Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden Pressure U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions Over Marijuana, Russia

U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley at a rally to save Obamacare on Jan. 15, 2017. (Joe Riedl)

Eleven United States Senators, including Oregon's Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, today sent a letter to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking that he leave marijuana policy up to the states.

Pro-pot activists fear Sessions will throw the party van in reverse and drive the country back to the days of Reefer Madness and hard-core drug war. Sessions has said that "good people don't use marijuana" and, as WW reported on Tuesday following a meeting with state attorneys general, mocked marijuana's potential to alleviate the prescription opiate addiction epidemic.

The Senators' letter to Sessions asks that he uphold the policy of President Barack Obama's Justice Department, which called for federal law enforcement agencies to defer to states that had adopted "strong regulatory and enforcement systems to control the cultivation, distribution, sale, and production of marijuana."

The letter continues:

The full letter can be found here.

Sessions has bigger problems than pot, at the moment. More than 100 members of Congress have called for his resignation in the wake of revelations in the Washington Post that hey may have perjured himself during his confirmation hearings last month, when he denied having any contact with representatives of the Russian government, even though, as the Post reported, he had multiple such contacts.

Merkley is among those who've called for Sessions' resignation. Wyden, who as WW reported in detail last week is involved in the secret Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the Trump organization's ties to Russia, has demanded that he recuse himself from any such investigation, and called for an independent special prosecutor.

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