About three long, long years ago, I published my first article online, marking the beginning of my journalism career. It was something fairly simple, a story about an old fraternity brother’s cover band in Uptown Dallas. I figured music, and possibly cannabis, would be my beats and personally veer away from politics. Given that the Silver State, my adoptive home, had just legalized cannabis and many states were to follow, there was more than enough news to cover just on dispensary openings and social cannabis events alone.
I held onto that promise… for about 3 short weeks. Until a blindly loyal voice in the White House, a shrill, Foghorn Leghorn-reminiscent, mouse-like voice if a mouse could be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, re-uttered words so mind-numbingly false that I’ll never forget them as long as I live. In the following decades when my now five-year-old nephew learns about the Trump administration and who the reality TV star appointed as his first Attorney General, I’ll be able to cite these words by memory.
“We need grownups in charge in Washington to say that marijuana is not the thing that outta be legalized. It ought not to be minimized. That it’s in fact a very big danger. This drug is dangerous. You cannot play with it. It’s not something to laugh about. And trying to send that message with clarity that good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
In that moment, I felt my entire journalistic trajectory change. Yes, cannabis would still be my primary focus, but I became enraptured by the politics behind cannabis and the American political shitshow that’s existed for decades. It could be both a pure dumpster fire and somehow life-changing simultaneously. And it was especially convenient that the 2017 Alabama Senate election became the first campaign that I wrote about extensively, mainly because jokes and stories about a blatantly Gilead-level homophobic judge with pedophilia allegations who cited having a Jewish lawyer to fend off anti-Semitism allegations really do write themselves.
And over the next 18 months, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III became the bane of my journalistic existence. For every antiquated and ineffective action or directly sadistic comment that came out of the rotting mouth of this octogenarian quite comfortable with previously using racial slurs, I found myself writing about its ramifications. When he inhumanely said that he wouldn’t stop enforcing federal cannabis law even if it meant persecuting a medical patient dependent on cannabis to stay alive, I wrote on it.
While he consistently spouted the disproven D.A.R.E-esque nonsense about cannabis being a one-way street to being hopelessly addicted to black tar heroin, the success of statewide cannabis industries and the social culture in the legal states skyrocketed. In 2017, while he screamed as loud as he possibly could with a stature shorter than Kevin Hart, the legal cannabis industry made $6.6 billion and created more domestic American jobs than his former, Cheeto-tinted boss could ever dream of.
At the beginning of 2018, when Sessions rescinded the Obama-era Cole Memorandum, which protected legally operating cannabis companies and their employees from federal prosecution, he was surely expecting to reign Khaleesi-worthy levels of hellfire upon the mostly peaceful and law-abiding employees of the legal industries.
Instead, the aftermath that Sessions maniacally expected should’ve been called “his career after being Attorney General” because literally nothing even close to noteworthy happened. Not a single federal prosecutor in any of the Legal States decided to file charges against anyone operating legally and compliantly. Instead, five more states legalized cannabis in some form in the aftermath, with Marijuana Moment reporting that Vermont decided to legalize cannabis the same day that he rescinded the Cole Memorandum.
Sessions even attempted to then personally asked Congress to rescind the Rohrbacher-Farr Amendment, which prohibited the Justice Department, the department he ran, “from using federal funds to prevent certain states “from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.”
As he continued throughout 2018 and slowly became the political punching bag of the president that he was once eager to endorse due to his recusal in the ultimately fruitless Mueller investigation, the negative sentiment towards Sessions even within his own party began to grow. Moves such as firing FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe only hours before his retirement in which he would have received a government pension and President Trump remarking that “he didn’t have an Attorney General” despite the fact that Sessions was still serving as Attorney General at that time made the civil rights-opposing leprechaun even more unfavorable among the GOP.
And on a day that politically savvy cannabis consumers will remember forever, November 7, 2018, only a day after his unofficial evil twin Pete Sessions lost his Congressional seat that he held for nearly 20 years, Jeff Sessions announced his resignation via an overblown and self-congratulatory resignation letter. After a final stroll through the Department of Justice building with the fakest crocodile tears to a surrounding applause meant for someone far more moral and humane than the draconian attorney general, Sessions faded into political obscurity, or so we thought.
Around late last year, Sessions announced his triumphant comeback. Back from obscurity and a more preferable retired politician status, Sessions would once again run for the seat he held for two decades before, during which he voted strongly against The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, a bill meant to address the growing number of hate crimes happening in the country brilliantly named after two men who were murdered in separate brutal hate crimes in Texas and Wyoming.
And despite campaigning as hardcore as a clearly aging and somewhat scenile octagenarian who should’ve retired well over a decade ago possibly could, a combination of the forever tainted relationship between Sessions and President Trump, the aforementioned Commander in Chief’s vice grip-like stranglehold of influence over the Republican Party and the high social profile of his opponent in Alabama culture proved to be little Jeffy’s achilles heel.
Now, you may ask who his supposedly high-profile opponent was? If he were high-profile enough to defeat Jeff Sessions in a seat that the bite sized Senator held for two decades prior, then he must be the governor of Alabama or another longtime Alabamian politician, surely.
Nope, not even close. The victorious Republican candidate in the 2020 Alabama Senate race who will be facing off against incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones and possibly flipping the state red again is Tommy Tuberville, a decorated college football coach who most famously coached at Auburn University for nearly a decade. Also coaching Texas Tech for two years yet having no political experience and few endorsements among Alabama’s political elite, Tuberville nonetheless had the endorsement of the Big Donald himself and gained even more support through those Republicans tired of Sessions and who view Tuberville as a breath of fresh air.
How Sessions, once considered one of the most conservative men in power and a mainstay in the Republican Party’s base, could possibly come back from this loss is beyond any comprehension of basic politics. He’s, for lack of a better term, shit out of luck and besides maybe some small town commissioner position if he’s lucky, I don’t see this once fear-inducing powerful man ever rising to the power he once delicately held in his miniature hands.
But after such a blaze of prejudicial and mandatory minimum-supporting glory, what is there to say about a man who sacrificed so much for a President only for him to be tossed out like the President tosses out Big Mac containers? What is there to say about a man who totally disregards ALL evidence supporting the contrary to his viewpoints and was even denied a federal judgeship due to his discriminatory viewpoints in 1986?
What is there to say about a man so deeply entrenched in his views and actions despite those views and actions disrupting and destroying millions of lives in the process? What is there to say about a man who supported criminal justice policies so clearly destructive and not at all reformative or corrective towards those convicted of non-violent and mostly victimless crimes?
Good riddance, that’s what to say. Simply put, the wholly flawed and constantly disproven viewpoints of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III will eventually become as irrelevant and forgotten as he will inevitably become. Only when discussing similar human rights and power abusers in law enforcement equivalent to Sessions, that being 89-year-old former Maricopa County sheriff and true Arizona Sun Devil Joe Arpaio and Prohibition Director Harry Anslinger, will the former Senator’s name ever be mentioned.
A little over two years ago, a much younger and naive to the world 25-year-old cannabis journalist reported on the Denver-based dispensary chain Medicine Man growing a limited time only strain called “Jeff Sesh-On’s” for 4/20 of 2018.
And earlier this week, that same journalist recorded some badass footage at the cultivation facility for an upcoming documentary on Harry Anslinger and the top-notched strain grown by Las Vegas-based 8Fold Cultivators named after his likeness.
Of all ways to remember a true American tyrant who blew up in the most unremarkable supernova of American politics, this is the best way that cannabis culture can ironically remember someone so nefarious towards legalization. Someone who was a living embodiment of both Reefer Madness and that weird uptight asshole who was never invited to the smoke sesh, let’s remember him by keeping the Sessions name alive in quality kush form. Sessions Sativa, Sessions Snowball, Sour Smoke Sessions, the potential names are endless.
So, to conclude my three-year stint of covering this overblown yet microscopic flea of a useless bureaucrat who cared so little about the majority of his state’s population, I’ll say this.
Go home, Jeff. Settle into bed and be with your wife, your three children and six grandchildren that love you dearly. For better or worse, and it was far worse, you served both your home state and your country for decades. But I wish no ill will towards you or anyone in your family nor have I ever during these past three years, but the policies you created and supported during your career were absolutely detestable, appalling and you symbolize a bygone and a falsely idealistic philosophy of this country, one that has always been completely detached from true reality.
And while it’s been a wild ride covering someone so passive aggressive yet aggressively stubborn, the future generations of the Republican Party and like-minded conservatives will undoubtedly be far more pro-cannabis, so cannabis reform is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time until these younger conservatives gain power in office in droves and then, cannabis in the southern United States will be a glorious reality, one that will leave little Jeffy Sessions rolling in his grave like a tightly rolled joint of Jeff Sesh-On’s phenotype number 6.