What Jeff Sessions Has Said About Marijuana

Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week declared that marijuana—a drug on which no person has ever overdosed—was nearly as dangerous as heroin, a drug that killed 12,989 Americans in a single year.

"I reject the idea that America will be a better place if marijuana is sold in every corner store. And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana—so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that's only slightly less awful," Sessions said while speaking with law enforcement officers Wednesday. "Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life."

But that quote shouldn't come as a surprise, since the former Alabama senator has long been a hard-line anti-pot crusader.

Here are five other things he's said about marijuana over the years.

1. On what he thought of the KKK in the '80s in comments he later insisted were delivered jokingly

"OK until I found out they smoked pot."

2. On the drug being a danger

"We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it's in fact a very real danger."

3. On Obama's more lax approach to pot enforcement and his admiration for "Just Say No"

"I think one of [Obama's] great failures, it's obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana... It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started 'Just Say No.'"

4. More on Obama and pot

"You can't have the President of the United States of America talking about marijuana like it is no different than taking a drink… It is different… It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal."

5. On the kinds of folks who smoke weed

"Good people don't smoke marijuana."