This is Attorney General Jeff Sessions. A diminutive hill person from Alabama.
Here he is when you get him all excited about something
Finally I give you the expression he makes when he’s finished performing fellatio on the President
This is medical cannabis. Jeff Sessions doesn’t like cannabis. He doesn’t think that medical cannabis is a thing. All cannabis is bad, and 2 marijuanas can kill you. I’m also willing to bet he’s never actually tried it.
During the Obama Administration, a memorandum was released called “The Cole Memorandum.” Many normally reliable news sources are calling this memorandum “the key to opening the cannabis industry.”
How can that be possible when medical cannabis had already been legal in some states for close to 15 years?
Also, we can’t forget about the Federal Medical Marijuana Program created under President Bush I in the 80’s, which still has 2 surviving members, receiving 200 joints per month delivered to their local pharmacy courtesy of the Federal Government. One of the survivors lives in my city. She says the stuff the Feds give her is crap.
And let’s not forget that after releasing the Cole Memorandum, Obama still preceded to unleash more DEA raids on medical cannabis operations in medically legal states than his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
I personally worked for a few Political Action Groups prior to the 2012 Oregon vote on recreational cannabis(which failed, and I was diagnosed with cancer that year, so I was unable to continue working on the successful 2014 campaign.) There was no Cole Memo.
One of these groups was actually operating a clandestine medical dispensary as early as 2009. And everyone who needed medicine and could show a card got it. Even homeless people walking in off the street with no money(I became one of those people.)
We had no Cole Memorandum. We knew that at any moment the City, State, or Federal authorities could come in and destroy us. In the end we were destroyed by sectarian infighting and certain people’s greed. No authorities ever came.
Just today, I’ve been in 2 recreational dispensaries and had 15-20 minute conversations with a manager and an owner. I also received a delivery and had a long chat with a driver. None seemed at all concerned. We’re talking about an industry where people were investing their life savings before they could find banking services for their businesses. Many still don’t have them. They get by. It’s a mostly cash industry anyway.
They knew that they were taking a calculated risk, and at this point, they don’t feel any threat to the industry they’ve created. They feel that all of this panic is mostly related to it being a fairly slow news cycle, with no breaking scandals this particular few days.
Despite what Reuters or the Associated Press may report, I’m reporting what I’m seeing on the ground here in Oregon.
If you need any context around the current events, here’s a link to the AP article about AG Jeff Sessions revoking The Cole Memo.
https://www.apnews.com/19f6bfec15a74733b40eaf0ff9162bfa
Thanks for the refreshing take! I do think the industry is already too big for him to take it down, but he is also really dumb and part of a really dumb administration, so I'm still not totally at ease.
Exactly. I was talking about it with a friend late last night(not an industry guy. Just another guy like me on the outskirts trying to get our hustle on.) We were thinking about the fact that aside from the fact that we now have thousands of large scale farms that are in full compliance with state law, and providing thousands of jobs, we also have thousands of stores providing thousands of decent paying jobs(they tend to make more than coffee baristas. Maybe not as much as a good bartender, but the perks are there.)
On top of that, most of the states that have passed rec allow private households to have a certain number of plants(4 in Oregon, 8 I think in Washington, not sure about the other states, it changes.)
So to shut this down, they would have to destroy thousands upon thousands of jobs, destroy millions of homes, and most importantly, they would need a reason to justify launching such an offensive to the public.
The majority of people in law enforcement don’t want to see legalization overturned. All it will do is take away American jobs, destroy American lives, and put control of a drug back into foreign hands, and give the cops one more thing to spend time on to take them away from violent crimes.
The only people pushing for any regression in the law are people who owe their political careers to Big Pharma(pretty much anyone who has ever been a member of the US Senate, which which Jeff Sessions was...)