Trump administration plans crackdown on recreational marijuana
President Donald Trump’s administration said on Thursday for the first time that it will crack down on marijuana sales in states that have approved recreational pot use.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the Department of Justice will pursue enforcement of federal law against recreational use, but not medical use. The statement marked a major break with the Obama administration’s hands-off approach to the growing marijuana legalization movement.
“I do believe that you’ll see greater enforcement,” Spicer told reporters at his daily briefing. “Because again there’s a big difference between the medical use … that’s very different than the recreational use, which is something the Department of Justice will be further looking into.”
The decision is certain to provoke a fight with the states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Those states are Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington and the District of Columbia.
Jay Inslee, Washington state’s Democratic governor, made it clear earlier this month that the state would fight hard if the Trump team tried to block its recreational pot sales. “I think it would be a really big mistake for them to pick this fight, and I hope it will not occur,” Inslee said.
California legalization could translate to $5 billion in annual retail sales if Trump doesn’t intervene, according to estimates from Marijuana Business Daily. A cannabis caucus formed in Congress last week and vowed to fight Trump, if necessary, and protect legalization. Among the co-founders is Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican and Trump supporter whose name was floated for secretary of state before ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson got the job.
Nevada Senate Majority Leader Aaron D. Ford called on the state’s attorney general to “vigorously defend” the state’s laws.
“Not only did voters overwhelmingly vote to approve the legalization of recreational marijuana, the governor’s proposed education budget depends on tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales,” Ford said. “Any action by the Trump administration would be an insult to Nevada voters and would pick the pockets of Nevada’s students.”
Seventy-one percent of voters say the government should not enforce federal marijuana laws in states that have legalized medical or recreational marijuana use, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released Thursday. Fifty nine percent support legalizing recreational marijuana while 93 percent of Americans support medical marijuana use.
Washington and Colorado were the first states to legalize marijuana in 2012, while California followed suit last year. Twenty-eight states have legalized the drug for medical use.
Spicer compared the use of recreational marijuana to the opioid addiction crisis that has ravaged many communities across the nation. “The last thing we should be doing is encouraging people,” he said. He referred specific questions on enforcement to the Justice Department.
But there’s little evidence to connect marijuana to opioid addiction. In 2014, John Hopkins School of Public Health published a report that found in states that had legalized medical marijuana “the annual number of deaths from prescription drug overdose is 25 percent lower than in states where medical marijuana remains illegal.”
“Science has discredited the idea that marijuana serves as any kind of gateway drug, and the addiction and death rates associated with opioids simply do not occur in any way with cannabis,” said Taylor West, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association.
Backers of marijuana legalization had been been waiting to see how the Trump administration would respond to the growing conflict between state and federal marijuana laws.
Trump has voiced conflicting opinions about marijuana legalization through the years. At one point, during the presidential campaign, he said he supported allowing states to choose how to legislate medical marijuana. “In terms of marijuana and legalization, I think that should be a state issue, state-by-state,” Trump told reporters in 2015.
But Trump’s appointment of former Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, a longtime marijuana foe who criticized President Barack Obama for not enforcing the ban on pots sales, rattled pot backers and had them braced for the worst. Obama, who smoked marijuana in his younger days in Hawaii, had left states to deal with the issue after famously telling ABC-TV’s Barbara Walters in 2012 that he had “bigger fish to fry.”
During his recent confirmation hearing, Sessions did not reveal whether he would enforce the laws. “Using good judgment about how to handle these cases will be a responsibility of mine,” he said. “I know it won’t be an easy decision, but I will try to do my duty in a fair and just way.”
Marijuana advocates said Trump risks a public backlash if he cracks down on weed.
“If the administration is looking for ways to become less popular, cracking down on voter-approved marijuana laws would be a great way to do it,” said Tom Angell, chairman of the pro-legalization group Marijuana Majority.
“The vast majority of Americans agree that the federal government has no business interfering in state marijuana laws,” said Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project. “This administration is claiming that it values states’ rights, so we hope they will respect the rights of states to determine their own marijuana policies.”
But Kevin Sabet, president of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, called the current situation “unsustainable.”
“States that have legalized marijuana continue to see a black market for the drug, increased rates of youth drug use, continued high rates of alcohol sales, and interstate trafficking, with drug dealers taking advantage of non-enforcement,” he said. “This isn’t an issue about states rights – it’s an issue of public health and safety for communities.”
Still, some industry officials said it was hard to take the White House announcement seriously, given the growing popularity of marijuana and widespread pubic acceptance for legalization.
“I don’t think it’s realistic for Trump to wage an all-out war against recreational marijuana. … My guess is that this is saber rattling,” said Aaron Herzberg, partner and general counsel of Calcann Holdings LLC, a California medical marijuana real estate company.
Spicer said the administration would not go after medical marijuana use.
“The president understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing, especially terminal diseases, and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana, can bring to them,” Spicer said.
Trump administration puts recreational marijuana in crosshairsStates where recreational marijuana is legal will be subject to “greater enforcement” under the Trump administration, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Thursday.
But watchers of Colorado’s billion-dollar weed industry are waiting to see whether Spicer’s statements during his daily briefing actually yield a real shift in enforcement policy.
“There’s a big difference between (medical marijuana) and recreational marijuana, and I think when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing we should be doing is encouraging people,” Spicer said, giving the first glimpse of the new administration’s views of the growing legal cannabis industry. “There is still a federal law that we need to abide by in terms of recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature.”
Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, although voters in Colorado and seven other states and Washington, D.C., approved measures to legalize recreational pot sales and consumption. Medical marijuana is legal in 28 states, Puerto Rico, Guam and the District of Columbia.
When asked about increased enforcement around recreational pot, Spicer said: “That’s a question for the Department of Justice. I do believe that you’ll see greater enforcement of it.”
Mark Bolton, marijuana advisor to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, said it would be premature to speculate about the administration’s intentions.
“We have worked with the Department of Justice since legalization to develop a framework that respects voters and promotes public safety,” he said in an e-mail.
Brookings Institution drug policy expert John Hudak said the White House statement “is not a death knell for recreational marijuana, nor is it clarification.”
Hudak said a troubling aspect of the briefing was Spicer’s “clear lack of understanding of federal law.”
Spicer claims there’s a difference between medical marijuana and recreational marijuana, Hudak said.
“I think it’s true in practice, it’s true in public opinion, but it’s not true in federal law,” Hudak said. “Medical marijuana is just as illegal as recreational marijuana.”
And yet, the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment keeps the Department of Justice from spending money to enforce the Controlled Substances Act in medical marijuana states, he said.
“I think what is said from the podium and what happens in policy often have a disconnect,” Hudak said.
Pushing back in Congress
Uncertainty has lingered for months around how the Trump administration might handle the topic of marijuana legalization.
“The president has said time and again that the decision about marijuana needs to be left to the states,” U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, a Boulder Democrat, said in a statement about Spicer’s comments. “Now either the president is flip-flopping or his staff is, once again, speaking out of turn. Either way, these comments leave doubt and uncertainty for the marijuana industry, stifling job growth in my state.”
Polis is a member of the congressional Cannabis Caucus, along with Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon, whose state started recreational sales in the fall of 2015.
“The national prohibition of cannabis has been a failure, and millions of voters across the country have demanded a more sensible approach. I’m looking forward to working with the leadership of our newly formed cannabis caucus to ensure that these wishes are protected,” Blumenauer said in a statement.
Colorado, which in 2014 became the first state to initiate recreational marijuana sales, recorded $1.3 billion in medical and recreational cannabis sales in 2016. Sales nationwide are projected to reach $24.5 billion by 2025, according to a report issued earlier this week by industry analytics firm New Frontier Data.
Adhering to Cole Memo for now
After winning the election, President Donald Trump nominated Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions a vocal opponent of legalization, as the nation’s attorney general. This raised questions about the direction the Department of Justice would take regarding the 2013 Cole Memo, which established guidance for when federal prosecutors should enforce U.S. marijuana laws..
All U.S. attorneys, including Bob Troyer, the acting U.S. attorney for Colorado and Wyoming, operate under the Cole Memo. While Spicer’s comments Thursday indicated new guidance may be coming, nothing new has been handed down.
“We will follow that guidance until, if or when, we receive new or amended guidance,” said Jeff Dorschner, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado.
Trump has wavered on the marijuana legalization issue, but said on the campaign trail that he favors states’ rights and would not interfere even with legal recreational-use states such as Colorado.
Andrew Freedman, a marijuana regulations consultant who previously served as Colorado’s director of marijuana coordination, said that it would be a very complicated exercise — especially legally — to unravel the regulations put in place by states such as Colorado, Washington and Oregon. The federal government also would be going against the will of voters who told their states to develop regulations, he said.
“States are set up to be laboratories of democracy,” he said.
States argue that by regulating the sale of pot they can help ensure public health and safety.
Freedman worries that if the feds try to undo the regulated pot industry, “in that vacuum it would be the black market that comes in to fulfill the supply.”
Dan Anglin, the chairman of the Colorado Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, said he was surprised by Spicer’s statements. A crackdown would harm the president’s popularity considering that legalization has broad support across the nation, he said.
“The administration has its hands full with a lot of other things which they intended to change,” he said. “This didn’t seem like something that was at the top 100 of President Trump’s list.”
Anglin didn’t expect an immediate crackdown, but said he wouldn’t be surprised if cannabis businesses received legal notices to stop selling and growing. If that does happen, he said he hopes Attorney General Cynthia Coffman will step up to defend Colorado’s constitution.
In the meantime, Anglin said it will be business as usual at his Boulder edibles company, Americanna.
As a voting Republican, Anglin said he was disappointed by the federal government stepping in on what he called a states’ rights issue.
“If we were issued a federal order to cease and desist, we would,” Anglin said. “However, I would imagine that many of us — if not all of us — would join in a suit against the federal government for making such a decision.”
Nevada Senate Majority Leader Aaron D. Ford released a statement saying Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt “must make it immediately clear that he will vigorously defend Nevada’s recreational marijuana laws from federal overreach. Not only did voters overwhelmingly vote to approve the legalization of recreational marijuana, the Governor’s proposed education budget depends on tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales. Any action by the Trump administration would be an insult to Nevada voters and would pick the pockets of Nevada’s students.”
Tom Angell of drug law reform group Marijuana Majority said: “If the administration is looking for ways to become less popular, cracking down on voter-approved marijuana laws would be a great way to do it. On the campaign trail, President Trump clearly and repeatedly pledged that he would leave decisions on cannabis policy to the states. With a clear and growing majority of the country now supporting legalization, reneging on his promises would be a political disaster and huge distraction from the rest of the president’s agenda.”
