After foraging through the Dumpster of discarded ideas, the Trump administration has dragged out another fetid reject as part of its campaign to roll back modernity, common sense and the will of the people.
We know Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a small, backward-looking man with even smaller, more backward-looking ideas, but what was the thinking behind his new federal crackdown on legal marijuana? Punish the blue states? Create cannabis chaos in the large swath of the American West and the other states where voters have said they want the police to spend their time on real crime?
Or is it just another betrayal of the fools who voted for a man aptly described from inside the White House in Michael Wolff’s new book, as “less a person than a collection of terrible traits”? For one way to really tick off Trump’s base is to start arresting them.
There comes a time in the evolution of social policy when law enforcement, science, medical authorities and the majority of the public reach a consensus about changing course. At this moment, criminalizing marijuana has never been more unpopular, nor a more unjust way to ensure that otherwise law-abiding people have to fear the police.
It’s not just that 71 percent of Americans oppose federal government efforts to stop marijuana sales, but an equally large majority thinks overall drug abuse should be treated as an addiction and mental health problem, rather than a criminal offense. The consensus crosses class lines and the racial divide, even if enforcement of drug laws does not.
And yet, after the government spent more than $1 trillion over the last four decades on the failed drug war, Trump now wants to double down on the most failed aspect of modern prohibition. According to the most recent statistics, more than a million people a year are arrested for simple drug possession in the United States — and more than half a million of those arrests are for marijuana possession.
