Travel guru cites European drug policies

Travel guru Rick Steves spoke to full house at the Vancouver Community Library Friday night in favor of I-502, an initiative to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana.

The crowd was calmer than the one he met earlier in the day at the state's capitol building. According to the Capital Record, those opposing the initiative tried to drown out Steves and other speakers.

With more than 100 people in attendance at the library, Steves, who has donated $350,000 to the campaign, outlined why he's a proponent of the initiative.

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Election 2012

Group's Analysis Mirrors Arguments Made for Legalization Effort

A new analysis of crime data has found more than 241,000 people in Washington were arrested for marijuana possession over the past 25 years, most of them in the past 10 years.

The report, by a New York-based group of academics, conservatively estimates those arrests cost $305,714,500 in police and court during the past 25 years, and $194,026,500 in the past 10 years, a figure that excludes the cost of defense and court fines.

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While the Editorial Board of The Daily News has yet to take a position on Initiative 502, the Washington ballot measure that would legalize recreational - or at least "non-medical" - use of marijuana, we met Tuesday with two men who have:

* State Attorney General Rob McKenna, this year's Republican candidate for governor.

* Reagan Dunn, a Maple Valley Republican who's attempting to make the jump from a seat on the King County Commission into McKenna's current position.

Both the current AG and the wannabe AG are opposed, which might be expected of Republicans. Neither of them, however, reached for the handy "no way, no how, not at any time" reply.

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I-502 is not pro-pot

Back in the late 1980s, I agreed to be the anonymous "responsible businessman who supports drug law reform" guest on Jim French's KIRO radio show. My pseudonym: Jerry. My stance: Our society would be better off by taking the crime out of the marijuana equation. Back then, it felt risky to use my own name when talking drug policy. The next day, I was walking through Edmonds, out for my morning cup of coffee. Someone I didn't know drove by, rolled down their window, and hollered, "Hey, Jerry...right on!"

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Regarding the Wednesday article, "GOP U.S. Senate candidate supports legalizing pot": Writing as a retired police detective, I know my profession in Washington earns about $1 billion (including civil asset forfeiture) chasing a green plant.

My colleagues have a conflict of interest when giving advice to Sen. Cantwell or any politician. Did the police of Washington advise the senator to oppose I-502 because they would lose good overtime, federal grants and job security, or do they truly believe marijuana prohibition is a more effective policy?

Detective/Officer Howard "Cowboy" Wooldridge (retired)

Co-Founder of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition www.leap.cc

Washington, D.C.

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The lawmaker has spent a decade trying to legalize pot. He says this initiative won't change that.

Rep. Roger Goodman, currently running for re-election in Washington's 45th legislative district, has been ready to end marijuana prohibition for a decade. He arrived at the conclusion back in the '90s after witnessing the drug war's consequences firsthand as the executive director of the Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission. "We were incarcerating people, particularly people of color, who were trying to cope with a difficult life with substances, for longer periods than people who've committed assault or molested children," he recalls.

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I would like to briefly describe the three studies Ann Donnelly mentions in her Oct. 3 letter "Recognize high risk of marijuana."

First, the research linking tetrahydrocannabinol to schizophrenia is based on findings from administering volunteers with large doses of pure THC intravenously. Indeed, symptoms mirroring schizophrenia occur under such circumstances, but nobody is going to be injecting themselves with incredibly large doses of pure THC.

The study linking cannabis use to testicular cancer is taken from a small and isolated sample group (455 volunteers from Los Angeles County) and needs more research before any conclusions can be taken seriously (if there is a risk, it's probably minimal).

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People Should Know Risks, Full Story

Many have seen TV ads supporting marijuana legalization and I-502. However, some risks of legalization are largely unknown and local residents deserve the full story.

"The claim that legalization and tight regulation will mean that youth will use less is bogus, because we don't have the experiment," according to co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, Rosalie Pacula. Marijuana is already the No. 1 reason Washington youths enter drug treatment - we should not experiment on Washington kids.

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The arguments for Initiative 502, the ballot measure to legalize and tax marijuana for general adult use, are remarkably impersonal. People make health arguments, economic arguments and legal arguments.

Who will say, "I just want to smoke it"?

A few weeks ago, I smoked it for the first time in 20 years. It was a quiet happening. I lounged by a campfire, entranced by the flames. Bugs gathered on the firewood, spooked by the smoke and heat. Some jumped to safety and some jumped into the flames. I pondered this for quite a while.

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As the previous U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, part of my job was to enforce our nation's prohibition on marijuana. I carried out my sworn duty without hesitation. But I saw then, and can say now, that marijuana prohibition has been a miserable failure.

Despite the fact that we arrest more marijuana users now than ever before, usage has not gone down. Nor have we had any impact on marijuana's availability. In fact, marijuana is cheaper and more available now than it was 20 years ago. And all the profits are funneled to criminal organizations.

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The Edmonds travel expert, a co-sponsor of I-502, has scheduled two stops in Snohomish County to promote the measure.

International travel expert Rick Steves will speak at two events in Snohomish County this month, part of an 11-city statewide tour to promote passage of Initiative 502.

The initiative would allow people 21 and older to buy an ounce of marijuana from stores regulated and licensed by the state, where it would be taxed at 25 percent.

The Snohomish County events are scheduled for noon Oct. 16 at the Everett Station and 7 p.m. Oct. 21 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood.

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SEATTLE - Residents of Washington, Oregon and Colorado won't just be considering whether to let adults buy pot at state-sanctioned shops when they vote next month on legalizing and taxing marijuana.

They'll also be voting on whether to let farmers grow marijuana's far less potent cousin - hemp - for clothing, food, biofuel and construction materials among other uses.

But don't expect farmers to start growing it, at least not immediately. The passage of the measures would create the familiar clash with federal law, which prohibits growing the plant for industrial, recreational or medicinal purposes.

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YAKIMA, Wash. - Depending on who you ask, Initiative 502 will either sap drug cartels of their lifeblood, do away with draconian drug policies and create a new revenue source for the state. Or it will open floodgates in schools and communities to a harmful drug.

The initiative, which is on the ballot for the Nov. 6 general election, would legalize recreational use of marijuana in Washington. It would not affect federal laws, which would still consider marijuana to be illegal.

"This is not a measure that proposes using marijuana is a good thing," said Alison Holcomb, campaign director for New Approach Washington.

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As a Bellingham native, former student of Western Washington State University and a current medical cannabis patient, I find myself in the awkward position of having to strenuously oppose Initiative 502.

New Approach Washington, the sponsors of I-502, have steadfastly mischaracterized this legislation as the "legalization" of marijuana in Washington State. In order to "legalize" anything, including marijuana, you must remove all current laws that make it illegal. Not only does I-502 not remove any of the current laws making marijuana illegal in Washington, it adds new, and even more dangerous laws targeting marijuana users.

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No Inspections

Labs Provide the Only Outside Quality Control

The kitchen in the weather-beaten beachfront cabin near Olympia is cramped and freckled with mysterious brown stains. A shaggy dog named Butter is poking around, and a quarter-sized spider dangles at the window.

It's not the best situation, Jim Chaney acknowledges, for a homebased business making marijuana infused products, called "medibles."

But in Washington's scantily regulated medical-marijuana industry, no one is checking how such food and drink products are made, or how safe they are. And there's a lot to check. A dizzying array of cannabis-infused products - from taco mix to cotton candy, from pulled pork to carbonated colas - have begun showing up in the past two years on the shelves at storefront marijuana dispensaries.

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I love the saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But there's a corresponding maxim: If it's broken, don't be afraid to fix it.

And there's one truth that everyone acknowledges: Our marijuana policy is as broken as Humpty Dumpty.

Buying pot is as easy as finding a burger at midnight; you just have to know where to go (or so I'm told I'm not a pot smoker and have never been one, making me both one of the best and worst sponsors of Initiative 502).

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In an election season when political statements seem laundered and starched and issues carefully calibrated with the "finger in the wind" test, one ballot measure has attracted one of the most unlikely collections of political bedfellows in state history.

Initiative 502 would allow people 21 and older to buy an ounce of marijuana from stores regulated and licensed by the state, where it would be taxed at 25 percent.

Who would have thought that one of the leading proponents for the initiative would be John McKay, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted major marijuana cases during his tenure?

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It's not surprising that Jim Johnston is passionate about this year's campaign for Initiative 502, the proposal to legalize marijuana.

Johnston has used and appreciated marijuana since he was a teenager in the 1960s, and for the past several years he's been smoking it daily to control pain from head injuries. He has long believed that criminalizing cannabis is misguided and counterproductive social policy.

"I definitely want legalization," Johnston said from his home in Puyallup. "As a society, we're dumb for not doing it."

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Medical Marijuana Started As a Grass-Roots Movement Among AIDS Patients and Still Caters to Medical Patients, but Increasingly It's Also Turned into a Party.

Three weeks ago, an event space in Fremont hosted an unusual trade show.

A legal panel debated public policy and a doctor discussed the state of health care as girls in bikinis posed near tables of bongs and a guy in a green bear suit offered free hits off a 5-foot pipe.

And the smell of marijuana wafted over the Ship Canal.

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I retired from the bench in 2005, after presiding over Whatcom County civil and criminal matters for 20 years. Then, as now, I did not believe that marijuana use was an appropriate matter for the criminal justice system. I believed that we could more effectively and economically tackle marijuana use as a public health issue, and still do.

The only difference I see now is that matters have gotten worse. We still arrest more than 9,000 adults every year for the offense of possessing marijuana. We still waste police, prosecutor and judge time that could be spent on serious crimes. We still saddle otherwise law-abiding citizens with criminal records that pose barriers to education and employment.

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