Newly-minted Attorney General Jeff Sessions had a great week in the Unadorned Prejudice department, making headlines for strong-arming his feckless cabinet colleagues into gutting federal policies protecting transgender children from discrimination in public schools. On Thursday, Melissa McCarthy plaything Sean Spicer dropped a few more hints about Sessions' forthcoming agenda, announcing that he expected "greater enforcement" of federal laws prohibiting the recreational use of marijuana, even in states that have legalized it—a major departure from the Obama administration's more laissez-faire approach.

There is a big difference between that and recreational marijuana. And I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing that we should be doing is encouraging people. There is still a federal law that we need to abide by in terms of the medical—when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature.

Equivocating between the recreational use of marijuana, a non-addictive, natural substance, and the opioid epidemic, which is a legitimate national health emergency that has played a significant role in tripling the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States since 1999, is breathtakingly irresponsible at best and willfully misleading at worst. In fact, states with medical marijuana laws on the books have fewer overdose deaths and fewer prescription opioid users than states that do not, which means Spicer is arguing that illicit opioid use justifies cracking down on something that might actually help mitigate some of that opioid use in the first place.

Thursday's revelation came as news to Cory Gardner, a Republican senator from beautiful, bold, weed-loving Colorado, who pointedly revealed that prior to Sessions' confirmation hearings, the attorney-general-to-be had assured him behind closed doors that he would not interfere with state-level marijuana policy.

Republican Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado, where marijuana production and distribution has become an established industry, spoke with Sessions before his confirmation about the business in his state and was assured there will be no sudden changes in policy.