Two years after voters in Colorado and Washington broke the ice as the first states to legalize sales of recreational marijuana to adults, residents of Oregon, Alaska and Washington, will vote tomorrow on ballot measures patterned on those of the two pioneers. The significance of being second out of the gate, people on both sides of the issue say, is that these ballot measures could determine whether there will be a national tide of legalization.
A changing political landscape has weakened anti-marijuana efforts. As the libertarian movement in the Republican Party has gained force, with leaders like Senator Rand Paul supporting decriminalization of marijuana and others going even further, an anchor of the conservative opposition to legalization has eroded.
And Democrats have found that supporting legalization — once an invitation to be labeled soft on crime — no longer carries the risk it once did, as public discussion of prison overcrowding and law-enforcement budgets has reframed the issue.
Photo: Reuters / Steve Dipaola
National groups that have long advocated for legalization have provided manpower and money, along with help from a legal marijuana industry that did not exist in 2012. The old anti-drug coalition, meanwhile, has struggled to find traction and money. Supporters of legalization have outdone opponents’ fundraising in Oregon by more than 25 to one, and in Alaska by about nine to one.
“The support coalition is definitely broader, and the opposition has splintered,” said Corey Cook, an associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who follows the marijuana debate.
The contrast between the pro and anti-legalization forces was apparent on a recent day in Oregon. In downtown Portland, scruffy hipsters with clipboards buttonholed passers-by, registering voters and urging them to vote yes on Measure 91, while political consultants put the final touches on a US$2 million ad barrage.
Nearby, opponents organized one of their major events in Keizer, a suburb of Salem, the state capital. Titled “Marijuana and our Youth,” the session included two hours of PowerPoints and passionate denunciations of the drug. But no one even mentioned Measure 91. Audience participants and organizers, many of them from nonprofit groups funded by the US government were involved in drug treatment services, were afraid of violating laws that ban politicking with public money.
Opponents were, by their own admission, late in forming a united organization, and their campaign had only about US$10,000 for advertising, with spots running on two Portland radio stations starting last weekend.
“They’ve done a pretty good job of shutting everybody up,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County and an opponent of legalization, referring to the pro-91 forces.
The pro-legalization campaigns in Oregon and Alaska are financed largely by national organizations. In Alaska, 84 percent of the US $867,000 raised by legalization proponents at Yes on Ballot Measure 2, have come from the Marijuana Policy Project, a group based in the nation’s capital with an advisory board that includes actors, musicians and politicians, including Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate for president in 2012. Opponents to legalization in Alaska have raised only US$97,000.
In Oregon, the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, backed by billionaire investor George Soros, has led the charge, contributing at least US$780,000 this year, according to state records, making up about 35 percent of the cash raised by the main committee supporting legalization.
Marijuana-related businesses or investors in Colorado, Washington and California have contributed at least US$60,000. Contributors included O.penVAPE, a company based in Denver that sells products for consuming concentrates like hash oil, Privateer Holdings, a marijuana investment firm in Seattle, and Vicente Sederberg, which calls itself “The Marijuana Law Firm.”
There has been some well-funded opposition to legalization, especially in Florida, where voters will decide whether to become the first state in the South to allow marijuana for certain medical uses. There Sheldon Adelson, a casino executive from Las Vegas, has contributed US$5 million to opponents of medical marijuana, about 86 percent of the total raised by the main committee fighting the legislation.
But in Oregon there has been “no sugar daddy,” as Marquis put it. Opponents have raised only about US$179,000. Initiative 71 in Washington would allow residents to possess up to 56g of marijuana for personal use and grow up to six cannabis plants at home. Measure 91 in Oregon would allow possession by adults of up to 226g of marijuana and four plants. Ballot Measure 2 in Alaska would allow adult possession of 28g and six plants.
Supporters of legalization in Oregon and Alaska said that money was crucial to overcoming what they say was years of incorrect information and distortion by law enforcement and anti-drug groups about marijuana’s risks.
“The opposition made good traction for 50 years, and it was built around locking people up. A massive industry was built around it,” said Richard Branson, the entrepreneur who founded the Virgin Group and a member of the Drug Policy Alliance’s international honorary board.
Opponents said they were facing, for the first time, an emerging industrial complex.
“This is not about independent Alaskans smoking marijuana in their homes, but a commercialization and industrialization of an industry,” said Charles Fedullo, a spokesman for Big Marijuana Big Mistake, which opposes Ballot Measure 2 in Alaska.
Whether the anti-drug coalition of the past is dead or just sleeping, both sides agree that the old arguments no longer work.
“Today’s parents are yesterday’s children who were smoking marijuana and have personal experience, and therefore, the kind of advertisement which shows fried eggs doesn’t really cut it with them,” Soros said in an interview earlier this year, referring to an anti-drug television campaign that showed a sizzling egg in a pan and the tagline, “This is your brain on drugs.”
But the pressure is also on proponents, they say, not to fall short, because every new state is a kind of test case.
“If we win, I think it shows that public opinion has decisively changed — we’ve won in two election cycles,” said Peter Zuckerman, a spokesman for New Approach Oregon, the main group supporting legalization. “If we lose, I think it becomes much harder,” he said. “We have to maintain the momentum.”
Kevin Sabet, cofounder of a national anti-legalization group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and on the faculty of the psychiatry department of the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, started his anti-legalization group with Patrick Kennedy, a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island. He said an interview that on the surface the fight against legalization probably looks unwinnable in Oregon.
“It looks bad — I want to be on the other team,” he said, laughing.
Turning serious, Sabet said that experiences in Washington and Colorado were both exposing flaws in legal marijuana — from greater exposure to young people to questions of highway safety — that he thinks will turn off many voters, even though opponents of the ballot measures lack the money to shout their message.
“Legalization in practice has been the biggest enemy of legalization,” he said.
Additional reporting by Serge Kovaleski
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