Earl Blumenauer is a U.S. Representative from Oregon’s third district. He visited the University of Oregon Friday to participate in an all-day symposium, A Step Forward: Creating a Just Drug Policy for the United States. The Emerald sat down with Blumenauer to talk about his report titled “The Path Forward: Rethinking Federal Policy on Marijuana.”
Can you start off by telling us a little about your report “The Path Forward: Rethinking Federal Policy on Marijuana”?
We’ve developed an overview of where we are with marijuana in the U.S. now, some history, past laws and some changes that have taken place because it seemed important to take a step back and look at what has happened over the last 40 years. Over the last years we’ve watched medical marijuana come forward, we’ve had two states legalize adult use of marijuana, and now for the first time in history, a majority of the American public thinks it should be legal. We wanted to have a picture that people could use to sort of give them a sense of the state-of-play.
When do you believe the first conversations of legalizing marijuana started taking place in the U.S.?
Whether or not marijuana should be legal or not has been a long-standing issue. Marijuana used to be legal. From the moment we passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, that classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug, actually worse than coke and meth and had no medicinal features, people have been debating that. It was debated in the Oregon legislation of 1973, where there was a bill on the floor of the House that got over 40 percent of the legislators voting to decriminalize two plants for person use. So it has been a part of this discussion, but has really ramped up after we moved forward in ‘96 with medical marijuana, and now I think the flood gates are opening.
What are some of the biggest barriers we face in legalizing marijuana in the U.S.?
Well right now people are conflicted. There are deep concerns about the impact this has with young teens and junior high students, and they should. There is evidence that marijuana, particularly for the adolescent brain that’s still developing, can be very damaging. There are questions about whether this will lead to other drugs – gateway drugs – and these are legitimate issues that people should be looking at, but I think to a certain extent it is beside the point. I’ve never visited a community where people didn’t think that a junior high student couldn’t get marijuana any time of the day or night at any hour. Never. And the situation we face right now is that there is no framework that enables us to deal with it in a meaningful fashion. We are enriching drug cartels and we’re criminalizing behavior that a majority of Americans think should be legal. So we have got to work through this. But I think over the course of the next two to four years the American public is going to come down very solidly in letting the states do what they want, and most of the states think (they) should legalize marijuana.
What do you think is the federal government’s biggest issue with granting power to the individual states?
Well, part of it is that they are caught up in this long standing, over four-decade-old policy, that misclassifies marijuana. There’s a lot of time and energy that’s invested in it. There are people that are doing time in jail for it, there are two generations of people that “just say no to drugs,” that are heavily invested. In fact, the federal government doesn’t even make it legal to do research on the therapeutic aspects of marijuana. So we’ve got to break this notion where we are frozen in time to have a broader view and get more people involved with this discussion.
What do you think are some of the benefits of legalizing marijuana for the citizens, government and U.S. as a whole?
We could stop incarcerating people — two thirds of a million people arrested for doing something over half of Americans over the age of 18 have tried, and a majority think it should be legal. That’s expensive. We have a situation now where all the profits — and there is a lot of profit in the marijuana business — that all goes back to crooks and cartels. We lose revenue, we are corrupting foreign countries and we’re criminalizing behavior that really shouldn’t be. I think this is a step towards saving money and getting some money in which we could spend on drug treatment and education, and stop distorting the justice because it has very unequal application in terms of who gets arrested for marijuana use.
With states such as Colorado and Washington that were recently passed for the use of marijuana for adults, them being states similar and close to Oregon that had a similar ballot measure from last November, are you surprised that Oregon still didn’t pass? Why or why not?
If you read the Oregon proposal that was on the ballot, it raised more questions than it settled. There is no doubt in my mind that if we would’ve been voting on either the Washington bill or the Colorado bill, it would’ve passed in Oregon. And that’s what is important now, for people to do diligence to have a good, solid proposal that people feel comfortable with, that doesn’t raise those questions. And if we do that, I am confident that within the next four or five years Oregon will legalize as well, along with California; then the game will be over.