If there’s anything Jeff Sessions hates more than answering rapid-fire questions in front of a packed Intelligence Committee hearing, it’s a bag of stinky bud. The Attorney General’s distaste for marijuana is well documented. His Reefer Madness-era alarmism is so anachronistic it’s almost quaint. Or at least it would be if he weren’t using its outdated data to launch an attack on states’ rights to authorize medical marijuana.

In May, Sessions asked congressional leaders to roll back federal protections for the drug that have been in place since 2014, according to a letter that became public Monday. Known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, these protections prevent the Justice Department from using federal funds to block states from crafting their own medical marijuana regulations. In his letter, Sessions complained that the amendment was keeping his department from enforcing other federal laws—namely, the Controlled Substances Act—citing the country’s “historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime” as justification.

Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that Session’s position directly contradicts the will of the American people; as of an April Quinnipiac poll, medical marijuana hit its highest levels of support in history, with 94 percent of voters approving of doctor-prescribed weed. Instead, let’s jump straight into why this is a totally bogus way to justify a new national drug enforcement policy.

While it’s true that yes, the US is in the midst of a “historic drug epidemic,” marijuana is not the drug that kills 91 Americans every single day. It is also not responsible for the quadrupling in overdose deaths in the US since 1999. In fact, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration—which Sessions oversees—no deaths from marijuana overdose have ever been recorded. The epidemic the AG referred to is, of course, the deadly opioid sort—drugs like oxycodone, methadone, heroin, and fentanyl. No one is losing family members to some THC oil.

Using this very real public health crisis to justify cracking down on medical marijuana isn’t just disingenuous, it’s irresponsible. Because marijuana, it turns out, is actually pretty great at managing chronic pain. In January, the National Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering conducted the most thorough review of marijuana research to date. Across numerous trials and experiments, the report found strong evidence that people treated for pain with marijuana were “more likely to experience a significant reduction in pain symptoms,” compared to a placebo.

That was pretty huge, because marijuana’s legal status as a Schedule 1 drug has severely limited the ability of researchers to test whether it can help patients deal with crippling pain, anxiety, insomnia, and nausea. It’s a classic, bureaucratic Catch-22: The DEA won’t change the legal status of marijuana unless the FDA determines its medical usefulness. The FDA can’t make that determination because the legal restrictions on the drug prevent researchers from running gold-standard clinical trials with it.

A meta-analysis published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found just 28 randomized clinical trials evaluating cannabis for chronic pain. Part of the reason for the paucity of pot trials is because whole plants and natural extracts aren’t patentable, so pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to pursue them. Plus the FDA doesn’t have an approval process for whole plants or other botanicals, just single molecules.

So instead, scientists are having to rely on observational, real-world data to form a picture of how marijuana might actually help solve the opioid epidemic, rather than contribute to it. So here are a few things Sessions might want to note: