NEWS
Jeff Sessions Has a Violent Crime Reduction Task Force Looking into Marijuana Policy
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Why the Attorney General continues to correlate cannabis with the violent crime is still not clear.
Published on April 7, 2017

Jeff Sessions is at it again.  The Attorney General with a hard-on for the War on Drugs set up the “Department's Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety (the Task Force)” at the end of last month, and now thanks to a memo from Sessions to 94 US Attorneys, we know that the task force will make recommendations to Sessions and the Trump administration about how to deal with violent crime and marijuana policy. 

The memo, sent Wednesday reads:

“The Violent Crime Reduction Strategy Development Subcommittee will make recommendations for the Department's overall violent crime reduction strategy, which will include focused enforcement against violent offenders...Task Force subcommittees will also undertake a review of existing policies in the areas of charging, sentencing, and marijuana to ensure consistency with the Department's overall strategy on reducing violent crime and with Administration goals and priorities.”

This isn’t the first time the nation’s new top cop has spoken about cannabis and violence in the same breath, a Sessions spoke to reporters at the Department of Justice in late February and claimed that; “Experts are telling me there’s more violence around marijuana than one would think.”

Despite his supposed experts, Sessions has not provided any statistics or fact about the relationship between marijuana and violent crime. A lack of clarity doesn’t seem to be stopping the man who recently compared weed and heroin - Business Insider notes that the task force will likely be reviewing the Obama-era Cole Memorandum, which directed the DOJ to essentially ignore state-approved legal marijuana.

In the memo sent this week, Sessions said that he expects reports back from the task force “no later than July 27th.” 

Maybe then we will finally get a clear picture of how the Trump administration plans on moving forward with cannabis policy.

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Zach Harris
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Zach Harris is a writer based in Philadelphia whose work has appeared on Noisey, First We Feast, and Jenkem Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @10000youtubes complaining about NBA referees.
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