This isn’t the cannabis crackdown Jeff Sessions envisioned.
Back in the early days of 2017, when the newly ensconced attorney general had the cannabis industry popping Xanax and praying twice on Sunday, Sessions loved to talk smack about legal marijuana. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he once declared. “We have too much of a tolerance for drug use,” he told an audience of cops last year. “We need to say, as Nancy Reagan said, ‘Just say no.’ There’s no excuse for this, it’s not recreational. Lives are at stake, and we’re not going to worry about being fashionable.”
With Obama gone, he assured us, things would change. No more hippies smoking doobies in church. The rule of law was returning to America.
So here we are, almost 18 months later, and the Department of Justice is finally laying the wood to the marijuana growers. They’re cracking down hard. People are going to jail.
And the legal, regulated cannabis industry is benefitting.
Consider:
- Last month in California, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of California oversaw one of the largest marijuana operations in recent history. On April 3 and 4, hundreds of federal and local law enforcement agents raided 74 houses in the Sacramento region, breaking up a network of illegal cannabis growers financed by dark money from China.
- Last week in Washington State, the US Attorney for Western Washington arrested severalillegal, unlicensed cannabis growers also financed by suspicious money transfers from China.
- Yesterday in Sacramento, federal and state authorities announced a joint effort to target illegal cannabis grows, with $2.5 million in federal money backing the effort.
The upshot: The US Department of Justice is enforcing the legalization rules and regulations established in the nine legal cannabis states.
‘it’s awesome’ ?