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 cannabis legalization whose elevation to attorney general could deal a blow to state-level cannabis legalization efforts across the country.
At a Senate drug hearing in April, Sessions said that “we need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say cannabis 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 cannabis, in certain states.
Sessions further argued that a lack of leadership from President Obama had been one of the drivers of the trend toward cannabis legalization in recent years. “I think one of [Obama’s] great failures, it’s obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on cannabis,” Sessions said at the hearing. “It 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 cannabis.”
