Continuing on his crusade to curtail legal weed and reinstate the full force of the war on drugs, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been sending letters to the Governors and Attorney Generals of legal weed states expressing his dismay with the state of the rapidly growing industries. But, for someone who thinks “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” it hasn’t taken long for various heads of state to clap back at the top cop’s faulty, outdated data.
According to the Oregonian, Governor Kate Brown is latest official to rebuke Sessions’ worries, joining Oregon State Police Superintendent Travis Hampton to sternly tell the AG that the state police study he used to claim Oregon is leading the way in black market exports, causing countless extraction-fueled explosions and growing too much weed was an early draft report from the years before regulation that has since been proven moot.
“The Oregon State Police determined that the draft report required significant additional work and revision because the data was inaccurate and heavily extrapolated conclusions were incorrect," Brown wrote.
The data Sessions mentions in his letter was pulled from the federally funded State Police study draft that, when leaked by the Oregonian earlier this year, was unequivocally denounced by the state police that produced it. To reinforce how wrong the letter was, Superintendent Hampton sent a similarly chiding letter to Sessions.
“[The leaked draft] was the first and least defensible draft, it was not accurate, not validated and outdated." Hampton wrote. “Unfortunately, you sourced the same leaked draft as evidence against Oregon's marijuana regulatory structure."
In the years since the unfinished draft was compiled, Oregon has instituted a seed-to-sale tracking system to cut down on legal weed leaving the state, and passed legislation to make prosecuting illegal cannabis traffickers easier. Sessions failed to cite either of those programs in his letter.
If Jeff Sessions thought it was going to be easy to shut down America’s legal weed testing grounds, Oregon, Colorado, Washington, and Alaska have quickly proved that they will not go down without a fight. And without proper information or any semblance of popular support, the crackdown-frenzied Attorney General still seems to be knocking his head against the wall of prohibition’s past. Let’s just hope he never breaks through.
