After legalization and regulation advocate Sam
Chapman graduated from the University of Oregon in the
spring of 2012, he started a political action committee,
Oregonians for Law Reform, to support Measure 80, and
the PAC raised about $8,000 for the cause. Chapman
thinks that the big reason Measure 80 didn’t pass was
money. “Had we had another $100,000, Measure 80 would
have passed,” Chapman says. Oregon Cannabis Tax Act
2012 received $339,943 in cash donations and Yes On 80
raised $44,570 in cash donations. In contrast, Washington’s
pro-I-502 groups had already raised more than $1 million
before 2012 even began. Supporters in Colorado spent
several million dollars in advertising alone.
The Washington and Colorado groups garnered wide-
spread financial and popular support during the campaigns
because a diversity of stakeholders were involved from the
very beginning, insiders told EW. Buckley says it works
the same way in Oregon. Successful ballot initiatives,
Buckley says, are those where “the initiative itself has a lot
of buy-in during the development of the initiative, and
Measure 80 did not have widespread buy-in as it was being
developed.”
Chapman says that pro-legalization advocates learned a
lot from the Measure 80 campaign and will apply those
lessons in the next go-around, but the 2012 election still
exceeded his expectations: “I was aiming to hopefully get
44 percent but it turned out to be 47 — which proved that
all of the assumptions about Oregon needing specific,
really tough regulations isn’t necessarily true.”
HAROLD AND KUMAR SEEK ADVICE
FROM WASHINGTON AND COLORADO
Attorney Brian Vicente, who was a spokesman for
Colorado’s Amendment 64 campaign, says including so
many stakeholders in drafting the initiative was a
painstaking process — but it paid off. “After six months of
conference calls and heartache, we came together and
came out with a law that a lot of people could get behind,”
he says. “I think there’s a feeling that there wasn’t that sort
of consensus building around [Measure] 80.”
Vicente says that in addition to taking a slow and steady
approach to writing the next pro-legalization measure,
advocates should focus on engaging a more broad-based
fundraising effort. “We put several millions of dollars
worth of TV ads on, as did Washington State, and I think
that really helped reach a lot of the public that we couldn’t
necessarily reach with a lesser-funded campaign,” he says.
The Colorado pro-legalization Amendment 64 cam-
paign’s largest funder was the D.C.-based Marijuana Policy
Project (MPP), which gave about $1 million in monetary
contributions and about $241,000 in non-monetary contri-
butions. MPP’s Director of Government Relations, Steve
Fox, says that the group looks at factors like the language of
the initiative and public opinion polls when deciding where
it’s going to focus its election-related efforts. In the case of
Colorado, MPP was involved from the early stages and was
influential in Amendment 64’s drafting.
“In Colorado, the MPP put up a lot of the money itself,
whereas in Washington State you had more of an alliance
with Peter Lewis putting in a good amount of money and
Drug Policy Alliance putting in a good amount of money,”
he says.
But Oregon doesn’t have much of a chance of attracting
Amendment 64-level MPP dollars in 2014. Fox says MPP’s
number one guiding philosophy is whether it’s a presidential
election year, and the next one’s in 2016. “Since 2002, almost
every funded initiative during a presidential election year for
marijuana reform has passed, and just about every non-
presidential election year initiative has failed,” Fox says.
Asked for what advice he’d offer Oregon activists
interested in seeking more funding next time around, Fox
offers three suggestions: “Develop a plan to spend the next
three years directing all of your resources and energy
toward public education that will establish the foundation
for a victory in 2016,” he says.
“My second piece of advice would be: Don’t spend
time and resources on a 2014 ballot initiative. Number
three would be: Be very thoughtful about how you eventu-
ally draft the initiative. Figure out where you can push the
limits and where you need to be a little more conserva-
tive,” Fox says.
While Oregon’s proposal did have some endorsements
from politicians like Buckley and former Oregon secretary
of state Bill Bradbury, Washington and Colorado benefited
from the support of conservatives like Tom Tancredo, dad-
type geeks like Travel with Rick Steves’ Rick Steves and
cops like retired Seattle police chief Norm Stamper.
Vicente says that reaching out beyond traditional liberal
supporters of marijuana for endorsements made a
significant difference to the voting results. “By bringing
on a prominent conservative like Tom Tancredo as a
spokesperson for the campaign,” he says, “we really could
reach some audiences that believed in his core principles
of small government, more personal freedom and better
use of fiscal resources.”
Anthony Martinelli of Sensible Washington, a pro-
legalization group that opposed I-502, says that if Oregon
advocates want to put forth a more palatable regulation
law in 2014, it’s Colorado’s Amendment 64 they should be
looking at. Sensible Washington opposed I-502 due to
language that changed Washington’s DUI law from an
impairment standard for conviction to a per se standard
— which means that instead of citing people based on
impairment alone, anyone with more than 5 nanograms of
THC per milliliter of blood could be cited.
THC is fat-soluble, so it can remain in your body while
not causing impairment, and regular users — cancer patients
using as medicine, for example — could build up base lev-
els that persist on days they don’t smoke and aren’t
impaired. And since users can’t say how much or for how
long their THC levels will rise after smoking a bowl (but
they can observe their own impairment), some say 5 nano-
grams is an unfair standard as well as an unscientific one.
Martinelli says that when Washington’s marijuana DUI
law was an impairment standard, the conviction rate was over
90 percent, so a change to a per se standard made the initiative
unacceptable. “We understood from the beginning that the
one-ounce decriminalization and a couple of other aspects of
it were steps forward,” Martinelli says, “but we just felt that
the DUI provision and the possibility of prosecuting innocent
people just wasn’t worth the rest of the exchange.”
FULL WEED AHEAD
Attorney Brian Michaels, who represents recently busted
Kannabosm owner Curtis Shimmin (who was charged with
racketeering, among other felonies, for his distribution to
OMMP patients in his Eugene dispensary), says that
legalizing marijuana, even on a state level, could help let
people like Shimmin distribute to OMMP patients in peace.
The team that raided Kannabosm seized all the shop’s
marijuana plus an ATM full of cash. “The root of these
charges is not any illegal activity,” Michaels says, it’s law
enforcement unjustly going after marijuana. He says it is
“the institution of government disrespecting its own law.”
“We’re kind of at the point where, as far as moving
forward, we’re all in agreement that we want to move
forward, but how we’re going to do it we’re going to have
to figure out and define,” Chapman says. He’s working on
proposals with Legislative Counsel that involve both
legalization and creating dispensaries for medical patients
who are unable to grow on their own.
Chapman says that coalition-building is next on his
agenda, not clearing up Reefer Madness-style myths. “I
think Oregonians are probably in a majority agreement
that prohibition of marijuana has failed,” he says.
In building those coalitions, Chapman is thinking about
what unconventional partners Oregonians for Law Reform
might reach out to in the next campaign. “For example, the
timber industry probably isn’t very excited about where
they’re sitting right now, and they’re not necessarily fully
open to the idea of hemp yet, but I think we’re in a position
where sitting down with the timber industry and saying
‘look, hemp could save your industry,’” Chapman says.
“We’ve had some pretty historical meetings over the past
month where we’ve sat down stakeholders, funders,
activists, lobbyists all in the same room,” Chapman says,
“and we’re starting those conversations.” On the table, he
says, are all sorts of possible provisions, such as enacting
the same provisions of the OMMP for all adults 21 or older,
though he’s wary of a DUI law similar to Washington’s.
Former Measure 80 campaign manager Jennifer Alex-
ander writes in an online Examiner.com article that she
believes the real force that will determine how the federal
government under Obama responds to Washington and
Colorado’s new statutes will be found in the other 48
states. “While some feel that the feds are desperately
clinging to their prohibitionists policies, it is my belief that
the federal government is simply responding to what they
believe to be the will of the people of the United States,”
she writes. Alexander did not respond to requests for com-
ment by press time.
Rep. Buckley says that he and other reform advocates
are starting to create a Senate-House work group to sift
through proposals for potential legislation and any
adjustments to the OMMP that might be needed.
“We’re going to take some time, and hopefully convene
this work group, and work for about a year to try to sift
through the proposals, find out really what can get broad-
based support, and if we can develop something through this
research process that we feel does have broad-based
support, we’ll ask the Legislature to refer it to the ballot in
2014,” he says.
Sending a legalization and regulation proposal for a
public vote is essential, Buckley says, because passing
marijuana reform measure is still somewhat controversial.
He says that if that changes someday, it will be due to law
enforcement being “at least neutral” on the issue, and he
thinks that’s important in getting a successful measure to the
ballot, too. “I don’t think the majority of legislators will
overrule the concerns of their district attorneys and their
sheriffs and their local law enforcement folks,” he says.
“Now we get to sit back and watch and see what
happens in Colorado and Washington and what the
reaction of the federal government is going to be, and we
kind of get to plan accordingly,” Chapman says. ■
‘I’ve worked on budget after budget that has cut funding for education;
we’ve struggled to maintain funding for services for people with disabilities
and seniors. It makes no sense to me to do anything in this state that is
wasteful of tax dollars that can be put to a better use.’
— REP. PETER BUCKLEY
eugeneweekly.com • December 20, 2012
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