The White House is running a secret anti-weed committee

The Trump administration has launched a sneak attack on Americans' growing support for marijuana.

To combat what White House meeting records call America's "partial, one-sided, and inaccurate" narrative in favor of marijuana, federal agencies were asked to compile "negative trends" about the drug and its "threats," BuzzFeed News has learned. It's all being done under the Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee, a secretive collective commandeering 14 federal agencies and the Drug Enforcement Agency to build an anti-weed rhetoric.

Acceptance of recreational marijuana use has grown over the past few years, with a recent Quinnipiac poll showing 63 percent of Americans in support of legalization. President Trump has tentatively echoed support as well, saying back in June that he'd "probably" back a bill to protect states' rights to legalize marijuana.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The committee instead seems to echo Attorney General Jeff Sessions' war-on-drugs rhetoric, BuzzFeed News points out. A July 27 committee meeting summary cited "an urgent need to message the facts about the negative impacts of marijuana use, production, and trafficking on national health, safety, and security." So the committee ordered agencies to deliver "the most significant data demonstrating negative trends" regarding weed for a briefing with Trump "on marijuana threats," the summary said. The goal is to "turn the tide on increasing marijuana use," per the meeting summary.

The committee only explicitly indicated that it was looking for negative information on marijuana use and laws, BuzzFeed News' analysis revealed. A White House response to the story said the committee is part of the administration's "internal, deliberative process" to "ensure consistency with the president's agenda."

Read more about the White House's war on green at BuzzFeed News.