At a rally last year, Donald Trump said that he generally supported medical marijuana and its legality should be a state decision, The Washington Post reports. But Jeff Sessions, whom Trump plans to appoint as attorney general, has a different attitude.
"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 said in April during a Senate hearing, according to The Washington Post. "This drug is dangerous, you cannot play with it, it is not funny, it’s not something to laugh about...good people don’t smoke marijuana."
He also said he believed Obama failed the country by not cracking down on legalization.
According to The New York Times, a Black lawyer who had worked with Sessions testified to Congress in 1986 that he'd said he considered the Ku Klux Klan "okay until I found out they smoked pot."
The Drug Policy Alliance's Ethan Nadelmann told The Post that Sessions' stance has major implications for the Trump administration. "Those who counted on Donald Trump’s reassurance that marijuana reforms ‘should be a state issue’ will be sorely disappointed," he said in a statement.
On top of that, Mike Pence is opposed to legalization of marijuana for both recreation and medical purposes, according to International Business Times.
On the state level, the 2016 election was a victory for those in favor of legalization. Four states voted to legalize recreational marijuana and three more voted to legalize medical marijuana. But the presidential election's results may tell a different story.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT