by AARON FLORES//Staff Writer
President-elect Donald J. Trump selected Senator Jeff Session as the new attorney general among his new cabinet members.
Along with Trump’s victory that night, voters in four states approved the recreational use of marijuana for the public. This is a good thing for the people who are pro-marijuana. But for people such as Session, considered as “The Dinosaur of war on drugs,” are going to hold back the legalization of marijuana.
During a Senate hearing on marijuana reform, Senator Session said, “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He also pointed out the theory that weed is a gateway drug that leads to more dangerous things. He added, “you’ll see more drugs on the street than ever before if marijuana gets legalized.”
From my point of view on the new attorney general and the legalization of pot, this whole reform is going to be a very long and slow process before the United States becomes pro-marijuana. The new-appointed attorney general said he is going to make the legalization of pot very difficult for President-elect Trump. Even through the president-elect hasn’t made it public that he is or isn’t in favor of the reform, he will still be the one giving the approval for the states to pass the law to decriminalize marijuana. Session is a Republican and the former 44th Attorney General of Alabama. He was also appointed by President Ronald Reagan to be the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1981 to 1993.
A court hearing in 1981 involved a Ku Klux Klan member who was convicted for murder in Alabama. During the investigation, several of Session’s colleagues heard him say, “ I used to think that they were OK, until I found out that some of them were pot smokers.” His assistant during the time, who is an African American, overheard the Senator’s conversation. Session owned up to what he had said, claiming that he didn’t see it as a problem that he doesn’t support a group that does drugs. I think that Session’s main mission is to stop the ongoing war on drugs and the legalization of marijuana so that the youth of America isn’t lead to a drug-infested country.
I don’t agree with his beliefs on marijuana and what it can lead up to. In Colorado, two years after the legalization of pot, the crime rate dropped by 1 percent. Now just imagine if the whole country legalized it. The crime rates could drop drastically from coast to coast. It could also lead to new cash crops and more industrial uses of hemp variations, from medical treatments that can eat away at cancer cells to stylish new clothes made out of 100-percent hemp. I personally feel that it’s going to be a good while before marijuana reform is passed. As for Session, I feel that he is going to make the war on drugs his main focus.
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