“On October 19, 2009, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden issued a memorandum (the “Ogden Memorandum”), that gave U.S. Attorneys ‘guidance and clarification’ on how to enforce the Controlled Substances Act in states where medical marijuana had been legalized. The path-breaking memorandum said that with the Department of Justice’s desire to ‘mak[e] efficient and rational use of its limited investigative and prosecutorial resources,’ prosecutors were to ‘not focus federal re-sources in your States on individuals whose actions are in clear and un-ambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.’ The memorandum directed prosecutors to shift re-sources towards other, higher-priority prosecutions. While the memorandum did not make medical marijuana legal under federal law, it opened up a conversation about the degree to which the Obama administration would refrain from prosecuting cases involving medical marijuana.”
