On January 4, the Associated Press reported that attorney general Jeff Sessions will end an Obama-era policy that allowed legal marijuana to flourish in states, which has been implemented in states like Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. His decision would enable federal prosecutors to decide just how aggressively federal law should be enforced in states where marijuana is legal.

“I’m appalled but not surprised at Sessions’s decision to repeal the Cole memo, which urged federal prosecutors not to enforce federal marijuana law in states that had legalized,” Drug Policy Alliance executive director Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno tells Teen Vogue. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legalizing marijuana use and the numbers are even higher among young people, but Sessions seems to be more fixated on his ideological crusade against marijuana than on facts.”

During the fall 2012 elections, referendums to legalize recreational cannabis in Colorado and Washington both passed. As a response, then deputy attorney general James Cole issued a memorandum in 2013 — known as “the Cole memo” — through the Department of Justice.

Leafly contributor Lisa Rough explains that the memo directed federal prosecutors to limit their focus to cannabis distribution to minors, those involved with the black market, and transferring marijuana from a state where it's legal to another state. It also named the use of firearms, consumption on federal property, growing on public land, and intoxicated driving associated with marijuana distribution as enforcement priorities. In plain terms, this memo made way for states to move forward with legalization with limited intervention from the federal government.

Now, some say Sessions’s rollback enables law enforcement to racially profile people of color.

“The people most harmed by the war on drugs in the U.S. have overwhelmingly been black and brown people, who have been disproportionately arrested, incarcerated, and deported for drug offenses, including simple drug possession, even though white people use drugs at the same rates,” McFarland Sánchez-Moreno says. “The war on drugs has also been used as an excuse by local law enforcement to heavily police communities of color, contributing to the context in which large numbers of police killings of black people have happened, but if U.S. attorneys start enforcing federal prohibition in states that have legalized, those most affected will be people in those states who have built businesses, invested, and bought marijuana legally under state law, who will now have a very real reason for concern.”

Session’s move comes after the January 1 implementation of California’s Proposition 64, which legalized the sale of recreational marijuana to adults in the state. Mother Jones reporter Brandon E. Patterson noted that Prop. 64 reduced penalties for several marijuana-related offenses in the state’s criminal code, and that many people incarcerated for certain marijuana-related charges could be released earlier than their original date. Additionally, Prop. 64 caps penalties at community service, drug education classes, and/or counseling for minors.