Former U.S. Attorney Eric Holder feels the current Attorney General has a fixation on shutting down the marijuana industry.
It has been no secret that Jeff Sessions wants to stamp out legal marijuana. He has made disparaging comments on the subject for decades including a joke where he said the KKK was not so bad “until I found out they smoke pot.”
Former AG Eric Holder thinks that Sessions’ desire to shut down the legal marijuana industry goes beyond normal political and legal aspirations. According to Holder, Sessions has an “almost obsession” with marijuana.
Serving under President Obama’s administration from 2009-2015, Holder oversaw the Justice Department when the decision was made to prevent the DOJ from being able to prosecute any companies that were following state marijuana laws and met other benchmarks. This directive is referred to as the Cole Memo.
“I think that was a really good policy,” Holder said of the Cole Memo while speaking at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “The Sessions almost obsession with marijuana I think is the thing that’s put the Justice Department in this strange place.”
Holder felt that letting states get their feet wet on legal marijuana was a good start and federal authorities could have intervened if states were not keeping a tight grip on the industry.
“I think the policy we had in place was a good one: Let the states experiment with the notion that again we have these eight or nine federal factors and if you trigger one of these eight or nine factors the feds are going to be coming in.”
Marijuana activist and Forbes journalist, Tom Angell, felt that Holder’s statement is odd since he could have pushed for marijuana legalization while he was in charge of the Department of Justice.
Hi, Eric Holder could have rescheduled marijuana while in office but didn’t. https://t.co/YOCWjpk71X
— Tom Angell 🌳📰 (@tomangell) October 10, 2017
“Eric Holder could have rescheduled marijuana while in office but didn’t,” Angell tweeted.
