It’s going to happen. Marijuana’s legalization is inevitable.
But inevitable does not have a time line, as Oregon voters demonstrated in 2012 when they turned down Measure 80, a ballot initiative that would have legalized weed. In the same election, voters in Colorado and Washington made history by approving measures that ended prohibition on marijuana.
But 2014 will be different. So says Roy Kaufmann. A one-time spokesperson for Portland Mayor Sam Adams, Kaufmann is currently a vice president at Hubbell Communications, an advocacy firm that is working on a legalization campaign in Oregon on behalf of the National Cannabis Coalition.
For Kaufmann, the question of legalization is not a matter of if, but when, and, just as importantly, how. He says that this new campaign won’t repeat the mistake of 2012 and will draw on lessons from marijuana-legalization efforts in Colorado and Washington, as well as a small South American country that could soon be ahead of much of the U.S. on the issue.
Although language for the new ballot initiative is being finalized, Kaufmann is bullish on its prospects. He says that the last legislative session in Oregon was a “milestone session for the cannabis advocacy community,” with legislation passing that will add post-traumatic stress disorder to the list of maladies treatable with medicinal pot, provide better regulation of dispensaries and reform sentencing for drug offenses. Even though lawmakers stopped short of full legalization, Kaufmann thinks that voters will get ahead of their elected leaders in the next election.
“What the polls show is that more than 80 percent of Oregonians said they saw marijuana legalization and regulation as inevitable,” says Kaufmann. “I think what we’re seeing is that there is a smart, rational frame work that is being proposed, and they want to hear the arguments for why it’s being proposed.”
Jake Thomas: Seeing the national shift in attitudes and laws on marijuana legalization and what happened in Colorado and Washington, what are the lessons for getting it legalized in Oregon?
Roy Kaufmann: I think overall that the Washington and Colorado initiatives were successful because they demonstrated that there was both a compelling case for why prohibition needed to end and why it had failed in every possible way. They also made the argument for not only why, they made the argument for how.
And I think that’s where the Measure 80 campaign in Oregon didn’t benefit from some of the advantages that Colorado and Washington had. At the end of the day, people want to know that there is going to be a logical regulatory framework that is workable, even as people are very much feeling out what the best approach is. So the substance of the actual ballot initiative is just as important as the overall argument. In Oregon, anecdotally, I spoke to a lot of voters after the election who were clearly on board with legalization but didn’t support Measure 80 because they felt that the substance of the initiative wasn’t something they could support. So that’s what we’re going to correct this time around and be successful next year.
J.T.: What was wrong with Measure 80? Was it bad framework or was it sold badly?
R.K.: Those two are not mutually exclusive. It’s really hard to get public support or financial support whether it’s in Oregon or outside if it doesn’t have a voice in creating the framework. Measure 80 was drafted with stakeholders in Oregon, but without a lot of input from organizations around the country that have been working on this issue for a long time.
I think the other piece was legitimate criticism of some of the elements of the proposal. For example, unlimited personal possession and cultivation are just a little beyond where the voters are on the issue. The average voter’s thinking is 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 if 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.: 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 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 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.
J.T.: Even if 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 of this work. Shouldn’t we be focusing on the federal government?
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 are laying off deputies and closing jail beds. They are talking about being fiscally responsible elected officials, and this is one of the issues that begs the question, is fiscal responsibility more important than a failed drug war?
J.T.: In 2014, there’s likely to be a question regarding gay marriage on the Oregon ballot. In Washington, in 2012, there were also questions regarding both gay marriage and marijuana. I’m wondering if you think that there is any link between these two issues socially or politically, and if turnout for one issue might help with turnout for the other.
R.K.: I think that there is a strong correlation between the issues of marriage equality and the issues of regulating marijuana. If you look at it in terms of turnout or crossover of who is going to support those issues, it tends to be moderates, progressives, young voters and libertarian-minded voters. The midterm elections and non-presidential elections tend to be really suboptimal for marijuana-related initiatives because younger voters tend to come out for the presidential election but sit out the midterm election, and that’s a real concern for people trying to get a real critical millennial voice on the issue. In Oregon, when you have an organization like Basic Rights Oregon that says they’ll put the issue on the ballot and then raise millions of dollars to get out the vote, that’s a huge opportunity for the marijuana policy movement to leverage that energy and activism.
J.T.: Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, had a turnaround on marijuana in a documentary he did for the network. How big a deal is that?
R.K.: I think that, legitimately, that’s a big deal. He’s a highly respected national and international voice. I’m not fixated on how many people watch CNN or the special he did. But I watched the program last night, and I have been following his evolution on the issue in the past few months. It’s a big deal because the concerns that voters might have, a good portion of the voters, especially over the age of 50, are still operating under the framework where “Reefer Madness” is a point of reference, and not an ironic or pop culture point of reference. These are people who grew up hearing about Reefer Madness and raised kids or went to college during Nixon’s drug war or Reagan’s escalation of the drug war. So there’s a lot of misinformation to deconstruct and a lot of new information that needs to be provided. To have a respected physician and scientist say, “I was wrong. I was part of the problem and I have to apologize for being part of the problem as an educated member of society and a physician.”
That’s why I think it’s a big deal. The documentary is good, but the big deal was that a very respected and respectable medical professional apologized for his past view.