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street roots
Aug. 16, 2013
POT from page 1
of appreciation that Attorney General
Holder is ready to look at the issue in a real
way, but I haven’t seen the details of the
proposal myself.
With the Illinois governor’s signage of its
medical marijuana law, now 40 percent of
the population lives in a state where
marijuana is legal in some way or another.
So if you do the math and look at states that
are looking at introducing medical marijuana
programs or are actively working toward
legalization, I think the pressure will get
greater and greater on the federal
government to recognize the failures and
hypocrisies and get where the American
people are on this issue.
evolving, and they are getting more and
more information from more and more
sources, but you need to put the
components in a framework that dictates to
them that this is being done is a measured,
thoughtful way.
J.T.: I don't know i f you’ve been tracking
this, but in Uruguay, it sounds like the
legislature is poised to pass a measure
legalizing marijuana. Uruguay is a very
different place from Oregon, but have you
learned any lessons from how they did that?
R.K.: I have been tracking that very
closely, and I think that first of all, it’s
incredibly exciting for Uruguay to be the
first country in the world to say that the
drug war hasn’t worked. I think there are a
couple lessons. The president of Uruguay
developed a framework on his own with his
team and got pushback from legislators and
pushback from different stakeholder groups,
which is what happens in a democracy. And
what they did is they came back and put
together a coalition focused on the public
safety and public health aspects of the issue,
and they really created something that the
legislature could look at and vote on.*
But I think that the lessons to take away,
just reinforcing what we saw in Colorado
and Washington, is to look at the issue from
the perspective of the average voter and a
broad coalition that includes the economic
argument and the public safety argument
and create an approach that works for your
jurisdiction. And what they proposed in
Uruguay are three models for cultivation:
personal, co-op and commercial. I think
that’s something very interesting to look at
and in the implementation phase, we will
look to that.
J.T.: Even i f you get this passed, pot is still
illegal on the federal level and it remains to be
seen how Eric Holder will handle the
situations in Colorado and Washington. Down
the road, we could get a law-and-order
president that could undo a lot o f this work.
Shouldn’t we be focusing on the federal
government?
J.T.: Uruguay went through the legislative
process. Do you think here in the U.S. we are
going to go through the initiative process? Is
one better than the other?
R.K.: Even the most optimistic advocates
and observers are very skeptical that the
federal government will change its position
on the issue or become a leader on this. It
will become inevitable, but inevitable
doesn’t have a timeline, and I think at the
legislative level there’s real opportunity.
What we’ve seen is that — looking at the
medical cannabis movement that started as
a ballot movement starting with California,
and then Oregon and Alaska — states are
now passing it at the legislative level.
Illinois has passed legislation legalizing
medical marijuana — and that’s Illinois.
That’s not a small-potatoes state; that’s a big
R E U T E R S /A N T H O N Y B O L A N T E
deal, and it probably took a decade to make
that happen. Advocates worked on the issue,
taking it to legislators saying, we can take it
to the ballot box or you can be part of the
process of putting this together. From 1996
to now, the issue has picked up
unprecedented speed in public support. So I
think it’s certainly within the realm of
possibility. I think within five years
legislatures will start picking up the issue,
but I think for now it’s an issue that fares
better in the citizen-initiative process.
J.T.: Do you think these state initiatives are
putting any pressure on the federal
government?
R.K.: Undoubtedly. Attorney General Eric
Holder, probably at this moment, is
proposing big changes to federal mandatory
sentencing guidelines because of the growth
of the federal prison population over the
past two decades. It’s been an insane and
frankly extremely racist and low-income
biased policy. The people who tend to go to
prison at the state and federal level are
overwhelmingly persons of color or low-
income people. There are some early signs
R.K.: There is some real and important
work on the federal level. Being in Portland,
we are lucky to have Rep. Earl Blumenauer
as our representative. I met with him and
his staff at the end of last year and he laid
out his plan and vision for taking up the
issue of marijuana prohibition at the federal
level and is working with a bipartisan caucus
on this and broader issues with marijuana
policy. But I think there is a lot of important
federal outreach that is happening.
Repealing marijuana prohibition is as
much a Republican political opportunity that
is aligned with the Republican Party
platform as it is with the Democratic
platform. If you look at the way Sen. Rand
Paul (R-Kentucky) and Rep. Paul Ryan
(R-Wisconsin) ... even when Mitt Romney
was asked about medical marijuana, he said
that it’s just a state’s rights issue. If you
look at it from a state’s rights point of view,
from a homeland security and drug war
point of view, from an economic point of
view, from individual responsibility and civil
liberties point of view, these are major
planks of the Republican Party platform. I
think more Republicans are connecting
themselves with this issue and portraying
themselves as this being an issue they can
lead on.
They haven’t reached a critical mass level
in the Republican Party yet. If you look at
polling, and who’s more likely to support
legalization and regulation, it’s making its
way there and that’s certainly part of what
we’re doing is having conversations with the
business community and rural counties who
See POT, page 5
Thursday, September 5, 2013
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8 to 9 p.m. Post-walk reception at Backspace
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