Legal marijuana: With Sessions as top cop, pot advocates getting nervous

Washington, D.C. (NBC News) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions was confirmed last Wednesday night by a party-line vote after hours of protest speeches by Senate Democrats.

Most of those protests centered on high-profile accusations of racism as well as Sessions’ record of opposing LGBTQ and reproductive rights. But there’s another policy issue that has advocacy groups, businesses, and even law enforcement concerned about Sessions as head of the Justice Department: His plans for federal marijuana policy.

The cannabis industry operates in an unusual legal gray area, as individual states have quickly moved to legalize a drug that’s still classified as a illegal by the federal government.

Though petitions have been filed over and over since 1972 in efforts to de-schedule the drug, marijuana is still classified by the DEA as a Schedule I substance — meaning it’s considered more dangerous than cocaine (Schedule II) or ketamine (Schedule III).

Despite federal law, eight U.S. states have legalized adult-use marijuana markets in the past few years, with Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Maine all allowing pot to be sold in stores. In addition, medical marijuana programs are implemented in 28 states.

Some may scoff at legalizing pot, but money talks: Colorado alone brought in $1.3 billion from sales of recreational and medical cannabis in 2016, according to the Denver Post’s Cannabist blog.

All of that could be at risk under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a notorious cannabis foe who said “Good people don’t smoke marijuana” during an April 2016 hearing of the Senate Drug Caucus.

“We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say that marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it’s in fact a very real danger,” Sessions said during the hearing.