White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer caused a stir during his press briefing Thursday, and it had nothing to do with his usual combativeness. In a departure from Obama administration practice, Spicer said that the Department of Justice would step up enforcement of federal marijuana laws.
Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for recreational or medical purposes. But federal law still prohibits it.
A congressional budget rider prevents DOJ from cracking down on laws that allow medicinal marijuana. But Spicer suggested the agency would go after state’s recreational marijuana laws.
There had been some question about what President Trump would do. At one point during the campaign, he said the law on marijuana should be a state issue. But after winning, he selected legalization opponent Jeff Sessions as his attorney general. As a senator, Sessions had chided the Obama administration for not enforcing the law on this issue.
The multi-billion dollar weed industry argues that the legal sale of marijuana is an important source of tax revenue for states. Some lawmakers even invoke the “but what about the kids” argument to argue for its legalization. “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,” Aaron Ford, majority leader of the Nevada state senate, said in response to Spicer’s comments. “Any action by the Trump administration would be an insult to Nevada voters and would pick the pockets of Nevada’s students,”
This is strange reasoning given that marijuana has serious health consequences, particularly for children and even for casual users. It is addictive and harmful and becoming more so as the potency of marijuana has risen over time, especially with the rise of edible forms of marijuana, which have been shown to cause hallucinations in some users.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse has found that a third of users develop marijuana-use disorders, which are associated with addiction. Children who use it are 4 to 7 times as likely to do so.
Regular use has been associated with withdrawal symptoms that include sleeping problems, anxiety and irritability, and it has been shown to damage performance at school and at work. Heavy use in teen years is thought to lower IQ.
Nearly half a million patients visiting emergency rooms in 2011 were there after smoking weed and one organization that runs drug and alcohol treatment centers in 10 states reports that nearly 70 percent of teens in their programs are there primarily because of marijuana abuse.
All of this helps explain why the American Society of Addiction Medicine issued a 2012 paper opposing legalization, and why even the Obama administration classified marijuana as more dangerous than cocaine.
It is unclear what actions the Department of Justice will take, if any. Perhaps it will crack down on the illegal transportation of the drug between states or file injunctions to nullify laws in specific states.
Either way, the Trump administration is sending the message that marijuana isn’t a harmless recreational drug that popular culture claims it to be.
