Pro-marijuana magazine demonizes Sessions: “Jeff Sessions goes full reefer madness on pot”
~My comment: More education needs to be done to show people the dangers of pot use. At the same time I wonder if de-criminalizing it would be better than turning our nation into a police state against a “plant” – for crying out loud. I believe pot can be dangerous and makes people ‘stupid’, and it is not an answer for every health issue known to man, as it is so often advertised. The very fact that in the conspirator’s long term agenda was to legalize drugs to dumb down the masses should be reason enough to reject drug use. This is a complex issue and all sides of the issue need to be presented.
One of the facts that people don’t consider is how many people are in prison over marijuana possession. This has generated a prison population that is then utilized as a slave labor source for companies. There are over 2 million people in prison in the United States, more than anywhere in the world, including China. Those companies in turn use lobbyists to persuade politicians to keep those laws on the books so those companies stocks will go up and they will keep making more money from prisoners. That entire process is actually unconstitutional – like debtors prisons centuries ago. Enforcing those draconian laws breaks up families and ruins lives.
I am totally against drug use, but when you look at the entire picture of what is going on, I don’t feel pot use should be a criminal offense. It simply doesn’t make sense. A free people should be allowed to do what they like as long as they are not infringing on others. A free nation cannot legislate morality, people need to be free to choose. George Eaton
~Jeff Sessions Goes Full ‘Reefer Madness’ on Pot
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
16 March 17
Attorney general says marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin
ttorney General Jeff Sessions continued a personal campaign to demonize marijuana, calling cannabis a “life-wrecking dependency” that is “only slightly less awful” than heroin in a speech on violent crime in Richmond, Virginia, Wednesday.
Insisting that the federal government should return to a Nancy Reagan-style, 1980s anti-drug campaign – “educating people and telling them the terrible truth” about controlled substances – Sessions conflated the nation’s opioid addiction and overdose crisis, which now claims 140 lives a day, with marijuana, a drug he said will “destroy your life.”
Sessions has no facts on his side. The use of medical pot as a painkiller can provide an alternative to opioids, and many in recovery cite cannabis as lessening the agony of opiate withdrawal. Research published on the federal government’s own DrugAbuse.gov website finds that states with medical marijuana programs have reported “reductions of 16 to 31 percent in mortality due to prescription opioid overdoses, and 28 to 35 percent in admissions for treatment of opioid addiction.”
No matter, Sessions cast his ignorance as bold, “unfashionable” truth-telling. The attorney general’s remarks on marijuana follow:
“I realize this may be an unfashionable belief in a time of growing tolerance of drug use. But too many lives are at stake to worry about being fashionable. I reject the idea that America will be a better place if marijuana is sold in every corner store. And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana – so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful. Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life.”
Answering reporters’ follow-up questions, Sessions added that, “I think medical marijuana has been hyped, maybe too much” and declared himself “dubious” about benefits of smoked marijuana.
Despite the Drug War saber-rattling, Sessions proceeded to offer a vague note of reassurance on the future of state-legal recreational marijuana. The attorney general said that “much” of the Cole memo – the Obama DOJ guidance deprioritizing federal pot enforcement in states that have legalized – is “valid,” and he recognized that federal law enforcement is “not able to go into a state and pick up the work that police and sheriffs have been doing for decades.”
