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U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions

Jeff Sessions missed major opportunities this week to rail against legal marijuana, giving marijuana-industry experts some much-craved hope that a crackdown is not imminent.

The cannabis-hating U.S. Attorney General delivered a speech at the Nevada U.S. Attorney’s Office in Las Vegas on Wednesday about crime, drugs, and immigration, but failed to mention the state’s newly launched recreational program.

Scott Pack has been indicted by an Arapahoe County grand jury for what attorney Matthew Buck has called “the largest fraud case in the history of Colorado’s marijuana industry.” Buck, who filed a lawsuit in the matter earlier this year, says the grand jury’s findings tie Pack to what prosecutors describe as a massive operation that grew marijuana for distribution outside Colorado and previously led to the indictment of sixteen people, including Pack associate Rudy Saenz. Among those reportedly indicted along with Pack is Renee Rayton, a former officer for the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division.

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The City of Miami might want to consider testing Barnaby Min for drugs. The deputy city attorney must have been high when he compared legalizing medical marijuana to legalizing pedophilia during a Miami Planning Board session last week. He was arguing against dispensaries in the city. In the tape of that meeting, Min comes off like that college stoner kid who takes massive bong rips before giving a speech in class.

“If the City of Miami, for some infinite, God-forbidden reason, thought having sex with a child was a great way to recover from some issue and so we wrote that into our city code, just because the city says that’s legal doesn’t mean it’s legal,” he said.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tied the regulated marijuana industry to opioid addiction last week. At a press briefing, he told reporters: “I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing that we should be doing is encouraging people…. There’s still a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature.”

Opioid addiction is a well-documented epidemic in the United States; 33,000 people died from overdosing on prescription painkillers, heroin and similar drugs in 2015 — a number on par with those killed by firearms and those who died in car accidents in the same year. But opioid use is down in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana.

The news that Senator Jeff Sessions will be the new Attorney General made pot proponents very unhappy. Is it time to panic? Here’s an opinion from attorney Tom Downey, former head of the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses, who’s watching developments in D.C. closely:

What will happen to the legal marijuana industry in Colorado and other states under the Trump administration and newly named Attorney General Jeff Sessions? The short answer is that we don’t know, but significant change is unlikely anytime soon.

President-elect Donald Trump has announced his pick for attorney general, and the marijuana industry is less than enthused. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has made multiple public statements voicing his disapproval of cannabis.

Industry leaders are hoping Trump’s administration respects states’ rights and the electorate’s decision to legalize medical and recreational marijuana in over half of the states.

The industry is worried.

Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek

President-elect Donald Trump nominated anti-pot hardliner Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama (R) for Attorney General. At a Senate hearing in April 2016, Sessions said that ‘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.’

“I think one of [Obama’s] great failures, it’s obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana,” Sessions said at the hearing. “It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started ‘Just Say No.’ ”

Lawmakers, he said, have to “send that message with clarity that good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
USNews calls Sessions an “ Existential threat” to state-legal cannabis. Industry leaders are very nervous.

Reason points out that Sessions has an “aversion to civil rights” and gay rights. The U.S. Senate failed to confirm him for a federal judgeship in 1986, amid allegations of what late Senator Ted Kennedy called “racial insensitivity” and “lack of commitment to equal justice under the law.” The New York Times editorializes that the nomination is an “ insult to justice.”

What does a Trump presidency mean for the industry? The transition team isn’t talking. NBC speculates.So does CBS.

The Sessions nomination needs to be approved by the Senate. Have a view you want to share?  Contact your Senator.

Before the Sessions pick, the Washington Post’s Radley Balko said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) would also be “ terrifying.”

Before the Sessions pick, anti-legalization activist Kevin Sabet said, “A Trump administration throws everything up in the air… “Is it going to be ‘ states’ rights Trump’ or ‘law-and-order Trump’?”

Marijuana.com’s Tom Angell has launched a petition for Trump to keep his “marijuana pledge” to respect state laws.  Even if he doesn’t go after the industry, The Stranger says President Trump will  make the industry whiter.

It’s official, Denver will be the first U.S. city to license social use businesses.

After the Massachusetts REC vote, Rhode Island could legalize REC through the legislature. Alaska is setting up a  drop box system  to collect taxes in cash.

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery (R), said looser cannabis regulations in Memphis and Nashville can’t stand.

Due to a glitch, it appears that MED in California will be tax-free until the state’s REC program begins in 2018.

Some conservatives don’t like that MED patients can’t buy guns.

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office could see a substantial drop in revenue if Proposition 205 passes, owing to the sudden disappearance of thousands of marijuana-possession cases.

Prop 205, which Arizona voters will decide on November 8, would give adults 21 and older the freedom to possess personal amounts of marijuana and set up a limited retail-sales system.

After working as a U.S. Senate page when he was sixteen, Jake Lilly went on to intern at the White House in 1998. After receiving his law degree at Cornell, he joined the Army and in 2005 served in Iraq, where he led search-and-rescue teams. Before all that, however, he was thirteen when his Boy Scout troop visited Colorado. He fell in love with the state, went home to Maryland, and told his parents that he would live here someday. Now 39, with thirteen years as a prosecutor, litigator and defense attorney under his belt, Lilly is running for district attorney of Jefferson and Gilpin counties, against incumbent Pete Weir.

His platform focuses on criminal-justice reform — reform he determined was needed after seeing the effects of the drug war up close. Lilly  believes in finding alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders and finding treatment alternatives for drug abusers. We sat down with Lilly to learn more about his positions, especially his support for continued legalization of marijuana.

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