Marijuana.com

Pompo

Legal pot backer sees pluses for state, businesses
8/10/08|The Oregonian| by Anne Saker

Madeline Martinez will take a pass on the stoner humor, thank you very much. For her, marijuana is a serious issue.

Martinez is executive director of Oregon's chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Last month, the group unveiled a petition drive to place on the 2010 ballot the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, which would direct the state to legalize marijuana, regulate its cultivation, sell it in liquor stores and tax the sales. Farmers could also get permits to raise marijuana or hemp.

If voters approve the act -- at best, a long shot -- Martinez estimates that it would increase revenue and decrease state spending for such things as the prosecution for simple possession, ultimately generating $300 million a year for the state.

"This is a law that would allow the state to end the black market of marijuana sales, and it gets marijuana sales under the control of the state and the money into state coffers where, I believe, it belongs," she said.

Martinez, a Los Angeles native, worked for seven years as a guard in a California women's prison until degenerative disc disease forced her into medical retirement. She disliked the prescription drugs that killed her pain but left her woozy. When her family moved to Portland in 1995, she joined the campaign to persuade voters to enact the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program, which they did in 1998.

She has led marches in Portland calling for "normalizing" adults' use of marijuana. She said she opposes any use of marijuana by minors.

Last week, Martinez sat down with The Oregonian. Her answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

If I were an employer, my biggest worry about the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program is that my employees would be impaired. Is that fear misplaced?

They should create an impairment test rather than spending so much money going to the Legislature and trying to destroy a program that works quite well. If we're going to talk about a safe workplace, let's test for everything. Let's have an impairment test for everyone. There was a great impairment test done here for the Portland Police Bureau, and it turned out that people were most often impaired because they were tired because of lack of sleep.

Have you found that cardholders can go back to work because of medical marijuana?

That's a struggle right now with the employment situation as it is. That's the problem we have, quite frankly. There are so many people who want to be productive members of society and don't want to be home on Social Security or be a burden. They want to be out there, they want to be producing, they want to be adding to our economy.

Many ballot initiatives for things such as lotteries and sports stadiums are sold to voters with promises of big tax revenues -- promises that often are overblown. How will the Cannabis Tax Act achieve what you say it will?

In our numbers, we were actually very conservative. We wanted to always weigh on the side of being sane with our numbers, not sounding crazy. But we believe -- by the statistics that we've looked at, by prohibitioncosts.org and by doing the math here in our state -- that this is in fact a reality. This is all new. No one has done anything like this. Oregonians are more progressive. I do believe that the fact that our medical marijuana law will be 10 years old next year already shows that people have become pretty used to it. They see that it works.

What's the response from state officials?

They haven't responded very much. The only people who have are at the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, and they are neutral on it. We just got an endorsement from Barney Frank (a longtime Democratic congressman from Massachusetts), and we're trying to get some of our legislators to back us up. But we haven't gotten a lot of feedback from them. We have more than 1,200 members (in Oregon NORML), and we're going to be asking them to contact their representatives. But no, it hasn't been overwhelming.

What advantage does medical marijuana bring to the economy of Oregon?

In 2005, it brought more than $900,000 to Oregon's budget, to the Department of Human Services. The Legislature took out that money from our existing surplus of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program. We have a self-funded program. Nobody pays for us to have this program. We pay for it ourselves with fees. Plus, anybody who doesn't have to be on the Oregon Health Plan, and we don't have to be paying for their pharmaceuticals, obviously is a gain for all of us.