Powerful allies of President Donald Trump and conservative Republicans are speaking out and organizing against the plans by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to crackdown on the legal cannabis industry.
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally, has launched the United States Cannabis Coalition; while Mark Holden, a top leader of the powerful Koch Network said that the administration is “never going to win the war on drugs.”
“Drugs won,” Holden said to reporters as the Koch network opened a three-day retreat at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs.
Stone announced the creation of the bipartisan coalition – registered with the IRS as a section 527 non-profit, the code often used for political action committees – during an appearance at the Cannabis World Congress and Business Expo in New York.
“I am going to be working with a coalition of Republicans and Democrats, progressives and libertarians, liberals, and conservatives to persuade the president to keep his campaign pledge,” Stone was quoted as saying by Business Insider, “and to remind the president that he took a strong and forthright position on this issue in the election.”
During the campaign, Trump espoused a state’s rights approach to cannabis policy, and Stone said his organization plans to lobby the president and the administration to make good on the hands-off approach promised during the campaign.
Holden said the views of Session represent a “failed big government top-down approach,” and that he supported allowing states to devise their own cannabis policies.