Welfare Recipients Can Use Their EBT Cards at Pot Stores

Six years ago, if anyone had made a campaign issue out of the potential for welfare users to buy pot with their food stamps, the media would have made great sport and mockery of that.

Yet here we are, six years later, with more Americans than ever on SNAP and various forms of welfare, and pot stores going up in a couple of states. The Washington Times reports  that the two things have been connected.

Welfare recipients can’t use their EBT cards at liquor stores but they can at marijuana dispensaries in states such as Colorado that have legalized pot, Sen. Jeff Sessions revealed Tuesday.

The Alabama Republican announced that he was drafting legislation to close the welfare-for-weed loophole after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to him that marijuana shops were not off limits to EBT cards, which replaced food stamps, or other federal benefits.

There’s no word on how many welfare users actually have used their EBT cards at pot stores.

Under current law, HHS claims that it has no power to stop welfare recipients from using their EBT cards at pot stores.

This is the same HHS that believes it does have the power to force nuns and everyone else to pay for other people’s birth control and abortion-inducing drugs.