Cannabis businesses and enthusiasts are celebrating after President Donald Trump forced the resignation of his famously anti-cannabis Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions had previously served as a Senator from Alabama since 1997, only to resign and take the position of Attorney General in 2017 when the Trump Administration took office. What does the Jeff Sessions resignation mean for cannabis? Let's find out.
Jeff Sessions Resignation
While Sessions' forced resignation had nothing to do with cannabis, the marijuana industry is thrilled. Cannabis stocks jumped as much as 30% yesterday after the news broke, but have since corrected and are currently trading in the red.
Having Jeff Sessions out of office is good for the cannabis industry for many reasons. Though marijuana is illegal at the federal level, there is growing support for the legalization of cannabis around the US. After the big election Tuesday, 33 states in the US have legalized medical marijuana. There are now ten states, plus Washington, DC, that have legalized recreational marijuana.
Sessions was a strong proponent against marijuana and even Republican Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, criticized the government's barrier to study the drug and its effects medicinally.
Long before he took the Senate, Hatch was a vocal supporter of the war on drugs, which incarcerated hundreds of thousands of individuals for low-level drug offenses. This January, Sessions ended a policy that asked the federal government to be hands-off with states that have legalized marijuana. Will his resignation reverse this? We'll have to wait and see.
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Bright Skies Ahead?
The new interim Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, doesn't have the same anti-cannabis record as Sessions. However, it remains unclear how strongly Whitaker feels about the cannabis industry—time will tell with that one. Still, it remains a victory for cannabis companies that Sessions is now out of the office.
Polls from the company Pew claim that currently 62 percent of Americans support marijuana legalization, which is up 31 percent from eighteen years ago. We shall see how much of an effect this forced resignation has on the cannabis industry. For now, all signs point to good—except, you know, the current red market.
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