warning about state-level marijuana legalization efforts, suggesting that such policies would open states to “violence,” as well as potential repercussions from the federal government.

“I don’t think America is going to be a better place when people of all ages, and particularly young people, are smoking pot,” Sessions said to reporters Monday at the Department of Justice. “I believe it’s an unhealthy practice, and current levels of THC in marijuana are very high compared to what they were a few years ago, and we’re seeing real violence around that.”

Sessions said he had a meeting on Monday with the attorney general of Nebraska, who is very concerned about marijuana flowing in from Colorado, which legalized weed in 2012. “Experts are telling me there’s more violence around marijuana than one would think and there’s big money involved,” he said.

Nebraska has been pushing back against its neighbor state’s marijuana laws for years. In 2014, Nebraska, along with Oklahoma, filed a federal lawsuit against Colorado in an attempt to invalidate its nascent laws allowing the sale of recreational marijuana, which the states claimed was increasing trafficking of the drug into their states. The Supreme Court dismissed the suit last year.

“You can’t sue somebody for drug debt; the only way to get your money is through strong-arm tactics, and violence tends to follow that,” Sessions said.

“States, they can pass the laws they choose,” he added. “I would just say it does remain a violation of federal law to distribute marijuana throughout any place in the United States, whether a state legalizes it or not.”

His comments appear to line up with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s comments last week that opened the door for a Trump administration crackdown on recreational marijuana.
http://www.huffingtonpos...58b4b189e4b0780bac2c9fd8

essions said during his hearing. “The U.S. Congress made the possession of marijuana in every state — and the distribution — an illegal act. If that’s something that’s not desired any longer, Congress should pass a law to change the rule.
http://www.marketwatch.c...d-change-them-2017-01-11

Sessions met twice last year with the top Russian diplomat in Washington whose interactions with President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn led to Flynn's firing, according to the Justice Department.

Sessions did not mention either meeting during his confirmation hearings when he said he knew of no contacts between Trump surrogates and Russians. A Justice official said Sessions didn't mislead senators during his confirmation.
The revelation prompted key Democrats to call for Sessions' resignation and led two top Republicans to call on him to recuse himself from Trump-Russia inquiries.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/...ian-ambassador-meetings/

In a floor speech earlier this year, Senator 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….
http://www.politico.com/...n-legal-marijuana-214501

As a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions said he thought the KKK "were OK until I found out they smoked pot.
http://www.politico.com/...n-legal-marijuana-214501

Sessions, who turns 70 on Christmas Eve, has called marijuana reform a "tragic mistake" and criticized FBI Director James Comey and Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch for not vigorously enforcing a the federal prohibition that President Obama has called “untenable over the long term.” In a floor speech earlier this year, Senator 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….It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal.” http://www.politico.com/...n-legal-marijuana-214501

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.” He voiced concern over statistics showing more drivers were testing positive for THC, the active component in marijuana, in certain states.

...

Sessions said at the hearing. “It [cannabis legalization] 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.”

https://www.washingtonpo.../?utm_term=.fc5fe7640306