 Well, good afternoon and welcome, everyone. My name is Barry Rave. I'm a professor here at the Ford School, and I direct close up the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy. I'm very pleased to welcome you to our fall academic year kickoff event. We'll only begin by noting that we very much appreciate the support of the School of Public Health in co-sponsoring this event. I want to thank my colleague Bonnie Roberts for pulling all of this together and would note that this is the beginning of a very busy event, season, or for that matter, week for us. Wednesday we'll be having a session on the role of interest groups in shaping Michigan politics. Friday we'll be visited by Cecilia Munoz, an alum of the University of Michigan, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. And on your flyer, you'll see a fuller listing of events to come, a list that continues to expand. One of the great national treasures of the United States, especially for those of us interested in questions of public policy, is the Brookings Institution. There are a good number of us here in the Ford School, myself included, but certainly Dean Collins and others, who've had a longstanding relationship with Brookings, which is for a long, long time been a remarkable place to have a serious conversation about matters of public policy. And it's one where you engage experts from Brookings, you often learn a great deal and engage new kinds of perspectives. We were particularly delighted here in the Ford community when Molly Reynolds, one of our doctoral students, joined the government studies research team just within the last year. There are great many topics that today's speaker could address. John Hudak is a senior fellow in the government studies program, also deputy director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings. He holds graduate degrees that include a PhD in political science for Vanderbilt. Many of you may know him for his first book, which I highly commend to you, Presidential Pork, Presidential Influence Over the Distribution of Federal Grants. You may know him even more so, though, through his frequent writing and his very incisive commentary on American politics, American elections, and, of late, what's going to happen in tonight's debate. I opened up this morning or this week's Brookings Brief, and there is the top line, what to watch for in tonight's presidential debate by John Hudak. I think, in many respects, many of us would love to hear what John has to say about the events that begin at 9 o'clock tonight or the election. But today, we turn to a different area of expertise for John and a book that is published, but we don't have copies of yet. Yeah, pretty soon. We're very excited about this, titled Marijuana Policy in the US, From the War on Drugs to Rapid Reform. This is a new book part of a new Brookings series that looks at a number of public policy issues that have current immediate consequences, but have quite a policy or political life cycle to them. This is a very detailed political history of the marijuana issue in the United States, placed in the context of current and evolving policy challenges. So we're really delighted, before the book is formally released on a broader basis, to have an inside look to this issue of great significance to Michigan and a great many other states. And I just would only add, it's a real pleasure to invite my Brookings colleague and friend, John Hudeck, to this campus for the first time. So please join me in welcoming John. John Hudeck. Thank you. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming out today. I was telling Barry last night over dinner my last talk on this topic, or one of my last talks on this topic, was at a state fair in Tennessee where I spoke to a much smaller crowd than this, and they made me stand on a hay bale like I was running for the Senate in the 1920s to address the crowd. And so I'm glad to be on solid ground to have a bigger audience today, even if it is basically speaking about the same topic. As Barry had mentioned, my new book, Marijuana, A Short History, is coming out within a matter of days, I'm told, according to the publisher. And it's a piece that I'm particularly proud of. I think it makes a contribution in, as the title would suggest, in a short way. It condenses about 120 years of American history on this topic down into about 40,000 words. So hopefully, to pitch this, you'll all go out and buy it, pre-order it, it's available at Brookings Press website or on Amazon. But even if you don't, I hope today, the conversation will be one that's insightful and I encourage you, we'll leave about a half hour at the end to ask any questions, preferably about marijuana policy, but if you're just dying to ask that question about the debate tonight, I'll relent and answer a question about that. First I wanted to start off by talking about why Brookings is involved in this policy area. I get asked a lot why a 100-year-old institution, our birthday is in October, why a 100-year-old institution is dealing with this issue? We've really never engaged it before. It's one that is not being taken up by a lot of think tanks or policy organizations or even public policy schools around the country. So why Brookings and why now? And the answer is a simple one. Marijuana is public policy. It's not a punchline. It's not the taboo that it used to be. It's not the plant that has been vilified in a lot of ways, rightly or wrongly, for a period of time. But it's a matter of public policy at the state and the federal level, at the international level. And it's one that touches on areas of policy that are important to everyone in a variety of ways. It first looks like an issue that is just about getting high or just about access to drugs. But the reality is much more complex. This is something that touches on issues of public health, public safety, agricultural issues. It touches on issues of taxation, banking regulation, veterans issues, healthcare issues, doctor-patient privilege, science in the broadest sense, the integrity of science, government's role in science, federalism issues are a significant part of this debate. And the list goes on. All of those other things I just mentioned are things that Brookings has been looking at for 100 years. But they haven't been looking at it through the lens of marijuana until about four years ago. And for the class that I spoke to earlier today, this will be a little bit of a rehashing, but how I got involved in marijuana policy is an odd little course, an odd little path. As Barry had mentioned, my research focuses namely in presidential politics, really in executive branch politics. I do all of that sexy work in political science on bureaucratic organization and personnel and process. What really is a page-turner. That said, presidential work is a page-turner by it. But I wasn't looking at this as a policy area in any significant way, in any real way. I knew about marijuana legalization as an average voter, not as a wonk, not as a researcher. And in September or October of 2012, one of my colleagues came down to my office and said, you know, you ask a lot of questions about administration and this and that. He said, have you ever thought about doing research on marijuana? And I said, absolutely not, not even a little bit. And he said, well, you know, I think there's an outside chance either Washington or Colorado is going to legalize marijuana in November. And if one of them happens to do it, they're gonna get all of the types of questions you ask about a variety of issues thrust upon those states or that state. He said, so take a look at it, read up on it and see what you think. And the more I read up on it, the more intrigued I was. These were unprecedented policy reforms. It was taking a substance that the federal government and the United Nations says is an illegal substance, illegal in all cases, under all circumstances, and making it legal at the state level. And not just for medical purposes, but for anyone 21 years and older to go in and to buy this for personal use. With that comes a very serious need for government to be set up and then to work. And that's our bread and butter at Brookings, effective policy. We don't take a position on any marijuana ballot initiative. I don't take a position on any of the initiatives either. I've never had occasion to vote for one. The states that I've lived in that had ballot initiative processes never entertained it while I lived there, they still haven't. And so I've actually never cast a vote on it either. I approach it from this perspective. If a state chooses to make these reforms, they ought to get it right. If voters say, or a legislature says, this is the reform we want, we'll then let the voters' voices be heard and let that policy reflect the goals of the legislators or the public or both. And so that's where my work proceeds from. And along the way I worked a lot on the politics of marijuana legalization, some of the implementation challenges that states face, some of the processes by which Colorado and Washington and later Oregon and Alaska and in some ways Washington DC set up recreational systems. I've also become curious about medical marijuana, writing a lot about rescheduling and writing a lot about the systems as they exist in the 25 states in the District of Columbia that have full-fledged medical marijuana systems. But all along the way, I realized that history was part of this conversation but not part of the conversation I was having. So I had the opportunity to write this book. Brookings Press is doing a series of short histories on a variety of topics, some of them boring, some of them non-traditional, some of them a little exciting. And they thought marijuana would be an interesting way to kick off this book series and I was happy to oblige. And so as I mentioned, marijuana, a short history, it begins around the turn of the 20th century, looking at how the plant was used, how it was viewed and how it began to evolve from a public policy sense. Now, there are some references earlier in the book to more historic times, the founding where many of our founding fathers grew hemp. It was a requirement to grow hemp in the Virginia colony right after colonists came to the US because of its versatility. There are examples from ancient China and even from the British monarchy of royals using medical marijuana to cure certain or to deal with certain ailments. But that's a very minor part of the book. Most of it focuses on public policy reform in the US and what's happened over time and it's a very interesting story. There's a lot of ideas about how marijuana reform has played out, how marijuana as a policy went from something that was used medicinally quite openly, it was something that appeared in the US Pharmacopeia until the 1940s. It was something that was not as taboo as it eventually became, but it was something that was part of the medical sciences. That said, if we were to base medical value based on what was done in the 1800s, probably three quarters of us would be dead. And so that's not to say that there is certain medical value because it used to be used. But there began a transition in how this plant was viewed starting around the turn of the century. There are arguments in place, I'm convinced by several of them, that drug control, drug regulation in general was an opportunity for the United States to expand the administrative power of the state. That gave way to marijuana as a revenue producer. The federal government was taxing marijuana through pharmacists in order to extract revenue at a time when world wars were coming and the income tax that had just recently passed wasn't really producing as much revenue as the United States had hoped. The government, which was increasingly having expectations about domestic policy, demands from the public needed to pay for those demands and drug control was one way to do it. Then the 1930s came and an institution which effectively is now called the DEA but went through several names over the course of 100 years found in it an advocate in some ways a radical named Harry Anselinger and he began what would be a multi-decade long role in leadership for a drug prohibition agency in the United States. He was effectively J. Edgar Hoover's peer with a portfolio on drugs and he began to racialize this issue in a variety of ways. He tied marijuana use to the jazz movement which was a very kind way of saying this is what blacks do. He never used the word blacks, trust me, even in testimony before Congress. He also began to vilify Mexican immigration claiming that the influx of Mexicans into this country were responsible for a lot of drug problems, a lot of violent crime and a lot of other serious challenges that the country faces. Luckily we don't deal with any politicians these days who worry about the crimes caused by Mexican immigration but trust me, 80 years ago this was the thing politicians talked about. So began this process in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s of increasing penalties for the use and the possession and the cultivation and production of marijuana as well as other drugs and this became a worldwide issue eventually becoming something for the attention of the international community in the early 1960s the UN passed the single convention which was the first significant and broad-based attempt to control drugs throughout the world. There were treaties previously targeting specific drugs like opium but this was the first broad-based reform and as nations ratified this treaty there was an expectation to bring domestic drug laws in line with that. There was some resistance at first, as you would imagine there's resistance of taking orders from an international community but in the United States there was a domestic policy situation around drugs that really was timed perfectly for the passage of the single convention and that was the 1960s and a counterculture movement within the United States that pitted against a war that really began to create a divisiveness in American politics about what young people were doing the way in which they engaged with drug use which for the first time was truly becoming something recreational, it's important to remember in the 1940s and 1950s most people had no experience with marijuana most people had not used it most people had not, most people were not users most people had not even experimented with it it was the great unknown and the only information that was coming through was really through advocacy organizations mostly prohibitionist in nature and through the government and what they were, the information that they were putting out and that information was being put out in a significant way and it was scaring people, frankly. Now it's not to say that every time the government scares people that's necessarily unfounded there are certainly public health and public safety and other public policy concerns around drug use but this became a real rallying call for the drug policy community within the government and in 1970 the controlled substances act was passed by President Nixon in part to comply with the single convention but we have evidence written and otherwise that Richard Nixon saw this as a political gain he was able to pit the counterculture movement against his own political values namely law and order efforts in order to score political points to look like he was being tough on crime hard on drugs and to try to ultimately win reelection in 1972 he was successful for a variety of reasons the passage of the controlled substances act was probably not chief among them but it was all part of a broader electoral strategy for President Nixon. President Nixon for whatever you think of him he was a magnificent politician and was a political strategist second to none and he really saw an opportunity in engaging with this issue and again as people were fearful of this plant of this substance of what it would do to really humanity if drug use became widespread he found a way to create or rather to further the us versus them mentality. The Nixon years of course were not the last in which we had drug warrior presidents we have had them all the way up through and including the current president people who are hard on drug use over the years the drugs of choice to target have changed a little bit certainly President Obama has been lax on enforcing marijuana policy in the United States as he has confronted other drugs like the opioid crisis heroin, fentanyl issues but it is a common issue for presidents to unite around and that is continuing the drug war and I don't use the drug war necessarily in a pejorative way it usually is but there are drug crises in this country and there are government institutions that battle against them and so it's important to understand that we have individual players throughout history who have had a significant impact on this issue but everyone in government has really joined hands to continue this type of policy effort for better or for worse but along the way changes began starting in the 1970s you started to see members of Congress start proposing legislation to legalize medical marijuana all of these bills failed you started to see states changing their mind about how they were going to handle marijuana specifically you had Oregon as the first state to decriminalize marijuana in the 1970s in 1975 the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that because of the privacy protections in the state constitution Alaskans had a constitutional right to grow marijuana on their property the most progressive reform oriented legal decision on marijuana up to that point later on efforts began at the state level to legalize medical marijuana all of them failing for quite some time until 1996 when California passed their medical marijuana law they passed it it received more votes on election day 1996 than President Clinton did in his reelection and so began America's experiment with legal medical marijuana that of course was followed by a number of states in 1998 and 2000 and 2002 and moving forward to do the same to legalize medical marijuana some states actually setting up institutions to dispense that marijuana California was not among them they had no regulatory system really until this year to deal with medical marijuana in the states and then in 2012 as I mentioned at the outset of the talk Washington and Oregon became the first states to legalize recreational marijuana by ballot initiative in that year both states passed recreational marijuana with about 55% of the vote outperforming President Obama in his re-elect as well and those systems came with fairly rigorous regulatory programs around them and setting up a dispensary system in Colorado two years prior they regulated for the first time their medical marijuana program the old adage was that there were more dispensaries in Denver than there were Starbucks I am told by members of the Colorado government that that is not a phony statistic these were wholly unregulated dispensaries you have some of those in Ann Arbor that was the way Colorado functioned for quite some time for really 10 years from passage of medical in 2000 until the regulatory bill was passed in 2010 they were followed by more states Oregon and Alaska the District of Columbia which is sort of has sort of legalized marijuana but because of some odd congressional action has what is effectively a legal home grow system but no commercial program for recreational marijuana and this year we have five states who will be voting on recreational marijuana initiatives and four states that will be voting on medical marijuana initiatives so you have a lot of progress if you are a pro reform individual or regress if you do not like marijuana reform over the past 30 to 40 years and that train keeps on moving in that direction there are a lot of reasons for this and I talked a little bit about this before so again my apologies for the repeat but two serious forces are acting on this first is exposure and the reform movement around medical marijuana has tracked somewhat closely with reforms around same sex marriage in the United States as people were exposed to gay couples marrying they realized that gay marriage was not a contagion that you couldn't catch being gay that a marriage of a couple across the street from you did not negatively impact your marriage and so people began to change their minds as people came out of the closet in people's families and people's circles of friends in people's employment situations they realized that this was not the harm that many people thought it was and so exposure to individuals who were LGBTQ made it easier for people to accept gay marriage as a policy and as a part of American life that's not true universally but generally public opinion shifted dramatically for those of you who voted in 2004 you remember how many state constitutional amendments were on the ballot that year to ban same sex marriage and then to imagine that 10 years later the Supreme Court would issue a ruling legalizing it nationwide is actually jarring in terms of how quickly policy changed given where public opinion was then and where it is today. Marijuana moves in a similar way when people are exposed to marijuana, marijuana use medical marijuana programs, recreational marijuana programs they're seeing that the what opponents of these measures said would happen are not happening. It's not to say these programs don't come with problems that they don't come with failures that they don't come with issues that there are not important and meaningful ways to reform the reforms but when naysayers paint one picture and the outcome is very different it's very challenging then to maintain that support or in this case maintain that opposition to marijuana reform and so that has moved public opinion when you look at polling and the book touches a little bit on the evolution of polling in the early 1990s about 30% of the American public supported recreational marijuana legalization it's 60% now that's a huge shift in 25 years in public opinion that doesn't happen by accident but something else happens too and it's generational replacement the oldest individuals in our society are those most opposed to marijuana reform about 35 to 38% of people over the age of 65 think recreational marijuana should be legalized for millennials for the 18 to 25 demographic that support stands at 80% so as generational replacement happens as older individuals in our society die and as people turn 18 and become voting age eligible you are replacing let's say 38% support with 80% support and that can lead to very rapid transitions in a public opinion on this issue and so all of this points toward continued legalization I don't think all five states who have valid initiatives for recreational legalization California, Nevada, Arizona, Maine and Massachusetts will pass this year if you talk to the people running the campaigns they will agree with that they don't think they're all going to pass but several of them have a real opportunity to do so on the medical side I would be surprised if Florida's initiative didn't pass I think it's a little harder in North Dakota, Arkansas and Missouri which have them on the ballot but the march is clear toward broader drug policy reform in the United States you have two presidential candidates who have talked a bit about marijuana reform drug policy in general but marijuana reform too and after not wanting to talk about it and then somewhat talking about it and then more openly talking about it you have two presidential candidates now who are in favor of continuing what I'll call the Obama doctrine on marijuana policy and that is a hands off decision what PA people or political scientists will call enforcement discretion to say this still exists as an illegal substance in the United States but we're not spending really any money to enforce the controlled substances act as long as you comply with this set of demands that the federal government puts out and I think one can question whether those set of demands are actually required in order for enforcement not to happen but regardless Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton believe that states should be able to do what they want in this area as long as they're protecting from children getting access to marijuana from engaging with drug cartels for drugs crossing borders and things like that so that's significant you had 12 years ago presidential candidates not even wanting to discuss if they ever experimented with marijuana you had a presidential candidate say that he tried it but didn't inhale marijuana and he was slammed for that now you have a president who has admitted that he smoked marijuana and tried cocaine and you have two presidential candidates who claim they've never tried any illegal drugs and are willing to let states continue to legalize medical and recreational marijuana that's a dramatic transition among political elites among elected officials that again if you go back to the 2004 or 2000 or the 92 or 96 elections you could not imagine that in 2016 presidential candidates would A be willingly talking about this issue and B have the positions that they have today that said we have a really serious problem in this country with marijuana policy it's one that people in the reform community hate to admit although they're eager to talk about it but marijuana policy in the US is completely broken it's totally inconsistent you have a federal government that speaks out of both sides of its mouth on a variety of issues and what it creates is a system that in some ways is untenable it's unlikely to exist as it is in the future is someone who studies public policy and specifically this public policy I like to see policy consistency I like to see a system that's working well there's one system that actually is consistent and that's prohibition now there are certainly arguments to say that the way drug laws of through most of the 20th century were enforced were not consistent that is true communities of color find drug crimes particularly marijuana crimes enforced against them at much higher rates even though usage rates are at parity but a policy in which the federal government says this is illegal in all situations and the states say this is illegal in all situations is consistent it makes sense you might not like it but it is a system that is set up to work the system we have now is not set up to work you have states defying the federal government in the most explicit of terms there is no gray area in the controlled substances act marijuana is a schedule one substance it is illegal in all circumstances it has no medical value according to the federal government it can't be used safely in any medical procedure in the United States according to the law and it has a high risk of abuse potential according to the controlled substances act that's the trifecta of prohibition for marijuana but the federal government will tell you that if you live in Colorado and you have anxiety you can go to a doctor who can issue you a recommendation not a prescription because if you write the word marijuana on a DEA approved prescription pad you lose your prescribing rights but you can go to a doctor who can write you a letter and you can bring it to a dispensary and you can go in and get your marijuana in Colorado and Washington, Oregon and soon in Alaska you can do that if you don't have a medical condition and you just want it that is a violation of federal law it's a violation of international law and it creates serious problems about the integrity of federalism in the United States it's what's most interesting to me is when you look at advocates of marijuana reform many of them are liberal not all of them but many of them are liberal these are the same people who are irate if a state passes abortion restrictions they are irate if a state is unwilling to embrace Obamacare they are irate if a state tries to prevent gay individuals from getting a marriage license why? well because there's a federal law that is clear on those issues or in the case of same-sex marriage a Supreme Court ruling which acts as federal common law that is clear on these issues but for marijuana there's also a federal law that's clear on these issues but states opting out of the Controlled Substances Act tends to work for a lot of people the problem goes deeper than that though this disjoint between federal law and state reforms creates a ton of unintended consequences and they're problematic for people who are concerned with public safety they raise concerns for people who are interested in legal integrity but it's also a problem for patients for consumers for dispensary owners if you're a dispensary owner in Colorado you have to pay a lot in taxes if you're a business owner anywhere you pay a lot in taxes but under the federal system you can't write off any business expense on your federal taxes why? because you're trafficking in a Schedule I illegal substance so if you talk to dispensary owners in a lot of these states this is true for medical or for recreational marijuana dispensaries if you talk to dispensary owners they'll be three or four years in and their tax burden is over 100% of their revenue well that's not tenable you have to have a really good supply of cash to keep a business going when your tax rates are that high relative to the income that you're bringing in you don't have access to banking you have very clear federal financial regulations that say if you're a drug dealer you can't have a checking account or a savings account or qualify for a business loan well here's the problem the federal government says if you own a dispensary you're a narco trafficker and a criminal but also it's okay to have that dispensary just keep it open make sure kids aren't buying from you don't deal with cartels and you can have this business well one of those things must be right but they both can't be right you know there's a dispensary a medical marijuana dispensary in washington dc called Tacoma Wellness Center Tacoma Wellness Center you walk in it looks like a blend of like a chiropractor's office and a massage parlor I mean I guess that's a wellness center and the guy who owns it is this really nice middle-aged guy named Jeff Jeff is a rabbi and he and his wife opened a medical marijuana dispensary in Washington DC eight miles from the White House right up the street from the Department of Justice and Jeff is not what you would expect from the average American narco trafficker he doesn't look the part you know he's a holy man he's someone who believes deeply in what he's doing but he can't get a checking account every time he applies for one he says they'll keep it open for about 30 days and then they realize what he's doing and it's shut down his assets are frozen that's not how policy is supposed to work the federal government is not supposed to say to someone you can have a business but you can't enjoy any of the benefits that the government affords you for that business like I said it's true for banking it's true for taxes I was talking earlier to one of your faculty members and I said you know here's another inconsistency I flew here from Washington DC yesterday I live in Virginia I cannot legally purchase marijuana anywhere in that state and I also can't go and legally purchase medical marijuana from the District of Columbia but let's say I did live in Washington DC and I went to my doctor and I said I have terrible anxiety let's say I have a really bad fear of flying which I actually used to have well anxiety is something you can get medical marijuana for in some jurisdictions DC is among them so I would say to them I'd like medical marijuana so I can use it when I fly to calm my nerves great the problem is I can't use it on a plane I can't carry it on a plane that breaks a bevy of federal laws and so I would not be able to get my prescription in Washington DC get on a Delta flight fly here without breaking state and federal laws and also both DC airports are actually in Virginia so you commit a crime driving to the airport both federal and state laws are violated and then as you bring the substance onto the plane you're also committing a federal crime and so that's a challenge that's a problem so you have to leave your marijuana at home but if I go to my doctor and I say I have a horrible fear of flying I need Xanax or I need Ativan standard anti-anxiety pills or tranquilizers he'll say sure write out a script hand it to me and then I can take a Xanax before I leave and then I can carry my prescription bottle with me on the flight to Michigan and back again without violating any laws well the challenge there is you have a government that is approving medical marijuana systems which implicitly says that marijuana is medicine you also have a DEA and an FDA that say it's not medicine under any circumstances but if you're a patient who depends on this how do you justify how does a government justify saying you can bring that medicine with you on a plane but not that medicine with you on a plane I'm not making a subjective judgment about whether you should or should not be able to use marijuana for medicine but if a government says you can you should also be afforded all of the policy benefits that come to you if you have a real prescription a regular prescription a DEA approved prescription written on a pad from a doctor there are a variety of challenges that this creates that the federal government is not really in the business of fixing there's very little movement in Congress beyond a few riders attached to appropriations bills but there's full fledged legislation in Congress that tries to fix some of these things that try to make marijuana policy more consistent in the United States and members of Congress House members and senators are scared to death of it a lot of people look at the Obama presidency a lot of marijuana reformers look at the Obama presidency and say this guy's been great and I think for some of them that's probably an accurate view he's certainly been the most progressive president on marijuana policy in our history that's a very low bar to clear but it's true he is he's also someone who has really failed in terms of showing leadership on this issue he is someone who could do much more he could try to enact try to push more bank regulations to try to fix the banking issue he could try to push the IRS to use some of their discretion to ease tax burdens on marijuana enterprises enterprises he could also work with Congress to get something done he's not working with Congress to address marijuana policy he's barely working with Congress to deal with drug policy writ large especially dealing with the opioid crisis even though there's quite a bit of support in Congress to do this though there are more gains in that area than around marijuana policy and so what he has done is he has helped create he has helped foster this schizophrenic system around marijuana policy that again is just untenable is not something that the marijuana industry is going to allow to move rather it cannot sustain moving forward with the current status quo the two presidential candidates are not going to make things better they have Clinton at least has outlined a little bit on her website about what she would do on marijuana policy Trump has said it in public statements about continuing the status quo so you talk to people from the marijuana industry and they'll say thank God we're so afraid of what a presidential transition might be because current marijuana policy in the United States is a bunch of broken pieces that are taped together with duct tape well the next president can unravel all of that duct tape all of this exists because of a memo from the Department of Justice that's the only thing that's really allowing these systems to continue to exist well that memo is the equivalent in some ways of an executive order it exists with some force of law but it can be undone instantly the next attorney general can come in and issue something in exactly the opposite direction probably at the guidance of the president I can't imagine a memo comes out of the DOJ without White House approval that would change public policy that dramatically so the marijuana industry and patients and consumers around the country went into this election cycle really holding their breath and oddly they're happy with Clinton and Trump as nominees there aren't many segments of society that will tell you that but for them they know moving forward they're at least going to get the status quo maybe they'll get a little bit more movement from the next president but they'll at least get the status quo and not move back in time they shouldn't be happy with that they should want more consistency and a lot of them want fixes to this problem but one of the challenges that exists with policy reform is twofold one, you get satisfied with the status quo when you start working within it and then the movement for more significant change sort of lightens the other challenge of course and this came up in the class I was speaking to earlier today is that when you are a reformer and you get a victory in this case passing marijuana reform legislation or an initiative you think our work is done here perfect, we're all set the problem is for this policy area the passage of the legislation or the passage of the initiative is just the first tiny step toward what this policy is going to look like is many of you know who are public policy students implementation is where all of the action is and most of these ballot initiatives and most of this legislation leaves tremendous discretion to the executive branch agencies who will ultimately regulate this issue and so if you get your initiative passed and then let others do the work for you the system looks very different than the system that you might have wanted the system that you thought you would have and that has happened in a variety of states and it's moneyed interests who know enough to get to the table during the implementation process but it's not advocates now there has been a transition in the marijuana reform community over the past fifteen years toward more professionalization that means that they understand how to run a ballot initiative and they also understand what comes next and the importance of engagement with what comes next so when you look at ballot initiatives in the past especially many of them that failed these were people who just threw their initiative out there and hoped for the best or they messaged that initiative in a very in a singular way and they weren't running this like a real campaign ballot initiatives are real campaigns they take money they take organization they take skills you need publicists you need communications advisers you need designers you need TV crews to help you you need photographers you need a lot of people to help you need political strategies social media specialists previous campaigns didn't think in those terms and a lot of them failed in fact the only reason the california initiative passed in nineteen ninety six uh... is because an outside national organization came in and helped collect the signatures that needed to be collected you can imagine how many signatures need to be collected in a state the size of california to run a ballot initiative it is tremendous the backers who are mostly on out of the castro district of san francisco we're not prepared to collect enough signatures they were not in any position to it took professionalization to come in and do this and professionalization has really uh... amped up so now the marijuana advocate uh... activist used to look like is no more although i will say someone who speaks at a lot of drug policy conferences you do see the person dressed in a full suit of marijuana leaves or marijuana leaf print suits which i can imagine how much that costs but uh... and you see people who are uh... really not doing much service for their cause but for the most part marijuana advocates dressed like i do right now because they realize if you're going to be taken seriously you have to dress like you're going to be taken seriously you have to communicate like you're being taken seriously and they're still an important space for the grass roots die hard grower uh... but in order to be successful again in a space that is now public policy and not just a one-off hobby uh... you need to play the game of politics and the marijuana reform community has done a very remarkable job in improving the way that they have uh... approached these questions uh... like i said there's still uh... there are still odd behaviors whenever you go to these uh... conferences you get swag bags that are filled with insane things uh... that uh... i'm sure a lot of people will use but the last one i got a branded lighter normal which is the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws normal branded rolling papers filters and febrize so that when i needed to go back into work after my smoke break which i don't take uh... i could febrize myself and no one would know i was getting stoned in the alley because certainly they wouldn't know based on my work performance uh... so these are the types of things that i think are unhelpful for the marijuana reform community but these things exist but that said there are a lot of people who are uh... again playing the game of politics having national lobbyists having state-level lobbyists working with the right communications individuals uh... to get this done a perfect example of this is what happened in washington dc and i'll wrap up on this point uh... and open it up to questions washington dc decided they were going to have a legalization initiative in twenty fourteen so one of the first things you want to do for it's true for any campaign it's certainly true for initiative campaigns is you do some polling you figure out who's supportive who's not supportive where you might make inroads where you need to make inroads and what aggregate levels of support are we look at a town like washington dc majority minority a lot of young white liberals uh... it seems like the right recipe for legalization the first polls they ran support was well under fifty percent shocked the backers absolutely shocked so then you start to drill down into the sub-demographics of these polls to understand who supports this who doesn't so they look across uh... the demographic makeup and who is what group was among the most vehemently opposed uh... groups for uh... marijuana reform it was older black women women fifty and older now in a lot of cases uh... you know individuals who are older again are predisposed against women uh... have uh... lower support for marijuana reform than than men do uh... but this tracked a little differently than you were expecting for women uh... or for for people fifty and up so they did focus groups to figure out what was going on and a very interesting thing came to the surface in talking to we'll call them black mothers and grandmothers they didn't see marijuana prohibition as the problem uh... a lot of people did if you're a young black male in washington dc you certainly see police enforcement of marijuana laws as the problem they saw marijuana is the problem they saw the substance getting into their communities in causing the problems and not the enforcement of the laws around that substance so what did they do one at one effort would have been to say we don't have the black female vote let's close up shop we're we're never going to win if we can't convince these people instead they convince those people they went into churches in southeast dc and started to talk about criminal justice reform in dc this was true in colorado this was true in washington this was true for the first time they approach these initiatives by saying one message isn't going to work what i tell a rural uh... guy who's prepping for the end of the world in eastern colorado why he should support marijuana reform that's probably a different message than i'm going to tell a college student at uc boulder and that's a different message than i'm going to use against uh... for soccer moms were concerned mostly about marijuana getting into schools because it's not there now trust me how you talk to the black community how you talk to the latino community how you talk to men is different than how you talk to women and so for the first time these movements started to do what every political campaign does target voters and do micro-targeting and better understand how voters are going to be responsive to different messages under different circumstances all around the same issue and that's a level of professionalization that this movement never had and once it it started to more effectively uh... march toward legalization in professionalization like that doesn't go away even though there's resistance against that uh... you know old-timers who are marijuana advocates hate to see the suit and tie type take over the movement but it wasn't until the suit and tie type took over the movement that they started having real success on the ground and so that's something that that tends not to wither and is part of the reason i think a significant part of the reason why the united states continues to march toward greater uh... more expansive marijuana reform in the future so i'm at five o'clock bonnie's waved at me that i need to wrap it up and i do questions so thanks for listening to me for an hour