I was enraged when I read an article in the Bend Bulletin about the new Rules Advisory Committee for implementing legal marijuana in Oregon. The article was entitled “To form new marijuana laws, state picks from group that broke old ones”.

“A review by The Bulletin of the members’ backgrounds shows several members of the panels have been ensnared by law enforcement for what at the time were crimes involving marijuana,” they write without any hint of awareness that in order to become an expert in marijuana before now, you had to break the law.

I must have a different definition of “several”. To open, the article notes that Anthony Johnson, chief petitioner of Measure 91 (and, full disclosure, a writer for this website and my friend), is on the committee. As of course he should be, since he helped write the law being implemented! Yet Johnson has never been ensnared by law enforcement for marijuana crimes.

Then we learn about Brent Kenyon, who has been convicted of marijuana sales in 2008 and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor delivery charges in 1995. As The Count on Sesame Street would say, “One! One marijuana criminal! Bwaa ha ha ha!”

Then we learn about Cedar Grey, who was charged with marijuana crimes in 2001 and 2007, but had all charges dismissed since he was obeying the medical marijuana law. In other words, not a marijuana criminal.

Then we learn about Don Morse, who was convicted of misdemeanor possession in a case involving the medical marijuana dispensary he was running in Washington County just months before dispensaries were made legal. A dispensary he and his partner opened up to inspection by state and local authorities and which was cited as being a model for how a legal dispensary system could work. “Two! Two marijuana criminals! That makes it ‘several’! Bwaa ha ha ha!”

Here’s my idea for another Bend Bulletin article: “To form new marijuana laws, state packs panel with groups that opposed them.”

Imagine, delving into the fact that at least three of the five members of the OLCC publicly admit to having opposed Measure 91, including the chair, Rob Patridge, the Klamath County District Attorney tasked with prosecuting marijuana cases.

We could also learn how one of the RAC is Doug Breidenthal, Jackson County commissioner, who believes under legal marijuana “child abuse and domestic violence cases will rise” and voted to tax marijuana locally, in opposition to Measure 91 but in lockstep with the League of Oregon Cities and the Association of Oregon Counties who are lobbying to gut Measure 91.

We could learn how one of the RAC is Jeff Kuhns of the Keizer Police Department, who, when it comes to card-holding medical marijuana patients, asks, “Can’t health inspectors walk into restaurant kitchens to do inspections without the consent of the proprietor? Doesn’t the fire marshal have the authority to inspect buildings without the consent of the owner? Individuals issued cards by the State of Oregon should know they too could be inspected in much the same fashion.”

We could learn how one of the RAC is Craig Roberts, Sheriff of Clackamas County, whose own employee was caught trafficking marijuana and drugs right under Sheriff Roberts’ nose.

We could learn how one of the RAC is Paul Frazier from Coos County, another of the 36 Oregon District Attorneys who voted unanimously to oppose the last two attempts at statewide legalization, and wrote “looks OK to me” in approving a ballot statement that included “claims that major tax revenues be will made or that current law enforcement revenue will be freed up [by marijuana legalization] are either fantasy or fraud.”

We could learn how one of the RAC is Kevin Wulruff from Medford Police Department, who thinks medical marijuana cardholders should just invite police into their homes for warrantless searches, as he told The Oregonian, “We will ask to do a compliance check and look at their cards and count the plants make sure they have enough cards for the plants.” (“Compliance check” is a term cops use to frighten medical marijuana cardholders into thinking the law allows them to do such a thing.)

We could learn how one of the RAC is Alan Rappleyea, who as Washington County counsel helped usher in a ban on medical marijuana dispensaries. Bonus! Rappleyea must have had some influence on the Don Morse case in Washington County… won’t that be a fun face-to-face?

Funny how out of 500 applicants with in-depth knowledge of marijuana to fill fifteen positions, the OLCC manages to choose only two with criminal records. Funny how becoming an expert in marijuana sales and cultivation required breaking the law. Funny how the Bend Bulletin chooses to frame the selection of RAC members while every other Oregon news outlet simply reported who they were. All of them.

One of the aspects of the film “The Culture High” that makes it my favorite drug war documentary is the section where the filmmakers investigate the role the media play in shaping our discussions of adult marijuana prohibition. Newspapers, television, radio, and websites all have methods they employ to frame the narrative around marijuana, whether it is the ubiquitous use of the pot-pun in the headline to make our issue seem frivolous or continuing to employ terms like “dope” and “drug” to make our issue seem dangerous.

A perfect example of the latter can be found this week at Miami’s WSVN, Channel 7. Their headline reads “‘Pot princess’ sentenced to 24 years in fatal wrong-way crash”. If you’re just scanning the headlines or heard this on the TV news, what have you learned? “Pot… fatal… crash…” has just been planted in your subconscious. Marijuana leads to stoned mayhem on the freeways!

So you read a little further into the lede paragraph:

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (WSVN) — The woman responsible for killing two South Florida women in a fatal wrong-way crash minutes after taking to social media to post she was “2 drunk 2 care” has been sentenced to 24 years in prison.

Wait a minute, now you’re confused. “2 drunk 2 care”, texted the “Pot Princess”? So, which is it, was she drunk or was she stoned or was it both? Let’s continue to paragraph 2:

Twenty-two-year-old Kayla Mendoza, who described herself on her Twitter account where she sent that message as the “Pot Princess,” had pled guilty to two counts of DUI manslaughter in the Nov. 17, 2013 death of Kaitlyn Ferrante and Marisa Catronio, both 21.

Now it’s even murkier. She just calls herself “Pot Princess” in her Twitter bio? But she tweeted “2 drunk 2 care” from that account and has pleaded guilty to DUI manslaughter? Was it DUI for alcohol, for marijuana, or for both? How is Mendoza’s Twitter bio relevant in any way?

Paragraph 3 tells us how the family mourns. Paragraph 4 tells us about Mendoza’s crash injuries and the two fatalities. Paragraph 5 tells us the father of one of the dead women still mourns. Paragraph 6 tells us that both families still mourn. Paragraph 7 tells us one woman’s brother can never forgive Mendoza. If you’re easily distractible or on a tight schedule, maybe this is as far as you read the sad story of two women killed by the “Pot Princess” who texted “2 drunk 2 care”.

Only if you made it to Paragraph 8 do you learn:

According to court records, Mendoza had been drinking at a Coral Springs restaurant prior to the crash. Her blood alcohol record was nearly twice the legal limit, recorded at .15. She had been traveling for several miles at over 80 miles per hour. Mendoza also had traces of marijuana in her system, according to Florida Highway Patrol.

So, a woman who was twice the legal alcohol limit and texted “2 drunk 2 care” before speeding the wrong way on an expressway and killing two women gets memorialized in the headline as “Pot Princess”. A woman with mere traces of what were likely metabolites of marijuana in her system, which couldn’t have possibly affected her like the impairment from Florida’s favorite legal drug, gets tagged in the headline with a snippet of her Twitter bio rather than the damning tweet from her Twitter account.

“Woman ‘2 drunk 2 care’ gets 24 years for fatal wrong-way crash” is just one character longer than the “Pot Princess” headline and it’s far more representative of the gist of the story. But it doesn’t frighten an electorate that’s going to pass medical marijuana in 2016, now, does it?

There has been a complaint I’ve read lately that I believe originated with the estimable Michelle Alexander and her book “The New Jim Crow”, but I’m reading it echoed elsewhere. The complaint, in one form or another, is that African-Americans (and Hispanics) bore the brunt of marijuana prohibition, and when they were marijuana entrepreneurs, they got locked up. But now that marijuana is legal in some states, the vast majority of marijuana entrepreneurs are Caucasians.

In other words, black guys did the marijuana time, but white guys get to be marijuana rich. (I hope you’ll understand and not take offense if I use the shorthand “black” and “white” from this point on.)

There can be no doubt that black folks are disproportionately the victims of marijuana prohibition. Nationwide, it’s something like a four-times-greater chance to be arrested for weed if you’re black than if you’re white. It can be even worse in certain states and counties. So I don’t deny the first part of the equation; certainly, black guys did the marijuana time.

But I object to the notion that the marijuana industry as it unfolds in Colorado and Washington, and soon in Oregon and Alaska, is racist against black people per se. Keep in mind that those four states are among the 20 least-black states by population (Oregon 2%, Washington <4%, Colorado and Alaska <5%, US Average = 12.6%), so it’s not surprising their marijuana businesses are white. Only one aspect of new marijuana legalization is directly racist, and that’s the proscriptions against former marijuana felons entering the industry. It’s not fair to prevent the guys busted for illegal grows and sales from participating in legal ones when we’ve been busting the black illegal growers and sellers at a greater rate than the white illegal growers and sellers.

Felony proscriptions notwithstanding, however, there is nothing about the industry itself that is preventing black investors and entrepreneurs from getting involved in the new green rush. Yes, the obstacles from our overall legacy of racism do exist, from the lack of black personal wealth borne of real-estate redlining to fewer business, educational, and loan opportunities, and so forth, but these can’t be pinned on the marijuana industry any more than any other industry. The racism that forestalls black success in marijuana is endemic of our capitalist structure in America, period, not something racist about marijuana legalization.

And when it came to creating this new legal marijuana industry, who was at the forefront? I’ve been in marijuana reform for ten years now, and one complaint I’ve always heard is that the movement is almost all white males. Should we be shocked that white males are benefitting from legal marijuana when it was white males who pushed for legal marijuana? All those years volunteering or getting little pay in marijuana reform gave many (mostly white people) the contacts and background necessary to succeed right out of the gate.

You can see it in the statistics, too – white males generally support marijuana legalization in greater numbers than females or minorities. You see it on the boards of the national and local drug reform organizations. For the years I worked at NORML, we were always struck by the conundrum that blacks were four times more likely to be arrested, but, seemingly, forty times as unlikely to do anything about it.

I generally got two answers to that conundrum. One was that “diversity attracts diversity” – get some black folks involved and more black folks will want to be involved. When black folks see nothing but white faces, they don’t want to get involved, I was told. Great, so how does a group of white faces get that first black face to join up and attract more black faces? It’s not like we weren’t trumpeting the inherent racism of marijuana prohibition every chance we got.

Then I’d get the other answer, which was that “blacks already are targeted” – the idea that if you’re a black person already profiled and harassed simply for who you are, you don’t want to add to that by declaring yourself a drug legalizer. True enough, I suppose, but then doesn’t that add up to more respect for the white guys who “came out of the closet” and made themselves targets of profiling and harassment for marijuana use, when being quiet about it would have maintained their white privilege and kept them much safer?

Furthermore, what kind of argument is that in the context of the fight for black civil rights? Blacks were already much more targeted, for everything, in the Jim Crow era. But when it was the right to a bus seat, a lunch counter, and the voting booth, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. leading black people to fight for their rights, making themselves an even greater target, and eventually attracting sympathetic white people and changing the laws. But the right to smoke a joint? It was Keith Stroup and a bunch of white folks making themselves into a target that nobody ever would have pinned on them otherwise, and it was black leaders mobilizing against legalization. It took until 2011 for the NAACP to even consider that legalizing marijuana was a racial justice issue… 2011!

I applaud all efforts to increase minority involvement in the marijuana industry, short of some affirmative action where we start awarding licenses and contracts disproportionately to non-white people. Already, we see Snoop Dogg, B-Real, and the Marley Family getting involved in the industry, but besides musicians with a weed-themed oeuvre, where are the black investors?  Black venture capital money spends just as well as Brendan Kennedy’s, Justin Hartfield’s, and Jamen Shively’s, doesn’t it?

How much of the lack of black entrepreneurship in the marijuana industry owes to mainstream black culture’s disdain for marijuana? I guess we could argue that white society over-criminalized weed in black neighborhoods, leading to crime and violence, leading weed to be associated with it, leading black churches and leaders to being anti-weed, leading black people away from investing in it. If so, what more could white guys have done to change that cycle than legalizing weed in all neighborhoods?

One of the Zombie Lies (thanks, Bill Maher) about marijuana that just will not die is this idea that marijuana smoking will make you turn schizophrenic. While there are studies purporting to show an exacerbation of one’s already present schizophrenia by using cannabis, no study shows a causal relationship between using cannabis and developing schizophrenia. Genetics, environment, even the month you are born have a greater statistical significance in predicting schizophrenia than does one’s use of marijuana.

But that didn’t stop Project SAM head Kevin Sabet from trotting out that Zombie Lie when Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s “Weed 3” called for immediate nationwide legalization of medical marijuana:

Once upon a time, marijuana legalization was proposed in a state. Most of the people saw it, and it was good. But the police, the prison guards, the drug testers, and the rehabbers saw it, and it was a vision heralding the demise of their way of life.

And one other group saw it and agreed with the cops. Ironically, they consisted of people whom the police, the prison guards, the drug testers, and the rehabbers make their living on.

These Stoners Against Legalization are a varied group, to be sure. At the top are the rent seekers, illegal growers and dealers who, like the first group, see the demise of their easy profits in legalization. A simple, unsupervised, unlicensed, untaxed, unregulated lifestyle coming to an end and marijuana becoming like any other commodity that requires legitimate business acumen, not just tolerance for criminal risk.

Below them are the Fundamentalist Legalizers and the Anarchists, sometimes one and the same. The True Believers always can tell you why the proposed state legalization will be far worse than the current prohibition that condemns 700,000 annually to criminal records.

In 2010 California, it was that a 5×5 garden was too small and would enable an Oakland marijuana monopoly. Better to wait for 2012’s True Legalization. They’re still waiting six years later.

In 2012 Washington, it was a per se DUID statute that would replace all marijuana arrests with “green DUIDs”, which never happened. It was non-store ounces that would get you arrested, which never happened. It was that over an ounce was still illegal, passing a joint was still illegal, and home grow was still illegal, and yet prosecutions for over an ounce and home grow have dropped, and nobody got busted for passing a joint.

In 2014 Oregon, it was that the liquor commission would be in charge and $35/ounce tax was too much for grows. We’ll see.

And in 2015 Ohio, it is that ten growers get rich, as if the market wouldn’t have been dominated by a few large players anyway. In 2016 California, it will be that it doesn’t protect the family growers in Humboldt, or that the tax is too much, or they didn’t call it “cannabis”, or that it didn’t declare Jack Herer’s birthday a holiday or some such trifle. There will always be an excuse to maintain prohibition for the Fundamentalist Legalizers.

Then, the Anarchists, who instinctively hate anything resembling the politics that actually makes change happen, latch on to the psuedo-analysis of the True Believers, sprinkling in some conspiracy theory along the way (“how much are they paying you to support fake legalization?”) Before long, some of the young people who’d benefit most from the proposed legalization become the loudest voices against it.

Fortunately, the Stoners Against Legalization have as much pull in politics as Pluto does on our ocean tides. California was sunk by Schwarzenegger’s surprise decrim and Prop 19’s lack of national backing, not Dragonfly de la Luz. Washington passed despite the ravings of Steve Sarich. Oregon passed despite the extremists on my Oregon policy email list’s hatred of it.

As for Ohio? That was a tough bet without a controversial constitutional amendment. It may well fail, and if it does, I wouldn’t bet on Ohio voting on anything for all marijuana consumers before 2020.

Stoners Against Legalization. Voting with the drug warriors and fighting to keep you and me and themselves criminal since 2010.

Throughout the battle for marijuana decriminalization, medicalization, and legalization, we have always faced one enduring roadblock: marijuana is a federally prohibited Schedule 1 drug. No matter what any city, county, district, or state does to reduce marijuana penalties or legalize its possession and cultivation, possession of any amount of marijuana is a federal misdemeanor with a year in jail possible and cultivation of even one plant is a federal felony with five years and a quarter million dollar fine possible.

But could federal marijuana prohibition actually, in some respects, be a good thing?

Certainly it isn’t for anyone involved in a federal prosecution who was obeying their state marijuana laws, like the recent defendants in the Kettle Falls Five case or any of the dispensaries facing criminal procedings filed by rogue US attorneys.

However, when it comes to drug prosecutions, the feds don’t really make many of the arrests; the states do. In 2013, the DEA made 30,688 drug arrests out of 1,501,043 drug arrests total that year. That’s just 2 percent of all drug arrests. DEA doesn’t break down their arrests by drug, but it’s highly likely they make an even smaller proportion of all marijuana arrests. If you want to protect cannabis consumers from arrest, changing local and state laws are a more efficient to do that.

What makes federal prohibition a good thing is two-fold. It hinders the corporatization of the emerging marijuana industry and it fosters differentiation in marijuana laws that lead to competition and improvement of legalization.

If there’s one fear that unites the prohibitionists and the legalizers, it’s the specter of The Next Big Tobacco. For prohibitionists, it’s our marijuana businesses that they fear growing to enormous proportions, cannily advertising to youth and addicting as many customers as possible. For legalizers, it’s our marijuana businesses being overwhelmed by tobacco corporations that already have the infrastructure to mass-market burned-plant delivery systems.

With marijuana in Schedule 1, however, there is no way Big Tobacco can get involved without risking another trip to federal court, where it hasn’t fared well in the past couple of decades. It’s much less risky for them to keep expanding into international markets and developing the e-cigarette market domestically.

It helps our developing state enterprises as well. The first companies to get rich in Colorado or Washington can’t expand their operations across state lines. New businesses will develop in Oregon and Alaska and the four legal states keep developing their own market leaders, none of which can develop much larger than their state market will allow.

That also fosters the competition that will help marijuana legalization become refined and improved as it passes in future states. How will Washington State adjust their high tax rates once Oregon begins moving $200 ounces with just $35 in tax? How will Colorado adjust as pot-friendly skiers realize there’s decent skiing in Oregon and some scenic ocean beaches and no huge marijuana taxes? Already, Oregon’s inclusion of home grow rights is leading Washington legislators to propose granting that right to their adult consumers.

Federal Schedule I marijuana also hinders research into cannabis’ medicinal effects and this absolutely impacts patients across the country. However, that Schedule I also means that Big Pharma has been unable to commoditize medical marijuana. It’s forced millions of patients and growers in each medical marijuana state to engage in their own research and development, perhaps leading to greater genetic diversity and a wider range of application than if Big Pharma were focused only on getting the most profitable standardized cannabinoid preparations through the rigorous FDA approval process.

There’s no doubt in my mind that eventually, the federal government will relent and move cannabis down into Schedule III. If I were betting, I’d say it happens in 2019, depending on whether California passes marijuana legalization. At least, I hope California passes legalization in 2016 and is allowed to grow its own state-level marijuana business behemoths for a few years before Schedule I falls. California’s massive market leaders and smaller state leaders with years of experience should then be able to hold their own against any incursions from Big Tobacco.

After two days driving across Idaho and Wyoming, where it is illegal to merely be high, my Portland NORML colleague Kaliko and I arrive at Infinite Wellness Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is the first legal pot shop you can get to on that route south from Laramie, Wyoming.

The first thing I notice is that below its green cross sign, it had the words “Medical / Recreational”. Ah, so my kind are allowed here. The second thing I notice is that the joint is jumpin’. There is a steady stream of customers on a Saturday afternoon.

Once we enter, I had to immediately use the bathroom, since I’d been driving since Rock Springs, Wyoming. Apparently the bathroom is permitted for use by both medical and recreational customers, thank goodness.

Back into the lobby, a clerk checks my ID and writes my name on a slip of paper along with the words “Non Resident”. See, I only get to buy seven grams because I’m an Oregonian. Coloradoans get to buy twenty-eight grams. “Keep your ID and that paper out,” he told me.

Then as we enter, there is a large rectangular showroom, with glass counters running to the left and right, along each wall, and along the back wall. Running down the middle of the floor was one of those posts-with-seat-belt-ribbons you see to form lines at the airport or at a bank. The sign at the first post read:

RECREATIONAL
===>
MEDICAL
<===

Now that dividing-belt ran to about half the floor, then took a left and ended at the glass counter. Thus, the MEDICAL side comprised about 25% of the shop. There were a couple of people there. On the RECREATIONAL side, it was like waiting on the next checker at the Best Buy.

Standing there watching two patients leisurely chat with their budtenders while my kind queued up for rapid-fire service, I felt a bit like I do at airports when I’m in Boarding Group B and they’re announcing the boarding for Platinum, Diamond, Elite, Ruby, Sapphire, Gold Star customers, uniformed military, families with small children and elderly boarding now.

While in line I struck up a conversation with a guy in the line who happened to have moved here from St. John’s in Portland. The fellow had a terrible stutter, but it couldn’t have been something medical marijuana could help, because he was in the recreational line with me.

Looking around, I notice that on the medical side, there were big display jars of marijuana buds, shelves of concentrates and edibles, and displays of vapor cartridges. Over on the recreational side, there were big display jars of marijuana buds, shelves of concentrates and edibles, and displays of vapor cartridges. But on the medical side there was a display case of pipes and bongs that wasn’t matched on the recreational side. It had a prominent sign reading:

MEDICAL GLASS

Hmm, I wondered. If someone were to mistakenly smoke some recreational buds out of medical glass, is that like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters? Can my kind even properly and successfully use medical glass, given our robust health? Maybe the carb on medical glass is shaped in such a way that it is easier for arthritics.

Eventually it is my turn and I make my order with my friendly budtender. I’ve grown accustomed to using vapor pens with pre-filled cartridges, so I ordered a cartridge of Durbin Poison (I like my heady sativas) and a couple of pre-rolled joints. “What do you have in pre-rolls,” I asked him. He told me they were “rainbow joints”, a mixture of all of their herbs. Oh, a salad joint, as we’d call it in Portland.

“So how much are the pre-rolls?” Ten bucks apiece. For salad joints.

“How much is that cartridge?” Sixty-five dollars. “Geez, man,” I whined to the budtender, “Sixty-five dollars a gram is pretty steep. In Portland, I’m getting a gram cartridge for thirty bucks.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to tell you, dude, that’s a half-gram cartridge. It’s just the way it is; you’d get it cheaper on the medical side.”

Yeah, but my kind aren’t allowed in there. At this point I made the split decision to continue with the ridiculously overpriced transaction just to have the receipt to use for this blog post and future presentations.

I made some small talk as he was ringing everything up, asking him about the medical glass. He made some explanation about it but all I recall from it was something about how the glass couldn’t be on the recreational side because if they had to ask their medical customers to go to the recreational side to buy glass that would be a “disservice”.

“All right,” he continues, “that’ll be ninety-nine seventy-nine.”

Yeah. $99.79 for a half gram cartridge and two salad joints!

So, the cartridge at $65 and the two joints at $10 apiece comes to $85. Then there is the CO, which I assume is the Colorado Excise Tax, which was $2.47. Add in the Fort Collins City Tax of $3.27 and the Larimer County Tax at $0.55 and the State Retail Marijuana Sales Tax of $8.50 and that gets you to $99.79.

Anyway, later I enjoyed some of those recreational products and I’ll be damned if my back ache from driving from Portland to Denver didn’t ease. Maybe somebody mistakenly mixed in something from the medical side into those ten dollar recreational salad joints. They must have, because they sure as hell weren’t getting me very high.

I will be doing everything in my power to ensure that legal marijuana in Portland, Oregon, turns out nothing like this marijuana apartheid.

Yesterday’s meeting of the Oregon State Joint Legislative Committee on Measure 91 Implementation was set to gavel to a close when State Senator and Republican Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli blasted the Oregon Liquor Control Commission’s ability to handle the task of regulating recreational marijuana, explaining, “Notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the OLCC staff, my confidence in their ability to manage this program is rapidly diminishing.”

The OLCC staff had been briefing the representatives and senators regarding Senate Bill 844, one of many bills addressing either recreational marijuana, medical marijuana, or some combination of the two.  This meeting was just one of many bi-weekly sessions on the issue of marijuana scheduled for 2015.  Senator Ferrioli brought up his question just as the chair, Senator Burdick, was about to adjourn the meeting.  “Some of the complexities that we’ve discussed lead me to believe that there’s a lot of expertise that currently doesn’t exist in the commission,” Senator Ferrioli added, “and it doesn’t currently exist in the staff.”

The senator had opened his line of questioning to the OLCC staff by asking about how other states are currently administering their recreational marijuana programs.  “What are the entities in Colorado and Washington State that function as the administrative authority… over the recreational marijuana programs?”  The beleaguered OLCC staffer could only answer, “I don’t have that information at this time,” leading observers to wonder how the OLCC could be three months into the regulatory process and not just fail to understand how Colorado and Washington have been regulating recreational marijuana, but fail to even know the name of these agencies (the Marijuana Enforcement Division in Colorado and the Washington State Liquor Control Board, by the way) that they should have been consulting with.

“We’re talking about creating a brand-new agency for research facilities,” Senator Ferrioli said, “yet the [OLCC] doesn’t seem to know the difference between micrograms and milligrams.”  Ferrioli also seemed to call on more cannabis community involvement, asking “I’m curious about comments our House colleagues have made about the level of expertise that is in the community that perhaps we’re under-utilizing.”

Senator Ferrioli’s complete unedited remarks are below:

UPDATE: MPP Communications Director Mason Tvert reached out to me to explain that “Unfortunately, Ms. Berman’s new committee grossly mischaracterized MPP’s positions. MPP has been unwavering in its support for an initiative that both includes a reasonable cap on retail licenses and allows adults to grow a limited amount of marijuana in an enclosed, locked space inside their homes. This initiative is the product of a lengthy and deliberative drafting process and represents a compromise that was agreed to by the folks representing the medical marijuana business community. It appeared that everyone was on the same page until this new committee formed and made claims to the contrary.”  I stand by my story, however, because the main points are about the threat Rob Kampia made in retaliation, and if there is no significant difference between MPPs and ALR’s plans, where’s the beef? –“R”R

Rob Kampia, the Executive Director of the Marijuana Policy Project, has sent an email to the head of a competing marijuana legalization initiative in Arizona, threatening to spend $10,000 “to pay people for 1,000 hours of time to distribute literature outside of your front door, and the literature will not portray you in a kind way.”  The recipient was Dr. Gina Berman MD, an emergency room physician who is the medical director of The Giving Tree Wellness Center dispensaries.

Dr. Berman was formerly on MPP’s campaign committee that is proposing a legalization initiative for Arizona that allows for generous home grow provisions and no cap on retail marijuana outlets (pot shops).  Dr. Berman disagreed with those provisions, feeling Arizonans are too conservative to support such liberal legalization, and has since filed with the Secretary of State’s office to present a more modest legalization initiative.

That’s right… MPP’s Kampia is threatening to spend money to shut down medical marijuana access because a dispensary owner supports marijuana legalization, albeit a different vision than Kampia’s.  The irony is even more sublime if we take a moment to recall the history of medical marijuana in Arizona.

Kampia Now Opposes His Arizona 2010 Campaign Principles

In 2010, MPP proposed a very conservative medmj law for Arizona. It was the first medmj law at the time that restricted the right of patients to grow their own marijuana. It was a “25-mile halo rule”; if you lived that close to a dispensary, you don’t get to grow your own. That means now, as dispensaries exist in almost every city, that 95% 97.2% of Arizona patients must shop at dispensaries and are banned from growing at home.

At the time, when I and others complained, MPP told us that they had to “give the market to the dispensaries to ensure they are viable.” (Because, you know, it’s soooo tough to find customers for legal weed.) The other reason given is that conservative Arizona voters would never support such unlimited home growing of marijuana.

Another aspect of the 2010 medmj law was that it capped the total number of dispensaries to one per 10 pharmacies. That worked out to 126 dispensaries. At the time, MPP explained that conservative Arizona voters would never get behind the possibility of a pot shop on every corner.

It turns out that MPP may have been right. The medmj law passed with just 50.13% of the vote, the closest winning margin of any medmj state to date. It also made Arizona the first state to disallow home medical marijuana grows, a precedent that has now been followed by every medical marijuana state since.

But now, in 2016, as MPP wants to pass legalization in Arizona, Dr. Berman believes MPP is proposing a legalization that conservative Arizona voters would not support. She explains that conservative Arizona voters would never support MPP’s proposed unlimited home growing of marijuana. She also explains how conservative Arizona voters could not get behind MPP’s proposed possibility of a pot shop on every corner.

And now Rob Kampia wants to threaten her business – one of the very medical marijuana dispensaries his MPP gave a market to – for supporting a legalization plan that echoes the conservative home grow and retail aspects of his 2010 medical measure?

Fighting Someone Who’s For Legalization

Gee, I wonder how much good $10,000 could do for promoting legalization instead of trying to put out of business a medical marijuana dispensary a certain number of sick and disabled Arizonans are depending on, since Rob Kampia made sure they couldn’t grow at home if they live within a 25 mile radius?

I don’t know Arizona politics. Maybe now, after legalization has passed in four states, Arizona is ready for wide-open home grow and pot shop licensing. It sounds like MPP is proposing a legalization more to my liking than Dr. Berman’s.

But if Kampia wants us to believe, per his email, that this “will not interfere with what we’re planning,” then what’s the $10,000 paid to hate-leaflet her dispensaries for? Just to punish her for disagreement? For daring to compete with MPP?

Remember, this is a medmj dispensary fighting for legalization that believes its more conservative approach is more likely to win. This puts MPP in a weird position. MPP is usually the “sober adults in the room” when it comes to legalization, casting their org as the reasonable one against the wild-eyed, yippie-hippie, treat-it-like-tomatoes “true” legalizers. Now MPP is the one calling for wide open legalization and facing a more conservative foil in Dr. Berman’s org.

Kampia tries to play the martyr in his email, claiming that “I spent 90 days in jail for marijuana when I refused to narc on anyone in 1989 as a student at Penn State University. As such, I’m certainly willing to spend no time in jail in order to disrupt the business of someone (you) whose actions are likely to keep people in jail for marijuana.” (I think he mis-typed “no time in jail”, as the context makes it seem as if he’s willing to accept jail time to take her down. Or maybe it means “what I will do will be legal because I wish to spend no time in jail.” If so, he comes off like Robert de Niro in “Cape Fear”.) Just keep in mind, the business he’s willing to spend $10,000 to shut down is one that provides medical marijuana to sick people.

If Kampia believes so strongly in battling the foes of legalization that he’ll spend $10,000 to destroy their medical marijuana business, where was his wallet in 2010 as dispensaries in California were openly campaigning against the failed legalization Proposition 19? Where was his wallet in 2012 in Washington State as dispensaries were openly campaigning against the successful Initiative 502? They were against legalization that was already on the ballot, not for a different legalization than one that hasn’t even gathered all its signatures yet.

Oh, wait, I know.  Those weren’t MPP initiatives, were they?  See, it’s not $10,000 put up to destroy the medical enemies of legalization. It’s $10,000 put up to teach a lesson to those who’d dare choose the highway instead of Rob Kampia’s way.

The Decline and Fall of MPP

This kind of petulant behavior reeks of someone facing irrelevance.  For MPP’s first two decades, Kampia was the Big Man on Campus in marijuana reform, thanks to his access to his billionaire buddy, Peter Lewis.  But Lewis is deceased now and other philanthropic billionaires are steering clear of MPP and its scandal-plagued director.  Half of the states that have legalized didn’t need Kampia’s war chest and as more marijuana millionaires are minted and more states are legalized, the need for MPP’s bankroll and expertise decreases.  Dr. Berman isn’t threatening legalization in Arizona; she’s threatening Rob Kampia’s potential win and next fundraising pitches.

Kampia’s reputation for surmising local politics is also in a free-fall.  MPP’s efforts at legalizing (Update: I’m informed Alaska’s effort wasn’t MPP’s; apologies for the error) Alaska, Nevada, and Colorado in the 2000s were all busts (39%, 44%, 41%, and 44%) and were all beaten by California’s Prop 19 in 2010 (46%), the first 21st century legalization try funded without MPP’s help.  Prop 19 was doing well in the polls early on and had Kampia and MPP given the kind of money they dedicated to just one of their failed legalizations, Prop 19 may have passed.  But, of course, that wouldn’t have been a win for MPP.

Yes, MPP’s legalization in Colorado passed in 2012, and to be fair, was far superior to Washington’s legalization that also passed.  But Washington’s passage also underscored the fact that legalizers don’t have to rely on Rob Kampia’s way or the highway.  In the meantime, the failure of Oregon’s grassroots, underfunded, wild-eyed, yippie-hippie, treat-it-like-tomatoes “true” legalization in 2012 presaged the greatest indicator of Kampia’s inability to heed local advice.

When Oregon legalization with no national backing failed with 46.5% (again, greater support than four failed MPP initiatives), shortly thereafter, Kampia penned another poison email to Oregon activists, threatening them not to move forward with legalization initiatives in 2014.  (Bonus fact: In turning the memo over to The Oregonian to publish, Kampia outed one recipient who had specifically asked not to be identified, owing to his then-probationary status for a felony marijuana cultivation conviction.  Luckily, his home state didn’t revoke that activist’s probation, allowing him to help fundraise for Oregon’s win in 2014.)

Kampia predicted that any Oregon attempt in 2014 would lose with 47% or less of the vote, thanks to the non-presidential-year depressed election turnout among younger, more liberal voters.  He also explained “…If key players can agree on an overall plan [for 2016]… MPP is proposing to spend $700,000 over four years …If, however, a [tax & regulate] initiative is placed on the November 2014 ballot, then [Oregon] will fall by the wayside and lose its time in the sun in November 2016.”  The implicit threat was MPP would give Oregon money for 2016, unless it tried to legalize without MPP in 2014.

Of course, as it turned out, Oregon legalized without MPP, winning with 56.1% of the vote, a greater margin of support than any other legalization that has passed statewide, including MPP’s Colorado initiative in a presidential election year, winning with a nine-point-greater level of support than Kampia had predicted.

So take comfort, Dr. Berman, in knowing that Rob Kampia’s not as good at gauging local politics out West as the locals are, that Rob Kampia’s threats mean you’re on the right track, and that you worked with Rob Kampia and the breast massage didn’t happen.

This Tuesday, I was honored to be selected as the pro-legalization side in the first-ever public debate on marijuana legalization at Texas Christian University.  Opposing me was Ben Cort, a board member of Project SAM, the nation’s anti-legalization lobby.

At one point in the debate (and I’m paraphrasing, since I was contractually forbidden from recording or live streaming), Cort said, “I talk to a lot of police officers, and I ask them if they’ve ever arrested anyone for simple possession of marijuana alone and their answer is no.  We really don’t arrest and lock up a lot of people for marijuana in this country.”

Someone needs to tell that to 94-year-old World War II veteran Douglas Floyd Ponischil.  From the Charlotte Observer, a very terse crime beat report:

A 94-year-old man has been charged with felony possession of marijuana, according to the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office.

Douglas Floyd Ponischil was arrested early Monday, records indicate.

Ponischil does not appear to have a lengthy criminal history in the state. A background check revealed only minor traffic violations.

Here’s the arrest, in case Ben Cort’s reading.  Tax money was used to catch a 94-year-old marijuana consumer.  I’m sure the people of Charlotte, North Carolina, are all resting safer knowing this veteran was taken into custody.

UPDATE: One of my listeners to The Russ Belville Show on 420RADIO.org provided this information (thanks JT):

I contacted the reporter, Elisabeth Arriero, by e-mail. She didn’t give me any more information, and said she was not planning a follow-up story. The lack of details of this incident are maddening.

I also called N.C. NORML, but only got an answering system. I left them the basic info on the recording.

One person in the comments section after the article, Melba Tarlton actually knows Mr. Ponischil. She gave this information about him:

>>>”I KNOW THIS MAN PERSONALLY. Let me assure you that Douglas is a fine man. He served our country in WWII and as a Captain in the Merchant Marine and Naval Reserve, activated during the Korean Conflict. He and his crew of 33 survived when the Germans torpedoed and sank his ship off the coast of Haiti during WWII. I have no doubt there are some explanations for what put him in this position, because he is a very fine gentlemen. I feel sorry for him to be in this position at his age, and all the sacrifices he made for our country. I hope the arresting officer reads this.”

>>>”John, he does have family, but sadly they do not pay much attention to him or his care. I just learned he is out of jail. He is hopeful the charges will be dismissed when he gets his day in court. Nevertheless, this must have been a horrible and humiliating experience for this war veteran. Thanks, John.”

Another activist, Adela Wisdom – of POW 420, got involved and found this information:

>>>”only felony possession…not intent to distribute, cultivation, enhancement gun charges, repeat offender, tax evasion, manufacturing….NOPE…just felony possession…which in North Carolina is 1.5 oz and up….3-8 months imprisonment and $1000 fine…. for a 94 year old man…”

During our debate, Ben Cort often made vague references to some sort of decriminalization that he’d support.  It’s the rhetorical trick of Project SAM’s I call the Kinder Gentler Drug War maneuver.  We’re at the point now where everybody is recognizing the futility and cruelty and absurdity of the Drug War, so it is difficult for them to be seen as supporting it.  So Project SAM pivots to this idea that we shouldn’t arrest and lock up and saddle with criminal records the people who get caught with personal amounts of marijuana.  (Growers and sellers?  SAM says lock ’em up.)

That’s North Carolina.  It was one of the states in the 1970’s (when Douglas was merely in his fifties) that decriminalized personal possession of marijuana.  Yup, for about forty years, possession of less than a half ounce is a non-arrestable misdemeanor with a $200 fine.  Problem is, you can be arrested for more than half an ounce and as Adela Wisdom notes, over 1.5 ounces is a felony.

Project SAM wants to maintain a penalty of some sort against personal adult use of marijuana, but reduce the consequences to the majority of adult users to just below the level of outrageous headlines and depressing statistics.  Things like the US leading the world in incarceration, college kids losing scholarships, innocent people and their dogs getting shot, racially disproportionate arrest statistics, and yes, 94-year-old men being led off in handcuffs for having too much marijuana.

Let’s begin with some praise for President Obama.  While many on my side of the marijuana debate (including, at times, myself) have roundly criticized the previous leader of The Choom Gang for his failure to end the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs, I do have to give him credit where credit is due.  Marijuana arrests are down four years in a row and states and Native American tribes are being given the latitude to institute marijuana regulations.  Sometimes it’s what a president doesn’t do that he deserves credit for, and in this case, it was getting out of the way and letting legalization happen.  Yeah, he could rein in some renegade US Attorneys here and there, but overall, it’s been a far better experience than we’d have had under a President McCain or a President Romney.

But this quote of his from his recent VICE interview does require a rebuke:

“First of all, it shouldn’t be young people’s biggest priority…sometimes on the White House website and petitions we get the same. So let’s put it in perspective. Young people, I understand this is important to you, but you should be thinking about climate change, the economy, jobs, war and peace. Maybe way at the bottom you should be thinking about marijuana.”

I’m not a young person anymore (I’m just six years younger than the President) but I’ve dedicated my life to ending this cruel, absurd, pointless prohibition of cannabis because I care about all those issues President Obama mentioned, and more!

Climate change?  Any serious discussion of reducing greenhouse gases means turning to alternative renewable fuel sources.  Besides the biomass of industrial hemp that can be made into ethanol, there is a remarkable new development in the processing of hemp into superconductors that are more efficient and a thousand times cheaper than the current graphene superconductors.  Translated from geek speak, we’re talking about an amazingly cheap battery technology that solves a huge problem with wind, solar, tidal, and other eco-friendly power sources.  It’s not always windy or sunny or high tide, you see, and power grids work on consistent energy sources.  Today, the cost of graphene-based batteries makes it tough for those energy sources to compete with fossil fuels… but you drop the battery cost a few orders of magnitude and sunlight becomes massively efficient and profitable.  And Hempcrete – a building material that’s carbon-negative, insulative, earthquake-, pest-, fire-resistant, cheap, sustainable, and recyclable – is another hemp product that aids the fight against climate change

The economy and jobs?  Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division has issued about 10,000 of its license cards to people working directly in the marijuana industry – jobs that have benefits, union protection, and living wages.  Then there are all the jobs created in the “pick-and-shovel” industries in this modern day gold rush – the packagers, the grow shops, the insurance companies, the security companies, and so much more.  The first two states to have a year under their belt, Colorado and soon Washington, are showing and will show nine-digit gross sales revenues and eight-digit tax revenues.  Even opponents of legalization can’t help but notice “more dispensaries in Denver than Starbucks and McDonald’s combined!”  (More places than you can get a cup of coffee or a cheeseburger, though?)

War and peace?  I don’t know how or if marijuana prohibition has any effect on ISIS, Boko Harum, or Vladimir Putin (give me a week, though, and I’d find the link) but honestly, I’m not that worried about those wars.  Take a look at Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras sometime.  The violence of our drug war, like many American manufacturing jobs, has been shipped south of the border.  Upwards of 80,000 Mexicans have been slaughtered over the past decade, and not just the rival gangs, but dances full of teenagers and daycares full of children.  VICE did a tremendous feature on “The Beast”, the cargo trains that Central Americans ride through Mexico to reach the United States, fleeing in fear of the narco gangs that rule those countries with murder and coruption.  If you really want to do something about another important issue, immigration, you must stop the drug war that forces people to immigrate.

It’s so much more than legalizing marijuana.  I want to see sick kids and disabled adults and stressed veterans and traumatized victims able to use medical marijuana safely in every state, so it’s a health care issue.  I want to see police reined in from the worst abuses we saw in Ferguson, Cleveland, Oakland, and more, and the drug war fosters and funds much of that, so it’s a law enforcement and civil rights issue.  I want to see a multi-billion dollar market with 20 million adult customers to no longer benefit criminals and scofflaws, so it’s a business and crime issue.  I want to see black kids able to walk the streets without police harassment and black fathers to be able to get jobs and provide for families, so it’s a racial justice and family issue.  I want to see addicts and alcoholics to have an exit drug to turn to that won’t kill them, so it’s a public health and drug addiction issue.  I want to see responsible adult pot smokers like me not be barred from certain jobs, scholarships, medical procedures, and opportunities based not on the content of our character but on the matabolites in our urine, so it’s a equal opportunity and discrimination issue.  I want kids to be carded by pot dealers, educated by teachers and scientists, not stoners, and still eligible for a bright future even if they do experiment like some young people do, so it’s a children and education issue.

But most of all, it’s an issue that now a majority in successive polls by numerous reputable organizations over the past five years agree upon; that marijuana ought to be legalized.  With respect to medical marijuana exceptions and marijuana decriminalization, it’s an issue overwhelming supermajorities have agreed on for over a decade.  And in White House poll after poll, it’s an issue that dominates the online discussion.  So Mr. President, instead of telling us how low marijuana legalization ought to be on our list of priorities, how about you listen when we tell you why legalization should be so high.

The leader of the anti-legalization group Project SAM, Kevin Sabet, sat down for an interview with the newly-confirmed head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (a.k.a. “the drug czar”), Michael Botticelli.  Yesterday, we looked at what the Drug Czar thinks of recent state legalization efforts (guess).  Today, we continue with Botticelli’s thoughts on how legalization impacts people like him who are in recovery from drug addiction.

BOTTICELLI: It’s been a long time now, but I think back to my early days of recovery, and I remember how hard it was for me to do things like walk down the street and walk near the bars that I used to hang out. I used to cross the street. … As a person in recovery, I don’t want to be walking down the street and smell marijuana smoke. I don’t want to be walking down the street and see one more temptation because there is a marijuana dispensary down the street. … And I think assaulting people with seeing people smoke, and the smell and dispensaries and advertisement is yet one more thing that people, particularly people in early recovery, have to deal with and struggle with.

No kidding!  I know that as a person in recovery from obesity, when I walk down the street and see McDonald’s or a Baskin-Robbins, or smell buttered popcorn at the movie theater, or watch TV and see commercial after commercial for junk food, it’s really hard to deal with those triggers.  Obviously what we need to do is criminally prohibit all these things so people in early recovery from obesity have a chance to lead a thin, active, healthy life.

It’s galling to hear the Drug Czar talk about his own responsibility to steer clear of distribution and advertising of the drug he was addicted to, alcohol, while he maintains a position that it’s government’s responsibility to protect the tiny minority of people with other drug addiction issues from the smell of an herb 114 times safer than his drug of choice.

BOTTICELLI: I do wish the recovery community was much more involved in this, because I do think a lot of people probably feel the same way that I do. … I feel like their needs have not been heard and attended to as we think about what’s right to do for our communities. I agree that we’ve got to look at disproportionality in our criminal justice system, but how do we attend to the needs of everybody in our community, and I think the recovery voice often is not vocal. It’s clearly not heard as we’re thinking about, quite honestly, the commercialization.

The problem is that the “recovery voice” is often the drug rehabilitation centers.  A large percentage of their clientele are marijuana consumers whose only problem with the drug is they got caught with it by police or a drug test and were forced to choose between rehab and jail.  According to the Treatment Episode Data Set – Admissions for 2012, over 43 percent of those admitted to rehab who use marijuana were sent there by the criminal justice system,  For those whose only drug was marijuana, over half were forced there by law enforcement (53.3 percent).  And of those admitted only for marijuana, over one-third (36.3 percent) hadn’t used in the month prior to admittance and over half (55.4 percent) had used less than once per week.

BOTTICELLI: I fundamentally believe that we can continue to reframe how people with substance use disorders are perceived in the United States. I really do. We’ve come a long way. I know that lots of polls show that people would rather see people get treatment rather than incarceration, but I also know there are still significant stigma, and people still feel like this is a moral issue. I think that we can really continue to change the way we think about this illness.

This is where we see the blind spot in Botticelli’s viewpoint.  There are people who don’t use drugs and there are people with an illness, period.  There is no room in Botticelli’s world for the majority of drug consumers, especially marijuana, whose consumption is no more or less a problem than the average social drinker’s.  Acknowledging those social drug consumers means treating them like social drinkers and not arresting them merely for their possession and use of their drug.  To Botticelli, that means accepting that people like him will have to avoid more triggers to their drug relapse.

Botticelli’s view, like many, is that we already lost the war on alcohol, there’s no way we can end its commercialization and promotion because it is so ingrained in culture.  My view is that maintaining marijuana prohibition in the world of legal alcohol and legal tobacco is like banning golf because football and boxing lead to concussions.  Yes, it is theoretically possible to get smacked in the head by an errant golf ball, but wouldn’t anti-concussion efforts be better focused on football and boxing?  (By the way, marijuana has shown to be protective against and therapeutic for those athletes suffering concussions in the football and boxing matches usually sponsored by Budweiser…)

The leader of the anti-legalization group Project SAM, Kevin Sabet, sat down for an interview with the newly-confirmed head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (a.k.a. “the drug czar”), Michael Botticelli.  In the interview, we learn that (surprise!) the drug czar opposes marijuana legalization (as he is statutorily required to do) and thinks medical marijuana and marijuana legalization have taught the children that marijuana is harmless and fun to consume.  Some relevant excerpts from Botticelli’s answers follow, with my reactions:

BOTTICELLI: Just to be clear, this administration, this office, is opposed to legalization. This is not from an ideological perspective. When you look at the research, the science, and the data behind the health harms of marijuana, particularly as it relates to youth in this country, I think we have some real challenges and hurdles facing us.

That’s strange, I was just reading this piece in the Washington Post entitled “Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say“.  The piece details the latest research on marijuana’s harm relative to other drugs and concludes “We should stop fighting marijuana legalization and focus on alcohol and tobacco instead.”  It goes on to note that marijuana is 114 times safer than alcohol.  Alcohol actually turned up as the most dangerous recreational drug, riskier than heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and meth.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, underaged drinking kills around 4,300 children and teens every year.  While there have been cases of children accidentally consuming marijuana, there has not been one single death due to marijuana overdose in all human history.

BOTTICELLI: The American Academy of Pediatrics… said that for any policy position, the most salient criteria should be what its impact is on youth in this country. That I think is where the basis of our policy comes from.

I see.  So, those 4,300 deaths from teen drinking must greatly inform the drug czar’s policies.  Since marijuana kills zero and the drug czar wants to keep its possession criminal, the drug czar’s position on alcohol must be somewhere from life in prison to death penalty for any adult who possesses alcohol.  Oh, no, wait, I’m told that the drug czar doesn’t take a position on alcohol prohibition, since that’s not a drug of abuse listed on the Controlled Substances schedule.  That drug we can sell in supermarkets where kids can touch it; that drug we can consume on outdoor public patios where kids can see it; that drug we can celebrate at dinners, at parties, at sporting events, at concerts, at festivals, and in public whether or not kids are around.  It’s marijuana, the one that kills nobody, that we need to lock people up for.

BOTTICELLI: Clearly, youth are getting messages that marijuana is a benign substance and in many cases helpful because of medical marijuana. …they are getting messages that are very disingenuous and are really not speaking to them about what the health harms are. …Clearly, [youth marijuana use] is tagged to their perception of risk, to the messages.

No, the youth are getting the message that marijuana isn’t going to cause schizophrenia, that marijuana isn’t going to cause lung cancer or COPD, that marijuana isn’t going to inexorably lead to heroin, that marijuana isn’t going to deplete their IQ, and that marijuana users can grow up to be smart, rich, successful people.  They’re also getting the message that people with cancer, AIDS, MS, ALS, epilepsy, and many other disorders gain great benefit from using marijuana as medicine, despite Botticelli’s office’s efforts to stop them.  It’s no surprise that the perception of marijuana’s risk by teens is plummeting when the hyperbolic lies of prohibition are being replaced by the truth about cannabis.

BOTTICELLI: …if you think of what Big Tobacco did, they said, “Our product is helpful. It relaxes you. It makes you feel better.” They had physicians promoting it. They used very funny cartoon characters to market their products and they refused to reveal the ingredients of their products. And I think you can begin to see that the exact same things that we had to undo with the tobacco industry are now happening with the commercialization of marijuana.

There are three reasons Big Tobacco had to lie about the harmfulness of its product, hide its ingredients, and market it to young pepole with cartoons.  Cigarettes are a toxic, unpleasant, addictive product.  Most people who try a cigarette for the first time will hack and cough, feel dizzy and nauseous, and dislike the smell and taste.  Adults who try a cigarette for the first time aren’t likely to try a second.  Therefore, Big Tobacco had to use Joe Camel to lure in young people whose penchant for risk and susceptibility to peer pressure and rebellion allows them to get past the nasty initiation period of new tobacco consumption.  Big Tobacco had to lie about the health risks of its product to forestall millions of its adult customers dropping the habit in favor of their health.

But Big Marijuana doesn’t have to lie about its product.  It really does help with stress, nausea, sleeplessness, mood, pain, anxiety, appetite, and many other conditions.  It’s a pleasant experience for most adults who try it.  And in the jurisdictions that have legalized it, a very careful inspection of the product is conducted with informative labeling on the package a statutory requirement.  It’s only the black market marijuana that’s sold with mystery ingredients.

(Tomorrow: The Drug Czar on Marijuana Legalization vs. Addiction Recovery)

What good is a democracy if what the people vote for is ignored?

It’s a question I’ve been pondering since Oregon passed its marijuana legalization initiative, Measure 91, with the greatest margin of support for any state that has legalized marijuana, 56.1 percent.  More Oregonians voted for legalized marijuana than voted for any statewide official.  Now, the legislature seeks to undo much of what the people approved as the legalization regulations are written.

The story begins with the previous general election in 2012.  Measure 80, known as the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act or OCTA, had made the ballot, but went to down to defeat at the same time Washington and Colorado were passing their historic marijuana legalization laws.

The major newspapers had mostly come out against OCTA.  They cited numerous flaws with the proposal, such as allowing for unlimited personal possession and cultivation and establishing a centralized marijuana commission selected by marijuana growers that would control the wholesale purchase and pricing of all marijuana in Oregon.  When OCTA lost as Washington and Colorado won, political observers explained that the wise electorate had resisted their inclination to legalize marijuana because the details of this particular legalization plan were unwise and unworkable.

But the strong showing for legalization in Washington and Colorado lent an air of inevitability to eventual legalization in Oregon, if not in the 2014 midterm election then certainly during the 2016 presidential election year.  That’s when organizers of what would become Measure 91 began engaging the legislature with their ideas of how legalization should unfold in Oregon.

The group, New Approach Oregon, explained that they were willing to work with the legislature to craft a legalization plan with their input.  Furthermore, the legislature need not have put their political careers at risk by going on the record for or against marijuana legalization.  New Approach Oregon asked the legislature to craft a legalization plan and submit it to the voters as a referendum.

The inevitability of legalization acted as a thinly-veiled ultimatum: Work with us to create the legalization you’ll like, New Approach offered, or we’ll gather signatures and place the legalization we like on the ballot, and it will probably win.

The legislature refused the offer, so New Approach followed through on its promise.  New Approach gathered the requisite number of signatures, the measure made the ballot, and it passed overwhelmingly.  Fifty-six percent of the voters agreed that on July 1, adults get to possess 1 ounce of marijuana, 16 ounces of edibles, 72 ounces of tinctures, and 1 ounce of concentrates.  Oregonians decided that adults also get to possess 8 ounces of marijuana and cultivate 4 marijuana plants per household.  The electorate mandated that only the state can tax marijuana at a low $35 per ounce and only a vote of the people can ban marijuana commerce in a city or county.  Most importantly, the will of the people is that the existing medical marijuana program is not to be affected by passing legalization – Measure 91 made that point in three separate sections (Section 4.7, Section 6.2a, and Section 6.2b).

Now the legislature is suddenly very interested in writing the details of marijuana legalization.  When Washington State passed their Initiative 502, it was safe from legislative tampering for two years, thanks to that state’s constitutional requirement of a two-thirds legislative majority to override an initiative passed by the people.  Colorado’s Amendment 64 is in that state’s constitution, and thus can’t be changed without another constitutional amendment.  But since Oregon’s Measure 91 is neither constitutionally protected nor a constitutional amendment, it is immediately subject to the regulation and amendment that can be passed within the House and Senate.  The legislative disdain for the clear intent of the people reached all the way to the governor’s office as well.

Before he resigned due to an influence scandal involving his fiancée, former governor Kitzhaber was announcing his set of “principles” that should guide the implementation of Measure 91.  “The amount that you can actually grow at a home-grow operation,” Kitzhaber told the Bend Bulletin, “seems to me to exceed the amount that you’re supposed to be able to have legally.”  Kitzhaber seemed to be thinking that four plants would produce more than eight ounces, which may be true.  But I doubt Kitzhaber was arguing that the home possession limit should be higher; rather, he was arguing that there should be fewer plants allowed than what was approved by 115,000 more voters than re-elected him.

The former governor was also quick to ignore the people on leaving the medical marijuana program untouched, asking “If you could use marijuana recreationally, why do you even need a separate medical marijuana statute?”  That’s a refrain picked up on by members of the legislature who are floating various bills that would in some way merge medical with recreational or eliminate major parts of the medical law altogether (some of those bills, sadly, are proposed by medical marijuana growers seeking greater profits and less responsibility to care for patients).

The lobbyists for the cities and counties, meanwhile, are fighting to allow localities to set their own marijuana taxes, clearly counter to Measure 91’s vesting of sole taxation authority with the state.  The cities are arguing for the legislature to let stand local taxes they passed prior to the election, despite Measure 91’s clear language repealing and superseding all inconsistent local laws.  Those cities and counties also want to be able to ban all marijuana commerce through their councils and boards, rather than through Measure 91’s required vote of the people.  One legislator even floated the idea of increasing Measure 91’s typical 1,000-foot buffer between commercial marijuana operations and schools to an entire mile, which would make marijuana commerce impossible in just about every city and town in Oregon.

So now the New Approach Oregon campaign is tasked with insuring that what the people voted for actually becomes the law.  As the legislature sees it, in 2012, voters who craved legalization were apparently smart enough to reject the details of OCTA, but in 2014, voters were apparently ignoring the details of New Approach Oregon because they simply craved legalization.

Yesterday I noted Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and his belief in the “gateway theory”. Today, I’ve got to comment on another tired old cliché he repeated to the press.  Speaking to the media following a meeting with the Badger State Sheriffs Association, the governor explained how ethanol use is socially acceptable, but cannabis use is not:

“If I’m at a wedding reception here and somebody has a drink or two, most people wouldn’t say they’re wasted,” [Walker] said. “Most folks with marijuana wouldn’t be sitting around a wedding reception smoking marijuana.”

“Now there are people who abuse (alcohol), no doubt about it, but I think it’s a big jump between someone having a beer and smoking marijuana,” he added.

This is the old “drinkers consume to be social, tokers consume to get high” rationalization, and it is well over forty years old now. It is a mindset espoused by the father of the modern drug war, Richard Nixon, in this conversation recorded on the Nixon Tapes between the president and TV personality Art Linkletter, an early anti-drug crusader:

Linkletter: “Another big difference between marijuana and alcohol is that when people smoke marijuana, they smoke it to get high. In every case, when most people drink, they drink to be sociable. You don’t see people –”

Nixon: “That’s right, that’s right.”

Linkletter: “They sit down with a marijuana cigarette to get high –”

Nixon: “A person does not drink to get drunk.”

Linkletter: “That’s right.”

Nixon: “A person drinks to have fun.”

Linkletter: “I’d say smoke marijuana, you smoke marijuana to get high.”

Nixon: “Smoke marijuana, er, uh, you want to get a charge of some sort, and float, and this, that and the other thing.”

Sorry to break it to Gov. Walker and the late President Nixon, but I’ve been to the wedding receptions where people are sitting around smoking marijuana. Wouldn’t they be surprised to learn that adults who are gathered in a small circle passing around a joint are, in fact, being incredibly social?

I’ve always felt that this myth owes to two circumstances: the lack of differentiation about what “high” can be and the effect marijuana can have on a new initiate.

Think about how many words you can come up with as synonyms for alcohol consumption. Drinking is a spectrum that begins at “socializing” and runs through “tipsy”, “buzzed”, “partying”, “drunk”, “hammered”, and ends at “passed out”. People understand there are levels of ethanol intoxication and see the first few levels as not only socially acceptable, but a civil right of responsible adults.

Then there’s marijuana consumption.  To most people, there is “not smoking marijuana” and there is “getting high”.  They can perceive of no gradients between abstinence and something they perceive as like getting drunk.  Any pot smoking is as socially reprehensible as chugging wine from the bottle at the party solely to get drunk.

Part of why some people don’t perceive any gradients is because for those who have tried marijuana just once or twice, there are no gradients.  While ethanol consumers can develop tolerance, a great deal of how drinking will affect a person depends on how much they drank and how big they are.  For the new drinker, there is a detectable range of effect between the first beer and the sixth.

But with marijuana consumption, tolerance has a great deal to do with developing those gradients between abstinence and “high”.  I am a daily marijuana consumer.  If I smoke a puff off a joint, I’m going to feel that to the same extent as a daily drinker is going to feel the alcohol in his mouthwash.  To get to the “high” level, I’m going to have to load up a couple of large dabs of concentrate or eat all of a powerful pot brownie.  There are many levels in-between for me, like “socializing”, “relaxed”, “lifted”, “high”, “couch-locked”, “overmedicated”, and ends at “passed out”.

That new marijuana consumer without any tolerance, however, has a very short distance to go from “socializing” to “high” to “passed out”.  For many, that single puff on a joint took them straight to “high”, they didn’t like it, and they never consumed marijuana again.  But that memory lingers and they figure everyone who is smoking pot still goes from sober to high in one or two puffs.

Gov. Walker, though, isn’t relating to that as much as he is the illegal nature of marijuana consumption.  The shocking thing about marijuana at the wedding reception is only the illegal status of it; plenty of people at the reception are consuming ethanol and nicotine.  As marijuana continues its inexorable march toward legalization, socializing with cannabis will become more acceptable, and Scott Walker will join George Wallace as governors whose prejudiced views were on the wrong side of history.