The Trump administration is moving to reverse an Obama-era drug policy that allowed legalized marijuana to flourish in states that declared it legal, despite a long-standing federal law that prohibits it.
The Associated Press is reporting the decision which is expected to be formally announced later today.
The plan: Attorney General Jeff Sessions will give federal prosecutors the ability to determine how aggressively to enforce the federal marijuana law even in states where it’s legal.
The decision reverses the 2013 Obama policy, the so-called “Cole memo,” which kept the federal government from getting in the way of states that legalized marijuana, as long as they worked to prevent the drug from being used by children and criminal gangs and kept it from migrating to states that had not legalized it.
Kevin Sabet, a former Obama administration drug advisor and marijuana-legalization opponent, says the move is a victory for public health and will help to contain the marijuana industry which has followed the tobacco industry’s model of attracting big investors and targeting youth.
“It stops them in their tracks,” he told CBN News. “These companies rely on major institutional investments…now that this has happened they are not able to do that.”
Sabet also predicted that the policy reversal will have a chilling effect on other states considering marijuana legalization.
READ: Stoned: How Colorado’s 5 Years of Legal Pot Is ‘Devastating Communities’
But critics of the decision say it tramples on states’ rights.
Colorado senator Cory Gardner tweeted a video of the president on the campaign trail in 2016 saying the states should decide on marijuana policy. He also said, “the Justice Department has trampled on the will of the voters in Colorado and other states.”
Eight states and the District of Columbia allow the recreational use of marijuana and it has become a multi-million dollar industry that attracts top investors as well as helping to fund schools, educational programs and law enforcement.
In California alone, sales are expected to bring in $1 billion annually in tax revenue in the next several years.
Marijuana legalization supporters were quick to condemn the Sessions’ decision on Thursday.
Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said Sessions “wants to maintain a system that has led to tremendous injustice…and that has wasted federal resources on a huge scale.”
The latest Gallup poll shows growing public support for marijuana legalization. An October 2017 poll says 64 percent of Americans say its use should be made legal. When Gallup first questioned survey respondents about the topic in 1969, just 12 percent supported legalization and in 2001, about one-third favored it.
Still, many Americans were recently appalled by a CNN New Year’s Eve story that featured a reporter with a lit marijuana cigarette showing another person demonstrating the correct use of a bong pipe.
READ: CNN Promotes Drug Use on LIVE TV: American Journalism Gone to Pot?
