Jeff Sessions will go ignored like Stephen Harper did.
In 2014, Harper wanted Vancouver to cease and desist its municipal cannabis dispensary regulations. When Harper threatened to use the RCMP, the Lower Mainland dispatch said they wouldn’t cross into Vancouver City Police territory.
If this happened in Canada, then the likelihood Sessions will be successful in America is even less plausible.
There are simply too many states legalizing. Too many farmers, consumers, butane extractors, cannabis vendors and bud-tenders.
Too many edible bakers, tincture creators, a panoply of third-party professionals, lawyers, agents, and brokers.
Too many patients dependent on honey oil and phoenix tears.
Too many consumers paying sales taxes. Too many state and local bureaucrats reaping the rewards.
The city of Washington D.C. itself has legalized cannabis. The entire West Coast of the United States (including Alaska) has legalized cannabis.
There is no way for Jeff Sessions to contain this. All he can do is pout and govern interstate trade, stunting the cannabis economy’s growth across state borders. Limiting how effective Canada’s licensed producers and BC Bud competition can be in the legal states.
The US Government enforces prohibition at the border. No products trade, but deals and agreements get made.
As in the case of Canopy’s Leafs by Snoop. The product itself is 100% Canadian, but its brand trademark registers to an American celebrity.
Any kind of Canadian investment into American cannabis markets is at risk.
Of course, Sessions will never be able to shut down state legalization completely.
Philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe already demonstrates how this works in his pamphlet, What Must be Done. While Hoppe focuses on the federal government’s abdication of its protection monopoly, the principles are the same.
So long as general public opinion is on the side of cannabis entrepreneurs and consumers, it is unlikely the federal government would occupy a territory “whose inhabitants did nothing else than trying to mind their own business.”
As Hoppe writes,
“Waco, a teeny group of freaks, is one thing. But to occupy, or to wipe out a significantly large group of normal, accomplished, upstanding citizens is quite another, and quite a more difficult thing. Once the number of implicitly seceded territories has reached a critical mass, and every success in one little location promotes and feeds on the next one, it will become inevitably further radicalized to a nationwide, municipalization movement, with explicitly secessionist local policies and openly and contemptuously displayed non-compliance with federal authority.”
Is something similar going on in the cannabis culture? An explicitly FU to the drug war? Has the United States reached critical mass on cannabis legalization? Have Jeff Sessions and his ilk lost the war on ideas?
Of course, the dissolution of the US government or its Drug War isn’t coming anytime soon. Sessions will find other ways to crackdown on cannabis legalization and states’ rights.
This could even put Canadians at risk. Any LPs bending the rules, or BC Bud connoisseurs working with American firms could find themselves with more trouble at the border. The whole import/export market between legal US States and Canada effectively shut down.
Triggering a bursting of an economic bubble? Roasting LPs over a fire of a crashing stock market?
Maybe. Or maybe it’s continued bubble-mania all the way to hyperinflation. Making cannabis legalization a nonstarter from the perspective of growing taxation and rising food prices.