marijuana legalization; Justice Department lacks way to study effects on federal enforcement priorities, GAO finds

Sen. Chuck Grassley is one of two senators who asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the actions Colorado and Washington have taken to implement their recreational marijuana laws and the mechanisms the Department of Justice and its components have established to monitor the effects of legalization.  The GAO report finds the Obama administration does not have a documented plan in place to monitor the effects of legalization on its eight marijuana enforcement priorities.  Grassley made the following comment on the report.  The report is available here.  Grassley is Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Caucus on International Narcotics Control.

“In August 2013, the Obama administration decided to effectively suspend enforcement of federal law relating to marijuana in states that legalized it for recreational use.  However, to disguise its decision as prosecutorial discretion, it announced a series of federal priorities that it claimed would guide its enforcement going forward.  These priorities include preventing marijuana from being distributed to minors, stopping the diversion of marijuana into states that haven’t legalized it, and preventing adverse public health effects from marijuana use.  At the time, the Department of Justice warned that if state efforts weren’t sufficient to protect the public from these harms, then the federal government might step up its enforcement or even challenge the state laws themselves.  This GAO report exposes this warning as a sham.  The report finds that the Administration doesn’t have a documented plan to monitor the effects of state legalization on any of these priorities.  As the report says, officials at the Department could not even say how they make use of the information they receive related to these priorities to determine whether its policy should be changed.  That means the Department hasn’t developed metrics to determine how many children have to eat marijuana-laced candy, how many drugged drivers have to endanger the public, or how much marijuana has to be diverted into a state like Iowa from Colorado before something meaningful is actually done about it.  This reflects a complete lack of accountability from the Justice Department.  I plan to hold a hearing on this report soon.”