Reviewing the work of Representative Pete Sessions to block marijuana reform efforts in Congress

Politico has this extended new article on federal marijuana reform focused on a Sessions who is even more important than AG Jeff.  The full title of the article explains: “Washington’s Most Powerful Anti-Pot Official Is Named Sessions. It’s Not Who You Think: Rep. Pete Sessions has quietly used his chairmanship of the House Rules Committee to stifle popular amendments that would protect legal marijuana.” I recommend this lengthy piece in full, and here are highlights:

[W]hile the nation’s top law enforcement officer has made it abundantly clear over the years that he views marijuana as a scourge equal to heroin, it turns out the unofficial title of Washington’s most powerful marijuana opponent belongs to someone else named Sessions: Pete, the longtime congressman from Texas’ 32nd district in Dallas. No relation to the attorney general, Pete Sessions nevertheless shares the former Alabama senator’s unforgiving attitudes toward all things cannabis.

“Marijuana is an addictive product, and the merchants of addiction make it that way,” Pete Sessions said in January. “They make it to where our people, our young people, become addicted to marijuana and keep going.” In February, at an opioid summit at the University of Texas Southwestern, Rep. Sessions stretched scientific fact when he said, today’s product is “300 times more powerful” than when he went to high school. (Later, his communications director confirmed that he meant three times more powerful.)

What Pete Sessions has, however, that Jeff Sessions doesn’t have is the power to change laws. Very quietly, but with implacable efficiency, Pete Sessions has used his position as the chair of the House Rules Committee to stymie or roll back amendments that protected legal marijuana in the 29 states that have approved it (30 states if you count Louisiana). States that have grown increasingly dependent on tax revenue from newly legal marijuana businesses, and investors who are pumping millions into an industry that is projected to hit $28 billion globally by 2024, have sought assurances that federal authorities wouldn’t try to invoke national drug law that still classifies marijuana as one of the most serious of all illegal drugs. Short of changing federal drug law, legislators in the states with forms of legal pot have sought the next best protection: using the power of the purse to curtail enforcement. But Sessions, with the approval of House leadership, has thwarted his colleagues. He neutralized one amendment that sailed through with a comfortable bipartisan majority and smothered others that would pass if they were ever allowed to see the light of day.

So far, the only people who have complained are the legislators whose amendments he has torpedoed and pro-marijuana lobbyists. That criticism has never troubled Sessions in his 21-year career (representing two districts). But recent polling indicates that 83 percent of Texas voters now favor legalizing medical marijuana, and that seems to be feeding a nascent campaign to use Sessions’ anti-marijuana influence against him in the 2018 midterm election. Even some Texas Republicans think his zealousness on the issue violates essential conservative principles of less government. “He’s got this personal viewpoint; he’s just personally against it. And there’s nothing that’s going to change his mind,” said Zoe Russell, of Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition (RAMP). “That’s the absolute worst of big government.”

The only thing that has prevented Pete Sessions from completely wiping out protections for medical marijuana, and freeing Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice to execute the crackdown he seems to pine for, is Congress’ own dysfunction. Because Congress could not agree on a budget, Rohrabacher-Farr has remained alive through a series of never-ending continuous resolutions. In addition, the Senate hasn’t been quite so willing to stifle its members’ wills on this issue; Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has proposed a companion amendment to Rohrabacher-Farr, which passed the Senate’s appropriations committee by acclamation….

The question of whether the appropriations conference committee will approve the Senate version with the Leahy amendment or the House version that killed Rohrabacher-Farr remains to be answered. The current continuing resolution ends on Friday at midnight. Don Murphy, director of conservative outreach for the Marijuana Policy Project, bemoaned the fact that the Republican Party has surrendered ownership of marijuana reform as Democratic support for the issue gains steam: “What had once been a GOP effort known simply as ‘Rohrabacher’ after [Republican Dana Rohrabacher’s] decade-long sponsorship, will now be known as ‘the Leahy Amendment.’ It’s a missed opportunity for the GOP.”

When he speaks publicly about marijuana, Pete Sessions often positions himself as a bulwark against just that kind of Republican accommodation, insisting even against mounting evidence to the contrary that marijuana is a gateway drug to the opioid epidemic. This is a viewpoint shared by Jeff Sessions but not by the American Society of Addiction Medicine, generally an anti-marijuana group, which acknowledges “the observed drop in opioid overdose death rates in states where marijuana use is legal for medicinal purposes. One study found that states with ‘medical marijuana’ laws had a 24.8 percent lower average annual opioid overdose death rate compared to states without similar laws.”…

The signs that the Drug War is thawing even in deep-red Texas are hard to miss In 2015, the Texas legislature passed an extremely limited medical marijuana program that grants access to non-psychoactive CBD concentrates to Texans suffering from epilepsy. Given that the Drug Enforcement Administration still considers non-psychoactive CBD to be a drug with no medicinal value, Texas’ tiptoe into the waters of medical marijuana legalization has been an act of civil disobedience against a federal drug enforcement policy that is staunchly defended by the likes of Pete Sessions. In Dallas County, where the majority of Sessions’ constituents reside, police no longer arrest people caught with up to a quarter pound of marijuana, opting instead for a cite-and-release program meant to unclog the jails and judicial system, following the example of similar programs in San Antonio, Houston and Austin.

Against this backdrop, Sessions finds himself defending his congressional seat in 2018 in a district that Hillary Clinton won by nearly 2 percentage points just two years ago. The Cook Political Report rates the race as leans Republican, but does Sessions’ opposition to marijuana law reform make him more vulnerable to a Democratic challenger in November? Some Republicans fear that medical marijuana might be an effective wedge issue that could steer Republican voters toward a Democrat who supports marijuana law reform at the national level….

“Pete Sessions has made himself the No. 1 target of drug policy reformers in the 2018 general election,” Don Murphy of MPP told POLITICO Magazine. “Defeating Pete Sessions in 2018 will send a message to Washington that even the tone-deaf GOP can’t miss.” In fact, Murphy’s prediction appears to be taking shape in Texas. “It doesn’t matter which Democrat wins. Either way, we’re going to un-elect him,” said Rob Kampia, the former executive director of MPP. Kampia’s new venture is the Marijuana Leadership Campaign and its companion Marijuana Leadership PAC. “Our invitation-only launch meeting was held in Dallas,” he told POLITICO Magazine, “and I can safely say we’ll be spending $500,000 on this singular congressional race.”