The holidays are just around the corner, making us all wonder what the hell happened to this year. As you warily ponder what 2018 has in store for us, chew on these quotes to help stretch out your stomach for the impending Thanksgiving feast. In the latest roundup, Art Garfunkel gets weird(er) and waxes poetic about the herb, both politicians and late night talk show hosts take jabs at Jeff Sessions, an economist highlights legalization as a way to reduce crime, and more.
Here’s a roundup of quotes from the past week.
“Our policy is the same, really, fundamentally as the Holder-Lynch policy, which is that the federal law remains in effect and a state can legalize marijuana for its law enforcement purposes, but it still remains illegal with regard to federal purposes.”
– Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee to discuss his oversight of the Department of Justice. He also tepidly responded, “I think that’s correct” when Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) said that cannabis is not as dangerous as heroin.
Rep. Steve Cohen just burned Jeff Sessions on his 'good people don't smoke pot' comment pic.twitter.com/yLsLI1LUgh
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 14, 2017
“You said one time that good people don’t smoke marijuana. Which of these people would you say are not good people? Is John Kasich a good person? George Pataki? Rick Santorum? Newt Gingrich? Ted Cruz? Jeb Bush? George Bush? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Judge Clarence Thomas? Which of those are not good people?”
– Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN)’s clapback to Jeff Sessions’ assertion at a Senate drug hearing in April 2016 that “good people don’t smoke marijuana”
“Jeff Sessions testified again as part of the Russia investigation, and at one point he was questioned about his stance on marijuana. Because, you know, it’s a little odd when a guy’s anti-weed but seems to forget every conversation he’s ever had.”
– Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon
This is about a post from a sitting Ohio Supreme Court justice who also is a Democrat running for governor. [I’m not showing the original post, but he initially provided significant personally identifying information about some of the women.] pic.twitter.com/HI7mg6HCmH
— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) November 17, 2017
“Now can we get back to discussing legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis. I am sooooo disappointed by this national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago.”
– Ohio Supreme Court Justice Bill O’Neill, who bizarrely took to Twitter for a very much unprompted overshare about the “approximately 50 very attractive females” with which he was “sexually intimate” over the last 50 years
“—The trouble with pot, said a doctor I know,
is: the insights, the color, quite wonderful—
are like fireworks…there and gone…
points in time…last year’s clouds”– A poem excerpted from Art Garfunkel’s recently released memoir, What Is It All But Luminous: Notes From an Underground Man
“You just can’t make those statements because then what happens is lay people say, ‘Oh my God, did you hear a kid died from marijuana poisoning?’ and it can be sensationalized. It’s not based on reality. It’s based on somebody kind of jumping the gun and making a conclusion, and scientifically you can’t do that.”
– Northern Colorado emergency room physician Noah Kaufman, responding to initial reports that an 11-month old suffered “the first marijuana overdose deaths” earlier this week. Thomas Nappe, one of the report’s authors who serves as director of medical toxicology at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Bethlehem, PA, added, “We are absolutely not saying that marijuana killed the child.”
“A lot of the violence around in the big cities, at least the ones that I’ve been in, have been around crack cocaine, cocaine more generally. I think very effectively and quickly, we could dramatically reduce violent crime through the legalization, not just of, say, marijuana, but of all drugs. Now, I think actually that would be a bad idea in general. But for solving crime, that, to me, is an obvious and clear path to some success.”
– Freakonomics co-author and economist Steven Levitt on the Freakonomics podcast discussing ways to reduce violent or drug-related crimes in cities
