To be fair, that's not even true anymore. More Republicans favor mmj now, if only by a slim margin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...arijuana-legalization/?utm_term=.bb8818f67ba6
It's not so much the rank & file being referred to in the Repugnican "they" as it is the entrenched old power brokers who have by and large lost their relevance - exactly like Jeff Sessions. Those guys are still 100% anti-"drug" and wallowing in all sorts of verifiably false positions (such as insisting marijuana is a "gateway" drug when the biggest "gateway" drug of all is alcohol, or continuing to keep it scheduled even in the face of overwhelming evidence that there is no rational reason for its current scheduling designation, etc etc).
They do not care about the facts. Those facts are inconvenient to their entrenched stand on these issues. They WILL NOT change. They WILL push this as far as they can. I listened to some smug Repugnican jagoff yammering on about how this will not be used to go after "Mom & Pop" MMJ dispensaries - but I've heard that crap before. I distinctly remember when they first started the property seizure stuff, which was allegedly NEVER going to be used for anything other than seizing the mansions, yachts, jewels, and bank accounts of "big drug kingpins".
Within weeks it was being used to leave families standing on the side of the road as local police-thugs drove off in the family vehicle, having seized it for finding "a white powder" in a foil packet - which turned out to be powdered bubblegum. Because, you know, powdered bubblegum looks and smells JUST EXACTLY like heroin or crack or meth or any other white powdered drug. And that is the biggest problem with those seizure laws - you don't ever have to be found guilty of a crime for them to seize your property. In fact, you never even have to be CHARGED. AT ALL. And if lab tests down the road vindicate Mom & Dad (Ooops, that really WAS powdered bubblegum!) - too late. That seizure is permanent after 10 days. It takes most people longer than that to come up with the money just to CONSULT a lawyer, let alone wade through the paperwork to get your stuff back.
Truth is they almost never levy property seizure laws against the actual kingpins of the drug business - because THOSE guys have entire shoals of sharks in pinstripe who are ready and able to bury the city in court orders and suits and countersuits. Nope. They levy this stuff almost entirely against the working poor, the elderly, and the middle class. My own father very nearly lost a rental property when he was in his 70s because a renter allegedly had a guest who was allegedly smoking pot. Nobody claimed he knew about that, and in fact, ultimately that case never even went to trial - but that didn't matter. I still believe that the only reason it WASN'T seized was that it was in a really bad neighborhood and it wasn't worth much of anything. Even getting it for "free", the city would have lost money on the deal. Had it been in an even SLIGHTLY better neighborhood, chances were he would have lost it regardless.
So when they grin their sharky grins and promise out of one side of their mouth that they're only going to get drug "kingpins", they're lying. I don't need to wait for the other shoe to drop, that's already happened and it will soon be clear that it dropped right across our necks. The claim being made is that they're after interstate commerce in "drugs" - which means all you guys out there who live on the border of a legal state, even if you're IN a legal state, and you've been using the interstate privileges on the other side of the border for whatever reason (proximity, selection, price) - you are an interstate criminal.
Also - did your state recently pass a MMJ law? That's great. Except - there is NO legal source for plants in new states. There never is because it was all illegal before. So all clones, seeds, plants have to be illegally smuggled in. Even if you buy legal plants in a bordering state via legal suppliers, as soon as you try to take them into your state, you are drug-smuggling. That means any grower or dispensary just starting up will, by definition, be involved in the interstate commerce of drugs because there's nowhere else to get the starting materials.
These guys are NOT going to be nice to mom & pop. They will TARGET mom & pop first because mom & pop don't have lawyers, don't have a lot of community support (eg they don't "know people who matter"), don't have a lot of money - and won't have ANY after all their cash is seized for being drug money (and it will all be in cash because banks still won't deal with MMJ businesses).
And they will target us, MMJ users, because we are REGISTERED. They know who we are and most of us are too sick and too poor to fight much. I'll bet you anything the next thing down the road will be sanctions against people on disability who have ever registered on a MMJ registry. They will cancel our SSD, SSDI, and Medicaid/Medicare, permanently and forever, just like they did for financial aid for college students. We are now officially felons again.
