The prohibition era is done

By Seattle Times Editorial Board

Via The Associated Press. The following editorial was published in the SeattleTimes.com, August 17:

U .S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an old school drug warrior, so it came as no surprise that his Department of Justice recently sent Washington and other states with legalized marijuana letters with a fusillade of bullet points on the dangers of legal weed.

What is surprising, however, is how misleading and cherry-picked his data was. Sessions wrongly portrayed Washington’s marijuana experiment as a circus, with exploding marijuana-extraction labs and stoned teens weaving across the roadway.

The experiment is a work in progress, but Sessions’ letter to Gov. Jay Inslee warrants a rebuttal — and not just because of bad data.

It missed the fundamental point made by voters in Washington and Colorado in the historic 2012 election. It has subsequently been made in California, Oregon, Alaska, Massachusetts, Nevada and Maine.

Legalization is spreading because it is a rational…