Would you like some irony with that baggie of medical marijuana? Well, like it or not, you’re getting some. Medical marijuana has been legal for a decade or so in various U.S. states but it wasn’t until the Ogden memo of 2009 that it really took off. Would you like some irony with that baggie of medical marijuana? Well, like it or not, you’re getting some. Medical marijuana has been legal for a decade or so in various U.S. states but it wasn’t until the Ogden memo of 2009 that it really took off.

That was the memo from the Department of Justice that states and medical marijuana providers took to mean the feds would stand down and look the other way as long as medical marijuana patients and providers were in clear compliance with state laws.

Then somebody at the Department of Justice apparently decided that maybe it wasn’t cool for the feds to look the other way as states began flaunting their defiance of the Controlled Substances Act, and medical marijuana states got a raft of new letters from new DOJ attorneys, culminating in the Cole memo which said that state laws are not a defense when it comes to breaking federal laws.

So, on the one hand you have the Department of Justice essentially launching the medical marijuana boom with a memo that seemed to spell out the fact that the nation’s top law enforcement agency would respect state law and pretty much stay out of medical marijuana. Then, on the other hand you have that same agency saying “Now, wait a minute, that’s not what we meant at all.”