Dear Pot Lawyer,
Jeff Sessions finally ripped up the Cole Memo. Should we be scared?
We should be paying attention, but no, we shouldn’t be scared. For nearly all of my law firm’s clients, from Seattle to San Diego, it’s been business as usual. This means growing weed, processing it, and selling it to other grown-ups. No one clammed up; no one ran for the hills. In this sense, it’s very much like January 2017 when Sessions was appointed as attorney general. In fact, the psychic impact is probably smaller.
For anyone who tuned out completely last week (or for the past few years), I should explain that the Cole Memorandum is an Obama-era guidance document that advised US attorneys not to spend federal resources chasing state-legal weed, so long as those states were acting responsibly. The Cole Memo stayed in place for nearly four and a half years, until Sessions finally rescinded it last week. In his rescission, Sessions didn’t tell US attorneys they ought to prosecute cannabis businesses, which would have been politically unfeasible. Instead, he left it wide open.