Racist little elf man Jeff Sessions wants to prosecute sick people on medical marijuana
America is a rather large mess at the moment. When our president briefly takes time off from golfing, he mostly tweets out his anger at the press, or asks his cabinet to go around and tell him what they love most about him.
Meanwhile, the GOP-led Senate is trying to pass a healthcare bill behind closed doors that would take an estimated 24 million people off healthcare and (of course) slash taxes for the 1 percent. No one has seen the bill, the Republicans are literally trying to force the legislation through in the dead of night because, as one staffer put it, “we aren’t stupid.”
And, while trying to pass a secret bill that will end up in Americans losing lives, today, Mitch McConnell banned the press from asking questions in the Capitol building, which is definitely something a functional and transparent government does.
ALERT: Reporters at Capitol have been told they are not allow to film interviews with senators in hallways, contrary to years of precedent
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) June 13, 2017
The GOP is turning our country into a flaming hellscape of misery as we careen further to environmental and healthcare disaster; the Republicans seem set on letting as many poor and sick people die as possible to enforce their voter base and keep cutting those taxes.
Things are very bad. There’s a fucking endless list of apocalyptic-level issues that threaten our Democracy on a daily basis, so naturally our brave Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to go after… medical marijuana.
Jeff Sessions has taken a careful look at the plethora of issues that threaten our great nation and has concluded that people that legally use marijuana as medicine are the problem that he wants to focus his efforts on.
In a May letter to Congress, first obtained by Massroots.com and verified by the Washington Post, Sessions wrote,
“I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.”
Specifically, Sessions wants Congress to take away the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which, according to the Post, prevents the Justice Department from using federal funds “to prevent certain states ‘from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.'”
Basically, the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment keeps the federal government from going into a state and enforcing federal law on medical marijuana users or practitioners.
Sessions has seemingly linked marijuana and the opiate epidemic, claiming a “historic drug epidemic” is the reasoning behind his request to congress.
An issue with this logic, as everything with Trumpism, is that it is grounded in old white men’s prejudicial emotions, as opposed to actual fact.
A 2014 report from medical journal JAMA found that states with medical marijuana laws saw 25% fewer opiate deaths over the study period from 1999-2010.
Obviously there is nothing but Jeff Sessions’ own agenda against marijuana, minorities, hippies, or whatever the hell he thinks is going on with medical marijuana. Surely the Attorney General of the United States would be doing actual research into the science regarding laws he wants to pass or people he wants to put in jail.
Sessions reacted in February to a Washington Post op-ed criticizing the Trump administration’s marijuana policy, demonstrating that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the massive amounts of federally-funded studies that prove that marijuana can help sick people.
“I see a line in The Washington Post today [link added] that I remember from the ’80s, ‘Marijuana is a cure for opiate abuse.’ Give me a break. This is the kind of argument that’s been made out there to just — almost a desperate attempt to defend the harmlessness of marijuana or even its benefits. I doubt that’s true. Maybe science will prove I’m wrong.”
The most recent, most prominent study that does indeed prove Sessions wrong is a January 2017 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that found concrete evidence of therapeutic uses of cannabis.
From the study,
“The committee found evidence to support that patients who were treated with cannabis or cannabinoids were more likely to experience a significant reduction in pain symptoms. For adults with multiple sclerosis-related muscle spasms, there was substantial evidence that short-term use of certain ‘oral cannabinoids’ – man-made, cannabinoid-based medications that are orally ingested – improved their reported symptoms. Furthermore, in adults with chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, there was conclusive evidence that certain oral cannabinoids were effective in preventing and treating those ailments.”
So, there’s science refuting Jeff Sessions dumb, Keebler elf-looking ass. Medical marijuana helps people, often those dealing with the gravest of illnesses.
As for the voting base, an April 2017 Quinnipiac poll found that 94 percent OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC SUPPORTS MEDICAL MARIJUANA.
And as for Sessions’ own party? Trump himself said back in February that he wants to leave medical marijuana up to states and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R.-Calif.) slammed Sessions’ letter, saying through a spokesperson,
“Mr. Sessions stands athwart an overwhelming majority of Americans and even, sadly, against veterans and other suffering Americans who we now know conclusively are helped dramatically by medical marijuana.”
Medical marijuana has been scientifically proven to help people with a variety of ailments. For certain sicknesses, like children with rare diseases that cause chronic seizures, a dose of CBD oil is literally the only treatment that has worked.
Quite simply, Jeff Sessions is a danger to the American people as long as he holds his place atop the Justice Department.
Sessions testifies to Congress today about his own involvement with Russia and the Trump campaign.