 All right. So this morning we have Dr. Kimberly Blake up first on our agenda. Dr. Blake? Hi. We're just gonna run. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Let's start. You want to put on the screen. I just have these pictures and then the rest I have, I can pass around some papers. I appreciate the opportunity to experience, to share some of my experiences. Family member, a parent of a child who had cannabis use disorder who has subsequently died from an overdose. I get a little emotional about it, but I wore a throat. Close to 30 years ago, my husband and I moved to Burlington where I could begin residency as an OB-GYN at EVMC. Our son was three months old and we chose to live in Vermont because it seemed like a great place to raise our family. There were lots of outdoor activities and a focus on health and wellness. We did our best to engage our children into tennis, hiking, and skiing as a family. Soccer, lacrosse, and football as team sports. We were very relieved when our older son, Sean, showed little interest in drugs and alcohol in the middle school years. What we didn't know that when we moved to Vermont was that Vermont is among the highest states for teen use of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. When John was a senior in high school, he began using the high-level THC products, oils that were baked. At the time, we had no idea that this was even a possibility. He was, it's fairly popular right now, but he was way ahead of his time. There was no telltale odor of marijuana. The vaping instrument looks like a pen. You would never even know what was going on. Our son was leaving school for an hour a day to use these fake products, or also known as oils or dabs. And we were unaware by the time he came home from school, he did not appear intoxicated. What we did notice was a very rapid, extreme change in his mood. Later on in life, Sean was diagnosed with bipolar depression and what seemed like a manic episode exploded. He went from being co-captain of the varsity Alpine Speed Team, a senior leader, a slam leader in South Burlington, an AP honor student to barely graduating high school. Some of the episodes we experienced were a car accident where he rolled his car into a ditch. Another evening, he was found by the police in a local park, confused and covered in mud. He could become combative and aggressive, and I get Terry thinking about this when he would fight physically with us and his brother. He became paranoid and restless and delusional. He felt that the police were out to get him, targeting him through our local newspaper. We, as concerned parents, took him to his doctor who immediately suggested a drug test. What we did upon finding the results of the drug test, our surprise was only marijuana. We thought for certain he was doing hard drugs and in fact it was, marijuana was the only thing on his drug screen. We struggled to find a psychiatrist and it was at that time almost impossible to find an adolescent child psychiatrist for his mood disorder. However, we were able to find good help with substance use disorder at center point and then later at the day one program. Interestingly, without even treatment for his mood order with sobriety and absence of marijuana, his mental health improved significantly. Significantly such that after a year of sobriety, he to us appeared completely normal. He entered the U.S. Navy. He went through basic training. He was selected to serve in the Submariner program, it's an elite program in the Navy that is restricted only the top 3% of enlisted personnel. He went through Submariner training and did very well through training. However, in the course of a few weeks after completion of training, he visited a high school friend of his in New York City and resumed consumption of marijuana. Within just a few short weeks of resuming consumption, he came home to visit us at Easter time and was again displaying all of the characteristic behaviors that we had seen and no sooner than a few weeks after he returned to base, after the short visit home, he was taken to a local psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. He was discharged from the Navy and he was charged with possession of cannabis and that was his only charge. Unfortunately, during this time after discharge of being in the Navy and believe it started also during the time that he was in the Navy, he started to use harder drugs and became addicted to opiates. He went for treatment to Hazelton Betty Ford in Minnesota. He then later transferred to California and he was sober. Again, his mood changed dramatically. He swore off opiates at that point in time, but soon after a relapse, again, it was the same frightening set of symptoms. He ended up going to New York City and was lost for several months. We didn't know where he was. He was finally found after shoplifting, multiple episodes of shoplifting, a very kind judge recognized the psychiatric distress he was in and had him sent to Rikers Island where he received treatment and evaluation. He was finally able to come home and at that point he felt that he was done with opiates, but he felt that he could continue to use marijuana, that it would help with his mood disorder, that it would help him even out his moods. What we saw was the exact opposite. Was that whenever he would resume using marijuana, he would have instability of his moods. A few years later, after a period of very significant, very pleasant stability, he had another episode. One night he was found by the Burlington Police Department. He was psychotic and delusional. He thought he was a member of the Grateful Dead family. My office is directly across from the emergency room and I heard that he was there and between the time I went from my office across the street, he pulled out his IV and left. He had already been discharged. Unfortunately, if you're not actively homicidal or just suicidal, even if you're quite psychotic and delusional, you could be released from the emergency room. There's very little that parents can do to intervene in their care. Some weeks later, I called the police when Sean broke into our home twice within 24 hours. My husband was out of town and when Sean was in some of these episodes, he could be very aggressive and I was fearing for the safety of our younger son. If there had been any way to have had a mental health evaluation, I would have done it, but there was not that availability so I felt compelled to call the police. Eventually, Sean landed in jail where he bailed mental health court. He went to several sober houses each time being discharged within 24 to 72 hours for using marijuana. It was the one thing he just could not give up. I don't have it here, but I can circulate later. There's a video, Sean, at St. Jay Work Camp speaking with members of the legislature asking for better mental health care at the St. Jay Work Camp. Unfortunately, after his release, he resumed marijuana consumption and 38 days after release, while high on marijuana, he used a substance that he thought to be cocaine, which turned out to be 100% fentanyl. Of his mental health, I'm convinced that the marijuana use, especially the high dose that he was using, it firstly affected his mental health. The difference was truly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type appearance. Thank you. I couldn't believe how genuinely caring, pleasant, and cooperative he could be if he was not under the influence. His letters from his time in jail for the few months before he died, he reflected relatively normal intellect and mood upon incarceration. I feel very fortunate for the last year of his life. I have several beautiful letters and cards. It really took our family by surprise and it wasn't actually until several years of Sean's use that he admitted that he was dabbing this whole time in high school and it wasn't until he told me about his supplier of the oils. It was a lab that blew up in Winooski in 2016 that he admitted that that was what he had been using in high school. We had no idea that it was this supercharged marijuana. I recently listened to Governor Hickenlipper's reference report on use after legalization where he notes that there is a percentage of decrease in smoking of marijuana which goes from a minimal amount down by about 3%. But there is an increase in the use of dabs which is what my son was using by 7% in Colorado and a use of edible increase by 8%. Data by self report can be confounding. As an OPGYN, I can tell you that pregnant women in Colorado have dramatically decreased their use because there's a DCF report filed if they admit to use of marijuana during pregnancy. However, the poor blood of the neonates shows the one third increase in THC component after legalization. I recommend that there be more study before jumping on this bandwagon. We need to ensure that we aren't hurting our kids by starting commercial sales. Marijuana is a schedule one drug and it has been hard to study and we need more data. I have a recent report from the American Journal of Medicine just in this last year, a review and commentary. And there are a couple of points from this review that I'd like to share with you. Marijuana use starts early in Americans and is the most commonly used illicit drug in Americans 12 years of age and older. 7% of 8th graders, 15% of 10th graders and 21% of 12th graders report use within the last month. Of adolescent users, 2.7% meet criteria for addiction, cannabis use disorder, which is what our son had, as compared to 4.9% of adult users. Lifetime marijuana use reported in 2016, 15% in the ages of 12 to 17 use marijuana. This is compared to 22% aged 65 and older. Few Americans believe that regular cannabis use is harmful to health and legalization in 29 states has increased the public's interest in possible benefits. However, regular marijuana use is associated with a range of behavioral abnormalities. Adolescents who use marijuana are twice as likely to smoke more marijuana and become addicted to those who begin smoking cannabis at a later age. Regular use of cannabis is associated with a decline in short-term memory and cognitive function, poor school and work performance, mood disorders and psychosis. Marijuana impures the ability of operation of airplanes, automobiles, motorcycles and trains and its effects appear to be dose dependent. For instance, automobile accidents occur two to seven times more likely. There's evidence of permanent neurologic change associated with marijuana use that begins prior to the age of 21. And this is from a very respected journal, the American Journal of Medicine. The clinical significance is that chronic marijuana use is associated with abnormalities in mood and cognition. Abnormalities in the brain maturation in the areas of the brain that subserve mood and cognitive function are present on functional brain imaging in chronic users. There appears to be a dose response relationship to these abnormalities and regularity of marijuana use. In contrast to adults, the abnormalities in cognition associated with chronic marijuana use under the age of 21 do not resolve with abstinence. One of the, I guess, benefits of having a child with severe psychiatric illness is that you get to meet other parents who have children who are similarly affected. I think that I'm close friends with probably the parents of the probably most seven or eight affected children in Burlington. I would say that most of them can't be here today because they're busy dealing with their child's severe mental illness. But a good substantial majority would say that they have anecdotal experience that the use of marijuana has significantly adversely affected their child's mental health. I would like to introduce my very good friend, Ron, who shares a similar story and he's gonna... Thank you, Kim. And I will share my articles for your review. Kim's story is all too familiar for what's in there. I'm gonna find yourself in the recorded record. My name is Ron Capola. I'm a resident of Essex. Welcome to my family's lives. A life now filled with delusional thought and insult, once a good life filled with soccer championships and promising career as an apprentice plumber. All of it derailed by my son's steady hypotency THC and the confines of a good neighbor's home, surrounded by his high school buddies. It's a life of schizophrenia. It's a life that has changed my marriage, my relationship with my children, my relationship with my grandchildren and neighbors. At times I'm overwhelmed by a nightmare, the notion that we're on the verge of normalizing pot to the extent that pacifiers will be impregnated with THC. The high school buddies are long gone. We have separate dinners for holidays. We argue over the dangers of antipsychotic drugs. We argue over calling the police. We argue over trying to preserve our own health and sanity. Statistics bear out the fact that we'll die earlier because of the stress. Our children don't understand. Our grandchildren don't understand. Their parents feel the need to protect their preschoolers from their own brother. As a result, we don't see them too often. Instead, we plan for retirement, much different than we imagined. Our wealth diminished by core costs, lawyers, and the surge for medical treatments. Precious time, money, spending, feeding, clothing, and housing are permanently disabled, loved ones, someone who can't manage his own life. I don't want to be here. I don't want to relive this, but you have abdicated your oath to protect Vermont citizens. My participation and your willingness to hear my story tells me everything about the mindfulness charter of this committee, but on the other hand, it tells me nothing about why we're proud to be Vermonters. Marijuana use was illegal, and harder to get when marijuana psychosis struck my son. He was 20, but I was unaware that over the decade, technology has weaponized this genetically altered breed of plant. The representatives on this panel and various other committees have been presented with evidence, ubiquitous THC in all its forms, and it all indicates or pressures kids for earlier use. You have been presented with controlled medical studies, correlations between THC and schizophrenia. You have seen statistics, harm caused by commercialization in Colorado. You have access, studies explaining how important pruning of the brain synapses for brain health and young adults, and THC inhibits that calling. The legislature has taken actions against unvaccinated people. They protect the immune compromised community. Tell me how many people are dead or permanently disabled because they were exposed to an unvaccinated person, and then compare it to the amount of people who will be disabled by the exposure to weaponized commercial THC. We see them more than ever now in the EGR, and at NAMI support groups. Regulation doesn't take away the liability of psychosis, putting an age requirement into laudas and shield underage consumption. Taxation funds don't cover for the lifetime disability costs. My ask is for the members to gain the insight needed to produce or deny policy that protects our communities. I don't wanna wait until your loved ones, spouses, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, sons, daughters, grandchildren suffer the throes of marijuana and do psychosis. So far you have chosen to marginalize the science against commercialization, and underestimated the discipline needed by curious underaged individuals to exercise restraint. I urge the committee to wait another year or two while new data and science will be released on this subject. I am one of many who have chosen not to come forward until today. If you fail to act, there will be a tsunami of adolescence addiction and unintended consequence. My son can no longer ask coherent questions, so I will. Why are you unleashing an industry that promotes a business model to get 20% of its users to consume 80% of its product? Only to find yourselves addicted, incarcerated, and disabled. Why are you making it more difficult to keep families together? More won't be able to cope, more will take their own lives. It's a no-brainer if my son had his mind back. He would argue that pro-commercialization advocates are more insane and delusional than he ever was or will be. He would say, put that in your pipe and smoke it. Sure, my name is Bob Troyer, and I'm the former United States Attorney in Colorado. I stepped down as U.S. Attorney about six months ago. So I was the U.S. Attorney for the Second Committee of the Office the entire time we've had commercialized marijuana for eight years, starting in 2010 until six months ago. Well, may I just start talking, or what's the best way to proceed? If you have some prepared remarks, that would be helpful. Okay, great. Well, let me give you what I thought might be helpful, was just to give you some lessons from Colorado. This is an issue where it'd be easier for people on both sides to get very excited and emotional. And sometimes it helps to hear, I have found another state considering what you guys are considering. It's just here from a place that's had a lot of experience and try to just give you some facts about that Colorado experience, and some lessons beyond the rhetoric. The first lesson is that commercialization really, really, really changes the atmosphere and the life in the state where it happens very quickly. We had over 3,000 marijuana licensees in the state very quickly, we have, and now have in the state, more marijuana stores open retail selling marijuana in actual brick-and-mortar stores where we have McDonald's and Starbucks combined. The media attention, the site, the sounds, the smells, the physical presence, the advertising is kind of overwhelming. It really has changed the culture and atmosphere of Colorado pretty quickly, and that's pretty embedded here now. And what was not done in Colorado when this happened here, there's any cost-benefit analysis. So I thought it might be helpful for you guys to understand that just from our experience what cost we've experienced, what the impact of marijuana had been in Colorado, and then talk a little bit about benefits so you can do what the hard work you're supposed to do, and that is what costs and benefits before making an important decision for all your voters. The first cost is broadly, there are really three or four categories, broadly the health of the population, specifically health of your youth, your adolescents, has been the biggest impact in Colorado. I have found over these many years that looking at usage data is kind of a red herring. Looking at adolescents, usage data, high school usage data is a red herring. What's more helpful to look at are the actual statistics from public health officials or maybe some of those that show the impact on youth, rather than relying on surveys, given the high school students while they're in a classroom, have proven to be inaccurate and don't reflect the real problems. In Colorado, the health officials that did this show the frequency of youth has increased, the number of people, I'm talking about adolescents now who've used, has increased the potency of what they use has increased and the delivery devices they use, the vaping devices that they use and the difficulty in detection, the devices that are detecting their usage, that has increased hermetically. In other words, working joints, very infrequent among adolescents, vaping through something that looks like a flash drive or looks like this standard highlighter. You can now buy it in hundreds of stores in Colorado, something that looks exactly like a common school supply, like this, that's actually a base pen. So all of that has changed in terms of actual data, the dropout rate in high school students since legalization in Colorado has increased. The marijuana-caused poison center admissions for adolescents in Colorado has increased 500% since retail legalization. In the age category, 10 to 24 years old, there have been 200 more suicides in Colorado since retail legalization went live, 200 more a year. Since legalization went live, in 21% of adolescents suicides in Colorado now, the victim, the person who committed suicide, has marijuana in their system. The health officials here report increased adolescent depression. They report now again, this is a low-low circuit based on survey statistics, but one in five Colorado high school students now is a regular drug user. That number was three times lower than that before retail legalization. Another interesting statistic, there's a city in Southern Colorado called Pueblo, Colorado. It's only a city of about 100,000 people, but it's the city that has most desperately embraced retail marijuana and has the lack of restrictions and aggressively invited marijuana into its community to try to profit from the tax dollars. Recently, a hospital study was done there and now 50% of the newborns born in the Pueblo Hospital test positive for marijuana. 50% of the newborns test positive for marijuana. So those are some statistics about adolescent use. We've also seen an increase among adolescents, as I said, in the use of higher concentration product and the change over from smoking to vaping. Now almost a third of adolescent users have vaped and when they vaped they're using much higher concentrated product, much, much higher percent THC. Average THC in our retail flower marijuana, smokable marijuana is 20% the average in our vape products is 60% THC and goes all the way up to 97% THC. Public health statistics from Colorado that we've seen since legalization that in fact the broader population not just that less than 151% increase in traffic fatalities on the roads in Colorado, 151% traffic fatality increase, 52% increase in emergency room visits in Colorado for marijuana overdoses, 148% increase in marijuana hospitalization. There's a number from actually from the federal Department of Transportation that indicates that marijuana users are 25% more likely to be involved in a car crash after marijuana use. The other thing we've seen that is contrary to what we were told by the industry when voters started for this, alcohol use on Colorado has steadily increased every year since retail marijuana legalization. The opioid death rate in Colorado has gone up every single year since retail legalization. When I was U.S. Attorney, we were part of numerous high resource, highly committed opioid enforcement and opioid use reduction initiatives despite the work of all the people, public health officials and law enforcement over the last five years to reduce opioid deaths, opioid deaths in Colorado has gone up every single year since we added commercial marijuana to the addiction mix. Another category of impact that doesn't get enough attention in my view that's really been very, very dominant Colorado is the development of two black markets, two distinct black markets from marijuana development and retail legalization here. The first is the local black market. There's a price disparity between what you can buy at the retail, the regulated retail establishment that has all the costs associated with taxation and regulation and brick and mortar production. There's much, much cheaper marijuana to be had on the street, so to speak, than at a retail establishment and those who can't afford the price differential buy from the local retail market. Every single state that has invited commercialization and commercial retail marijuana into the state has vast overproduction, that overproduction by the growers goes into either a local or a national black market. Colorado has the lowest overproduction and the industry brags about how long the number is. The number they brag about, the industry brags about here is that in Colorado they only overproduce six metric tons of marijuana last year. That's six metric tons of marijuana. It was grown here legally, but not sold in a retail store. They either went to another state first sale or it was sold on the black market. In California, that number is over a million pounds in Oregon at several hundred thousand pounds last year. The national black market involves international drug cartels. Why was U.S. turning the prosecuted Cuban cartels, Asian organized crime cartels and Mexican cartels in debriefing defendants on the cases we prosecuted? We've heard a consistent story and that is they would tell us these actual marijuana operators from these organizations would tell us when you have retail marijuana in the basement and we invited us into your state to be a theater of operation for production. We didn't have to produce in Mexico. We could or somewhere else and somewhere across the international border we could produce right here in your state. And so finding a place to grow, planting, cultivating, harvesting, all of those things we could do under the cover of legalization. So we had much less risk. All we have to worry about is transporting it to a market back east. So that's why we're here. We had a case right before I left that involved black market, an Asian organized crime group. We'd take it over 950 houses, residential homes, convert it then into greenhouses and we're making millions and millions of dollars harvesting and shipping back east. So a lot of violence comes with those black markets and a lot of increased law enforcement costs both for the state agency that's supposed to be regulating and for local law enforcement, local sheriff's department and police department come from that black market activity. Another category that I want to get through this quickly enough is you have a little time for questions but another category you've got that public health stuff, you've got the black market impact. Another impact we've noticed is that these retail locations, these grows and these retail hotshops always end up in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. So the diverse communities who were told they would benefit in a social justice way from legalization, commercialization of marijuana have actually been harmed much more than white privileged communities. The crime associated with marijuana and the sight sounds and smells of grows and retail operations much like we've seen over history in this country with liquor stores. The folks who think this is a great idea from a social justice perspective when it comes to voting locally on having a marijuana grow in their community never allow it in their white privileged community and they always end up in these disadvantaged struggling areas of the state, particularly in Denver when you've seen that. As a result, in high school in Colorado, with the higher percent of minority students, the suspension rates in those high schools for marijuana is a hundred percent higher than it is for marijuana suspension in the predominately white high schools. Marijuana or RAT for state law violations so it's still illegal in the state not to comply with the state rules or to possess more than an ounce of marijuana at that time or to sell it off the bar. Or RATs for that kind of behavior for whites have gone down 8% in commercialization. For African Americans, they've gone up 59% for Latinos. Or RATs for marijuana violations have gone up 38%. For commercialization, I don't know if you guys have issues, have a mental health crisis in Vermont like we do here in Colorado. What we've seen in the development is those same communities of mental health homeless populations through congregate in the vicinity of high density marijuana establishment and that population causes increased threats on government services and also on the neighborhoods. Those already disadvantaged communities tend to be magnets for those folks, unfortunately. A final category that particularly has a lot of people here who care a lot about the environment and they're here to enjoy the outdoors. Lots of outdoor environmental activity and in fact, the environment here, the change in the environmental culture here with commercialized marijuana has also been stark. Their public land officials and environmental officials here refer to commercialized pot as carbon cannabis because harvesting cannabis is this environment where it's not naturally grown requires 17 times the per square foot electricity use. Okay, obviously you guys know, like some voters that that electricity, unfortunately, the largest percentage of electricity still comes from coal and fossil fuels, 17% I'm sorry, 17 times per square foot the amount of electricity used in a resident is used in a marijuana grow and marijuana facilitate just for the lighter, just to do the heat light in a marijuana facility. Marijuana also is a very thirsty plant. Colorado water is scarce. An adult marijuana plant requires 2.7 liters of water per day per plant. So there's a strain on the water resources, a strain on electricity and obviously the carbon products. In grows whether they're indoor or outdoor or legal or not, lots of pesticides are used and lots of mold is detected in a recent sampling survey of pesticides and mold from just retail products. These are products people buy and it's just 93% of the samples tested in the survey contain dangerous levels of pesticides and molds. Most disturbing here to me when I was U.S. Attorney where we are charged with protecting our public land. We had enormous, enormous outdoor and legal public land grows that we had never had here before. Before commercialization, again, because the illegal black market here's come into your state because they feed the cover of legalization provides less risk for them. So they grow land, state lands, federal lands and they use nerve agent pesticides, nerve agent pesticides to get into the water system and get into the mammal food chain. These are pesticides that are literally used in less developed countries to kill lions, to kill habalinas, to kill large mammals, threaten agricultural proper livestock. And they're showing up here in black bears, deer, elk and stuff, but they get into the food chain from rodents on up to the larger mammals. So those are some of the impacts we've seen that's life in Colorado now, unfortunately, across those categories. In terms of benefits, so you look at those talks and then ask, okay, how do we balance that against benefits? The tax benefits here have not been what was promised. The total tax revenue for marijuana taxation is less than 1% of the state budget. The state spends a recent study from the Centennial Institute which did not even capture long-term health costs. I forgot to mention a major, major long-term health impact that we started to see manifest among adolescents. The risk of psychosis, so let's get the brain at, psychotic rates, studies again and again have shown studies published in the Lancet, laid out in great detail in Alex Berenson's book called Tell Your Children. The higher the potency of marijuana, the greater the increased risk of psychosis. There's a four to nine time increase for drugs that's four to nine times more likely if you're using high-quality marijuana as an adolescent and you're gonna have a psychotic break at some point in your future. So the study that was done here about costs does not even include the cost of dealing with that, dealing long-term with a population with increased psychosis. Just the mitigation costs for law enforcement hospitals, emergency rooms, poison control centers. Would you just look at those costs? Costs $4.57 to mitigate the impact of marijuana for every dollar brought in in marijuana taxes. So for every dollar you bring in, you're spending over $4 to mitigate the impact that I've described earlier. We had seen about right now there are about 15,000 more jobs brought to Colorado from the marijuana industry. That's out of millions of jobs in the state and increased in 15,000. We've also seen across all major sectors of employers, there was a study recently done of 20 different industry sectors which showed that a positive drug test has been increased by a factor of three. Positive drug tests by employers have tripled since retail legalization. Most jobs, also those 15 or so thousand jobs I mentioned, the vast majority of those 90 plus percent of those are $15 an hour jobs, basically minimum wage, slightly above minimum wage jobs. So in terms of benefits, haven't seen it so much on the tax side or the employment side for the core workers in the industry. There have been approximately 12 already wealthy individual white males in Colorado who were the primary beneficiaries of commercialization. So a very few already wealthy people have gotten a lot wealthier. So that's one of the benefits. It's much easier to get high now in Colorado. That's one of the benefits. I'm not positive point system you have in place right now in terms of home growth. So the system where you had two, three, four plants for personal use and you decriminalize up to an ounce of marijuana allows people to get plenty high without having all of these other consequences by the charge. But when you're weighing those benefits and those costs, I would strongly suggest that you guys at least have state health officials, the state budget office, whatever your state public safety officers are, highway patrol, Department of Safety, whoever it is there for months, but health safety and budget officials need to tell you guys before you make this decision, how much it would cost, to create an entire new regulatory agency to govern this, how much it's gonna cost you to create an entire new laboratory to test for moles and pesticides before this stuff is sold over the counter and people put it in their bodies. How much it's gonna cost to have your own version of federal drug admins, I mean the FDA. The FDA and the EPA do not regulate this. So the kind of regulations for the environment, public health that citizens are used to, used to getting from the federal government, they're not gonna get. So you're gonna need your own equivalent of the FDA, your own equivalent of the EPA. Police departments in metropolitan areas in every town of marijuana are gonna need to have Marijuana Enforcement Control Division, that happens in every state or every city in Colorado that has them. You're gonna need to assess the cost of that. And then of course, there's an increased load on treatment centers for drug treatment, treatment centers for mental health, hospitals, poison centers, and ER rooms, or emergency rooms, that's six categories of things that have been major, major costs that drive that difference that $4.50 versus $1.00 taken in. Colorado didn't look at any of those costs before approving the system we have here. Of course, we did it by popular growth, not by legislature. That's why it's great for you guys for looking at this as a legislature, you can do that cost benefit analysis and try to get an actual cost assessment on those things because those are six easy categories that you'll guarantee to have, is to guarantee that you'll have a major increase in those costs and you'll need the new regulatory agency, the new lab, a state version of an FDA and EPA capacity, law enforcing control divisions, and those increased loads on especially mental health and hospital treatment centers. So. Thank you very much for presenting your view of cost benefit analysis. We have only about 30 minutes left on this subject here in committee this morning and we have two more witnesses waiting to speak with us. Your presentation contained a lot of data and a lot of anecdotes and I'm wondering if you could provide references to some of those to us. I know that there are some very inquisitive minds around this table who might like to dig into some of the data and understand a bit more some of the anecdotes. And so if you could submit that to our committee assistant via email, I know that you have already been exchanging information with her via email. So that would be very helpful. I'm gonna give just a couple of minutes for a few clarifying questions from committee and then if we have a number of lingering questions, perhaps we can make an appointment to speak with you another time. So how? Mr. Troyer, how much money is being spent for education and prevention in Colorado? I don't know. I don't know that specific. I can find that for you. There is some, yeah, I can find that specific easily. Thank you. J.P. Did you have a question? No. Bob. Can you follow up a little bit on that? Do you know if they integrated when they set up the system in your tax structure dedicated money to go towards education and prevention issues? Yeah, they did. They did. What was that number? Do you know? And I just don't know, you know, it's a small percentage of the money taken in. And I just don't have the specific number, but that is part of the structure in Colorado. This money will be set aside for that. It's not, I can, you know, I can tell you just in terms of the experience if you came out to spend a week in Colorado, your experience would be the industry constantly, for instance, trying to get you to use and you'd have to work pretty hard to find anything publicly displayed on a billboard or in a school that indicated there was any kind of adverse impact that for any effort at prevention. So, there are people who work hard at that and the actual money is set aside for another small. Thank you. So thank you for being with us this morning. And we will look forward to digging in a little bit more on some of those issues that you suggested. So thank you for sharing some citations with us. Have a good- Happy to do it. Yeah, I'm happy to do it. And I'll get you the follow-up information on the statistics, but I'm also happy to talk in the future if you guys think it would be helpful. I admire the work you're doing and I'm impressed that we're from Colorado. We had a group of people trying to be as thoughtful as possible as doing sort of a risk or a warrant analysis before going down the path. Thank you much for being with us. Thanks. Goodbye. So we have next on the agenda, Kate Nugent from Wienersky Partnership for Prevention. Thank you for being with us this morning. To do some stretching. Welcome to our office. We can all get up and eat. All right. Thanks a lot for that. Do you have anything on our website? Anything? No. Yeah, thanks for having me today. My name is Kate Nugent and I'm the executive director of the Wienersky Partnership for Prevention. I'm here as a resident of Vermont and a mom, also a community substance abuse prevention leader. That microphone doesn't amplify your voice. Okay. Sure. So I'm here because one of my core values in life is to leave the world a better place than how I found it. And I think that's why I love Vermont so much because I think that is a shared value that we all have. And I especially feel that way about kids. So I have always worked with kids and even when I was a young preteen myself, I taught in various ways and have always worked with youth and throughout my career. So it's something I'm really passionate about. And I think I'm here because I think I owe that to the next generation to speak what I know and share it with you. So since being involved in this work in particular, I've seen a disconnection between what is known in the science and what is perceived in the communities around us. I was in this state house a couple of years ago and a world renowned researcher, someone who has under 20 patents to her name has worked or has presented in front of the United Nations is from Harvard, Dr. Bertha Madras. She gave a presentation here and she talked about the wealth of knowledge that she had, that's her specialty and her experience. And then she shared a little bit of emerging research and it was striking to me because when I read the article about it the next day, the summary was we don't know a lot about marijuana. And I thought, if you just read the article and you hadn't been in that room, that's what you would take away from that. And so that's what I'm hoping is to just lend a little bit of more information to this discussion. And also my personal story. So I have friends who have lost their careers. Their marriage has fallen apart through marijuana use. In particular, one story that really affected me was a friend of mine in college was a sometime user of marijuana for a while and then started using it more and more. I think used it every day after six months that I first knew him. And then he was found in a river since central New York in the middle of winter. Freezing and he was unconscious and luckily he was rescued but he had to leave school. So that really stuck with me. And I think we hear a lot of this narrative like it's harmless. I think everyone in this committee doesn't think that at this point, but those stories, I think there's a lot of shame involved sometimes people telling these stories so they don't get out as much. So I've worked with teachers and guidance counselors, parents and kids, pediatricians, doctors, law enforcement officers. It's the nature of what I do. And other nonprofit directors. And it always strikes me how much they care about their communities and how hard they work. They're out at night just trying to make a difference with one more person. And they're busy. So the resources are not as great for them as for these industry groups. But because of their hard work, I think you all know this because you're part of this. We have a pretty good quality of life. It's not perfect, but it's all these things that are in the background. And these folks deal with the consequences of these things on a daily basis in their work. And many have asked them, asked you state leaders to prevent further increases of access to marijuana use by youth because they're seeing the consequences in their daily work. I wanted to talk a little bit about tobacco prevention because I think that we have had a lot of success with that and it's a good model to look at. But there's a lot of things that I don't think a lot of people know. One is that tobacco still takes eight times the number of lives in Vermont that opioids do. So it's about 800 for monitors every year die from tobacco use versus about 100 from opioids. And we have learned how to reduce the impact of addictive substances. But I want to emphasize that this is relative because before tobacco was mechanized and commercialized, rates of tobacco use were under 5% in the nation. And we have never since come close to that number. Right now we're at an all-time low and it's 14% of the adult population in the United States, which if this were any other disease, we would be, in many ways we do treat this as an epidemic that it is. We were able to achieve these remarkable reductions because of 50 years of piles of research. The first study that came up linking cancer to tobacco use was I think about 50 years before the master settlement agreement where tobacco industry people still said, nicotine is not addictive and yet the states were able to prove that. Because of that settlement agreement, we've had billions of dollars pumped into tobacco prevention in this nation. Vermont has done a great job using more of that money for prevention than other states. Some states have just absorbed it into their general fund. And so we've done a good job with that, but it's not necessarily something that happens automatically once you have an industry set up. And it did not happen willingly as you probably know. So what worked for tobacco was increased education and restricting the promotion, marketing, access, visibility, and the impacts of secondhand smoke exposure. In Vermont right now we have promotion and sales of equipment and growing supplies. We have promotion that's been limited for dispensary medical use, but that has been relaxed since the initial start of the medical marijuana. We have private events that promote use and we have the ability to grow and use at home for anyone under 21. Rates of marijuana use by use are greater than we find acceptable. So among Vermont high school students it's about 24% regular use. Returning to the success of tobacco prevention, I think the ways that marijuana is currently regulated and how we could do better to protect their use. 51% of Vermont high school students believe that there's no risk or slight risk in using marijuana. So that means only 49% think that there's a moderate or great risk. And as those perception of harm decrease, use tends to increase. If you want to compare it to alcohol, which is what the marijuana industry often wants us to compare it to, 36% of Vermont high school students believe that binge drinking on the weekends is harmful and 33% report regular alcohol use. So right now both numbers are higher for alcohol than they are for marijuana. I think this should be our goal. It's my goal is to reduce use of marijuana. And if I were going to approach it that way, I would try to keep it from being used in front of kids. I would try to reduce exposure to secondhand marijuana smoke. I would have as many fun substance free events and programs for use as we could. That helps kids and it helps people in recovery as well. I would keep it from being sold everywhere. I would try to make sure that it was harder to get at home by educating parents about putting it away out of access or inaccessible. I would try to make it not seem normal and attractive. I would limit the promotion, especially of kid attracting colors, flavors, cartoon images and promoting it in foods and candies. I think we don't sell Advil in baked goods and Advil is a relatively benign drug and I don't think we should be selling cookies and gummy bears with THC in them. I would also make sure that as many people as possible and have the latest and up to date information about the health impacts of marijuana. I've heard it said that it's like the opposite of the steroid, it's a performance unenhancing drug and some of the stories that you hear are heartbreaking but I think in general, or and I think in general that's kind of the most heartbreaking but it's slow and quiet. And I think the good news is that we can do all this today because it hasn't been fully commercialized in Vermont and I think we can keep marijuana from becoming the next alcohol for our youth. People rarely develop addictions after the age of 21 if they haven't tried it before that. Addiction is an adolescent disease and however profits from the alcohol and marijuana industry are derived 80% from heavy users. So in order to profit, they need to addict youth. It's a big business. I think the last thought that I wanted to leave with you today is that if we are to prevent drug use and addiction, we must stay hopeful and confident that this is possible. I think the greatest motivation to legalize and commercialize this substance has been the idea that it's inevitable. I think that argument is a distraction from our true goal which is to have healthy, safe and connected people. And just as we know it on an individual level, it's possible to protect youth from drug use and addiction. We know that it's possible to protect communities. Iceland has proved this to be possible. Their drug use rates are below 5%. That took them 20 years from going from one of the worst, one of the most used or where youth used the most to under 5%. Many, many, many communities in the United States have proven this to be possible as well. And again, our people are our most valuable resource and I think we need every single one of them to be as healthy mentally and physically as they can as we need everybody. So thank you for your time. Are you okay for questions? Oh, sure. Actually, I hope this is amazing. Thank you for your work and thanks. One of the things we talked about a little bit here is the network of prevention programs around the state. You've worked for one of the local prevention coalitions. What does that network look like around the state? How many are there, what kind of work they do when they work for them? I don't know if I can have the exact number of how many there are around the state but there are seven to eight, I wanna say. 17. I asked you a question, but what's the scope of the work you do in your communities? When you say scope, did you explain what you mean by that? Who are you working with? Where do you do the things you're engaged in? What kind of programs do you have out there? We work with everybody, local community leaders and youth and kind of people that I mentioned before, law enforcement people and other people that serve different functions in the community, so treatment providers and counselors. When you talk about drug-free events, is it something else on volunteer drug and alcohol for events? Yes, yeah, if we do, I mean we- What does something like that look like? Well, we might create a community dinner, something that we do often and, yeah. So it's like free and invites everybody in and we have a speaker from another agency or something. Thanks for your work. Thank you. Thanks for being with us this morning. So we have one more witness and then we have a hard stop at 1045 because we have an appointment with a school teacher who's boning in with us and I suspect he has rearranged his day to be out of the classroom when we need to speak with him. So, Tim, you're gonna have to help me with your last name. Trevite. Okay. Madam Chair, before we begin, so there's several students here who are invited down. I know the time is oppressing. If I keep my short, can we get their voice heard? We have a hard stop at 1045, so I'm happy to have you use your 15 minutes. I'm sorry that that's all I wanted to talk to some of the other- Appreciate it. So good morning, Madam Chair, members of the committee. I'm Tim Trevite. I'm from CVU High School and the Student Assistance Program Council or the SAP Council. I've been in SAP for 14 years. In my role, I support kids in many ways. Really 90% of my job is meeting one-on-one with students about any issue that they come in and wanna talk about, whether it's suicide ideation, whether it's self-harm, whether it's substance use, their use, or someone else's use. And it's been a really rewarding and taxing job. I hear a lot of stories, I hear a lot of pain. So I'm here today as its opportunity to actually talk about sort of the real world because I believe there's a disconnect. There's a lot of rhetoric that you guys hear and will continue to hear. And I wanna talk about my students and what's happening in my building. So I will have show and tell too. I will use some props because I think it's important because that's the real world that our kids are in. Our schools, our microcosm was going into a larger community. So if we have anger angst in our world today, we're feeling in our buildings. If we have hope, we're feeling in our buildings. If we have drugs in our community, we're in our buildings. And so it's been an interesting shift in my 14 years. It's like self-birth in high school right now, they have taken their doors off their bathrooms. They're taking their doors off their bathrooms because of the jewel epidemic is so, so strong. We're losing the battle, we're losing the battle. Just the other day I go walk in the bathroom and do a bathroom, this kid's got a babe coming out of his mouth. So I'm like, hey, let's go see the administrator. And that was interesting, it was in between when I was talking to a class. So when I have the opportunity to talk to a class, I always ask the kids, I say, hey, how many of you guys want to be drug addicts when you grow up? As you can imagine, there's not a lot of hands go up. 9th graders probably used to have a couple giggles, a couple of knuckleheads. And then I ask, so how does it happen? No one wants to be a drug addict when they grow up. How do we have drug addicts? You know, Kate talked about adult addiction starts in adolescence and that's reality, okay? So I've seen the shift in terms of the jewel. I've also seen the shift in terms of the marijuana. And it happened to me about seven or eight years ago. I started talking with kids and they were very open. Some of them were way too open with me, considering that I need to report some things. Some of them I report to the police. So I started to see the diversion of medical marijuana from Vermont. And I've talked about my rep with this. I've said this. I've created, you know, a lot of harm to no one listens. And then when I started realizing one of my students, one of the most powerful drug dealers in my school would actually get marijuana shipped from California, which was fascinating. Large amounts of marijuana from California. And so we started seeing that. So I don't know if you guys have talked to the drug task force at all. They would say that most of the marijuana in Vermont a long time ago came from Canada, right? Low to THC, just like Bob was talking about. Low to THC, street level THC is really low, really good range from six to 20%. Now, our kiddos get legal marijuana. We get legal marijuana in our building. And I'm gonna show you, Bob Troyer talked about these big things. So these two dab pens, these are dab pens. This is legal. For people with medical marijuana card, they say to Vermont. Conscaded by an 18 year old and a 15 year old. Also, I want you to look at that THC level on that card. So what I've seen is a dramatic increase of access and availability on high policy marijuana, mostly due to our diversion of medical marijuana. And Vermont touts and brags about we have a really, really strict medical marijuana problem. You're gonna be talking to Mr. Whalen this afternoon about that program. And he's gonna say we have a great program. But no one's asking questions and no one's listening. So my concern is that as we continue to liberalize marijuana, and I'm with all four decriminalization. In fact, the state actually saved money. But I'm not for commercialization for another industry that's gonna create more access and availability for our kids. And I'm seeing it firsthand. I've seen the first hand of psychosis. I've seen tragic death through car accidents. The first time I experienced psychosis is when this young man came in, he was a seventh grader when he started smoking pot, his mom's medical marijuana. He comes in as a ninth grader. He has three policy violations in the first four months. I got him to go to residential treatment once. Next time he's in my office, he's giggling. He's all messed up. And he starts talking about cats and aliens. And I'm like, dude, what are you on? He's like, oh, I took mushrooms. I ate mushrooms for breakfast. Ha, ha, ha, ha, right? I'm like, okay, this sucks. I gotta take you down to the principal. I'll bring him down to Jeff Adams at the time. And I know this is his fourth violation, that chances are he won't be coming back or running back anytime soon. So we had a conversation. I get to my office the next day. His dad left a voicemail, said, call me. So I call him back and he tells me what transpires. Ultimately what transpires is that he gets some physical altercation with his dad, gets transported to the UVA medical center in a five point restraint. Then they do a toxin rain. There's no psilocybin in his system. And then he goes down to a brow bar retreat where he's diagnosed with many things. One of them being cannabis and new psychosis. That was the first time I really started seeing it. We're probably losing two kids a year due to psychosis in our school because of high-ponency marijuana. Another time, I'll tell you that. So I got called from the social worker, right? She's like, I need your help, Tim. I walk in and this lady, the young lady who I knew, she's got yogurt all over her face. She's crying. She's laughing and she's strumming the guitar. Clearly I walk into a psychotic break. Her father has a medical marijuana card. Her brother used to, her older brother used to sell the medical marijuana. And so we bring it to the hospital and indeed they diagnose her with cannabis and new psychosis in a psychotic break. Probably the worst strategy that we've had at CFU and we've lost probably nine kids per year. Every year I've been there we've lost a kid. It was when this young man chose to get really, really high behind his car, kill himself in a cyclist. That was probably the worst. And long-term psychosis, that's lifelong, right? Some of these kids have been developed schizophrenia because of the prodromal phase of cannabis and new psychosis can go away when you have symptoms if you stop using. So I'm gonna end with this. And then hopefully I don't know if we're gonna have time for students. So I'm trying as quick as I can then. And dreams begin responsibilities. I wrote William Butler Gates. I'd like to believe that all adults care about fostering our children's dreams. Sadly when I look at the world we have now, that we have created is clear to me that some adults care only about the immediate needs that are blinded by how their actions impact those of youth in the future generations. For those of us in education who dream of creating environments where the minds and spirits of children can thrive, it is our responsibility to make that happen. That is a high calling of education in the urgent task of our time. I believe we are living in interesting times right now both politically and socially. A world that is far more complicated than probably most of us in this room. When we grew up. There are several factors that are converging and impacting our kids, but will undoubtedly will grow in coming years. Picture a weather mat if you will, right? With different fronts heading towards one another. Front one is social media. Front two is adults modeling a lack of responsibility and accountability. Front three is a celebration of a new drug industry called marijuana that will target youth and already the less privileged. I am fearful that we as adults are creating a perfect storm for our kids. Thank you for your time. To be respectful of your students, we have only five minutes, but I would welcome you if you're able to stick around because our 11 o'clock testimony, I suspect is not gonna take the entire hour. So we could possibly hear from your other students more like 11 30 or 11 45. They're able to stick around. So do you have a student who can do five minutes? We look as you want to go and then Chris out. I'm excited to see my mom. What's that? I'm just, I'll probably see my mom. Okay, if you want to. Thank you. Okay, so I'll probably see my mom, my name. For the record, just give me your name. Oh, yeah. My name is Lucas. I'm from Monoski High School, ninth grade. I've been involved with the above the influence program at Monoski, Monoski for about three years now. And first I just want to quickly give a personal experience. I'm just gonna sum it up mainly. So my personal experience is mainly, I was, before I was born, my dad started using a lot of products. It started off with marijuana and alcohol. Then it slowly started to proceed when I was born and it started to move to more hardcore drugs. And it started to turn into things like shrooms and it turned more intensely into heroin. And so what ended up happening was, he left me with some things, mainly medical, like some turn mental, and it mainly just had an effect on my life. And that's kind of what started to get me into things like this too, so things like that can't happen to other people. So that's why I'm mainly here. I'm just gonna sum up mainly what I wrote down. So mainly what I wrote down was marijuana does a lot more things than just make you high. It does affect your mental stability. It can give you physical illness, mental illness, and things like that. And main thing I want to talk about is how it affects also kids who are not even using them. What can happen is there's a lot of second, not only second hand things that can happen like related to illness. It can also affect their mindset related to smoking. It can affect how they look at the drugs, thinking that the people they look up to, mainly adults who are there using them, make them look cool or make them have any, like it can outcome and make them want to use them. So mainly it's popularity in my opinion. So, and they're becoming more and more open about it. People are becoming more and more open, which is leading to more kids wanting to use and other things like that, usage. And it's starting to get kids interested. I've noticed a lot in the bathrooms at the school, kids won't even care if a teacher walks in while they're smoking marijuana. They'll just continue. So it just really affects their mindset on how kids are starting to increase in usage because they're noticing that adults and people they look up to are starting to make it more cool or just popular. So that's the main reason I really wanted to come in here and talk about that. And it starts to make them think that they have no consequences. So they should be seeing stuff like that and it puts them at an early disadvantage and that's my sum up, really. So, committee, we have a teacher, Josh Knox. And so let me just help orient you because we are switching gears right now so we come back to the issue around rank choice voting. This was a bill that we heard the introduction of a week or two ago and the rank choice voting issue is one that has been adopted in May and we have over a month social studies teacher who has a great deal of interest in it. So Kelly, you can go ahead and dial up. So we will hear first from the social studies teacher and then I believe that the president of Maine who's worked on the main rank choice voting system will be coming into the room at some point soon. What? Good morning, Josh. This is representative Sarah Copeland-Hanses from Bradford. Can you hear us okay? I can hear you pretty well, can you hear me? I can hear you just fine, thank you. So if you could just wait one moment because we have a couple of folks who are coming in the room who are also here for the same conversation this morning or having a little bit of a change over of folks as we switch gears to talk about rank choice voting. I was intrigued by your interest in the bill and I understand that you're a social studies teacher so please give us- Lacking teacher. Okay, excellent. I do cover Roman political. Okay, well I'm sure there's a lot more there. So we would love to spend about 10 or 15 minutes with you and if you can leave some time for questions that would be fabulous. Okay, so I was, Kelly told me the idea is to sort of read prepared remarks in and then give time for questions. Perfect. Thank you, go right ahead. Okay, so thank you for giving me the chance to speak with you today and I already said my name is Joshua Knox and I want to speak in favor of House Bill 444 rank choice voting. I think it's important to tell you who I am and my reasons for supporting it. Thank you in advance for your indulgence. Although my day job is that of a Latin teacher at a public school, I ran in 2018 as an independent in the general election for one of the six at-large kids in County C. I chose the state senate because of how strange its method of election appeared to me. Frankly, any ballot that offers 13 candidates and tells you to vote for six is going to be a bit confusing for the average voter and she will probably default to party alignment or name recognition or some other shorthand. Even worse than left-sided elections however are elections that fail to generate popular interest and I have to mention the thing that got me in the state's hands right from the first place is the so-called wasted vote or also blank votes. So a wasted vote, as you may have heard, is any vote that doesn't achieve its end, so any vote for a losing candidate and a blank vote is, as the name implies, when a voter thunder votes a ballot, meaning she leaves them off a blank or votes for fewer choices than allows, of course in the case of citizen senate seats, it means voting for fewer than six. In 2016, the number of blank votes for citizen senate was nearly 180,000 out of just over 450,000 caps. So if you add votes for a losing candidate, we have over 220,000 votes that by this definition are wasted. That would nearly half of all the votes voted for citizen senate seats, so to be clear, although this delegation for the state senate was to zero in favor of one party, Democrats or Democrat progressives, there was very clear list for all evidence that half the voters would held affirmative support from those candidates. And the important thing about this that got me really interested about the other concept is, it disadvantages whoever the minority party or interest is in the given place. So in Rutland County, 2016, the election for state senate was three to zero Republican despite the fact that Republicans again, as we include blanks, obtained fewer than half the total votes. And every county was a three or more large district has delegations of one party. So as a result, I decided to run for the state senate myself. Now, I'm not gonna say I was a dynamo on a stump or incredible in a televised debate, but I do think that presented my ideas pretty thoughtfully. My main issue was naturally the negative effects of the way Vermont's legislature is elected, this first half the post system. And my slogan was what I thought was pretty catchy, no wasted votes. My big push was for a form of election reform, specifically proportional representation, whereby the division of seats would be equivalent percentage of votes. That said, I wasn't a one issue hobby horse kind of guy. As you all know, as candidate, you receive a lot of surveys, solicitations, propositions on particular issues, broader requests from the media. So I took time to fill out all the serious requests that I received, whether it was a general survey or something like project vote smart or issue specific matters like affordable childcare, education, legality, abortion, firearms, minimum wage, do you name it? I probably filled it out and returned it. But at the end of the day, it didn't matter. As the deadline for responses passed and I checked the various websites to see what the other candidates have said in order to compare our positions, be more informed myself, I discovered that only a minority had filled out all these surveys. My name is Kyle Bailey from Gorham, Maine, which is right outside of the city of Portland. I've lived in Maine for 10 years. I grew up in Georgia and Florida and moved to Maine for a job and fell in love with the state in New England. So thank you all so much for having me here today. I just really wanna walk through my presentations about the first on the campaign manager for the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, which has worked for the last four and a half years in the state of Maine to educate voters about ranked choice voting, to work for two successful ballot measure campaigns. We are a ballot measure state, as you know, to win ranked choice voting and to defend it. We were also engaged in multiple litigation situations to defend the law and to require supplementation. And I also led to successful efforts to educate voters about using ranked choice voting in the June 2018 and November 2018 elections. So what I bring to this conversation is real world experience, educating voters about ranked choice voting and implementing it on the voter education side, as well as doing some work with clerks in the Secretary of State's office. So my goal is really for today's conversation is talk about what ranked choice voting is, how it works and why it matters through the Maine experience. My goal is really to hopefully give you all some more information to consider about ranked choice voting and to elevate the conversation and maybe even inspire a few folks to be engaged in this conversation and take a leadership role along with other legislators who've submitted this. So the first place to start is, you know, what is ranked choice voting? It's a simple, fair and easy voting system that is now used in the state of Maine and in cities across the country and as you've heard from the previous speaker in countries around the world. In fact, a number of countries, every voter uses it. And it's a system that tackles some challenges which we've heard the former Speaker mentioned and I'll get into that in just a little bit. But it's really important to sort of look at ranked choice voting as a simple, fair and easy, non-partisan, consensus oriented voting system that gives voters more voice and more choice. So let's talk about why that is. First here is just a quick map of a place in the United States that either have ranked choice voting that are considering their legislature. Legislature, there are five southern states that use ranked choice voting to accommodate overseas voters in their actual runoff election. So people use ranked choice voting in various different formats in different states and municipalities and then across the world there's many different uses but six countries use it like they're president. Australia has used it for actually over 100 years for it to elect their parliament. So when people say in 1917, they were obviously not computers or tabulators, so it was a hand count. So this has been used for a long time. So how does ranked choice voting work? I thought it might be helpful just to look at a couple of examples from Maine. The first would be the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary in which there were seven candidates running. Under the old pick one first pass post system, you go in, you vote for a candidate, the candidate with the most votes wins. And historically in Maine we've had nominees win from both parties, 30, 31, 32% of the votes. A lot of questions about were they really the consensus nominee, a lot of fracture within the party as a result of that. And so we use ranked choice voting in the primary elections in Maine. Here's a sample ballot in that seven way range. So instead of having one ol' next to every candidate's name, you have the option to rank them from your favorite to your least favorite. So you can say, this candidate, I heard them in the debates, they were a rock star. I really align with them, they're my first choice. And then you look on down and say, this other candidate, 90% of the time I have pretty much agreement with them. If my first choice couldn't win, I'd like to have them win, they're my second choice. And so you can rank as many candidates as few or as many as you like in this race with the right option as well. And I should say in your package you have sample ballots from Maine as well, actual sample ballots. So on election night we add up all the votes to see who is everyone's first choice. And what we found in Maine in this race was seven candidates. Janet Mills, who is our new governor, had the most votes, she had the plurality in the first round of tabulation in Maine, the most first choices, but she did not have a majority. And so the great thing about ranked choice voting is we wanna find out, was she the consensus nominee for Democrats or did they have other preferences? And so in this race, we look to see the three candidates who are in last place, they had the fewest first choice votes, they're eliminated, none of them have a path to victory. But if you voted for one of those candidates, your vote's not wasted. We literally pick up your ballot and look to see who's your second choice. Who do you like best between the remaining four candidates? And we count the votes again. So we see that each candidate sort of gained a little bit from those voters who were eliminated. But Janet's still in the lead, but she doesn't have a majority. So we look to see the last place candidate, former Speaker of the House Mark Eves is eliminated, he's in last place. We look at all the voters who voted for Mark Eves and say, who do they like best between the remaining candidates? We move those ballots to the pile for the remaining candidates. Again, added to each candidate's tallies, but Janet Mills continues to be in the lead, it's still not quite a majority. So the last place candidate in this situation, Betsy Sweet, is eliminated. We pick up those ballots, who's the remaining favorite candidate among those voters? And it confirms Janet Mills is in fact the consensus nominee for the Democratic Party for Governor, it wins with an upright majority. When you go back to the initial ballot, why didn't you eliminate three and not just one? Great question. So when you look at these three candidates at the bottom, even if you tally all of their votes together, even if they sort of aligned, so you'd still be less than the fourth place finisher Mark Eves. There's no path to victory. So you can do it one at a time. It's called batch elimination. Yeah, but how do you know that the one, two, three, the fifth place guy didn't have, wasn't the second choice of everybody else? Yeah, so let me just, let me just say, so Donna Dion finished last place, followed by Diane Russell, followed by Mark Dion. Even if everyone who liked Donna Dion and Diane Russell made Mark Eves their next best choice, and he got all those votes, he'd still be behind the fourth place finisher Mark Eves. So there's no mathematical path to victory. So both for presentation and the election system, we simply batch eliminate them. So that's a great question. You know, if he was able to have a path, yeah, he's continued to have been eliminated, but in the bottom one, bottom two. And with right choice voting, you ballots are counted in rounds in which last place candidates lose until one candidate reaches the majority wins. So I've got one more, yes, sir. Hold on, I've got a Q Bell and Rob and then Bob and then Nelson. Could you back up to the screen where you had your third winner? Yes. I mean, I don't know if that totally works mathematically, but would there be a scenario there where neither one of them got 50% of the vote? No, because you'll always have a majority of votes cast in the final round of tabulation. So there are some voters, let's say, just pulling back to the original line, I've got one more example too, it's a smaller candidate race to look at. So Donna Dion finished in last place in this scenario. There may be voters who walked in the voting booth and said, I only want Donna Dion and to heck with everybody else. What's called bullet voting, right? I just voted for her. And so what happens is if you're a voter, you're a vote counselor, Donna Dion, she loses, it's done no different than the system we had previously, but you're choosing not to participate in the subsequent rounds of tabulation. It's just like if you had an actual runoff election four weeks after a date and you decided not to show up because you didn't care at that point. Who won? So to follow up on that though, so if you had a significant amount of bullet voting, I mean, it is conceivable that the top two candidates might not reach that figure. You always do a majority of votes cast in the final round of tabulation. So what it is is there are some voters who decide not to participate just like an actual runoff election. What we find though, and we can talk more about this if you want to, so rank choice voting when compared to something like actual runoff elections, you have 10% higher voter participation with rank choice voting than asking voters to come back to the polls four weeks later for a runoff election between the top two to get that majority. So it's just a more efficient way to conduct a runoff which you often need to get a majority winner in a crowded race unless someone is very popular and surpasses that goal. Let me show you one more example, I think might be helpful and let me just say to answer part of your question, voters attitudes, there was exit polling in Maine, 85% of voters were very familiar or familiar with rank choice voting by the time they used it the first time, 84% found rank choice voting very easy or easy to use, 95% of voters in that Democratic primary ranked candidates, they participated in ranking, turned out with 7.5% higher than the previous competitive Democrat primary for governor and the squirrel ballot rate which is overvotes or challenges with the ballot was comparable to past first past post election. So on the back end and the voter reported data, we saw positive indications about implementation. Let me show you another example, 2018, the congressional general election in Maine, I mean second district, here's the sample ballot, there were four candidates, a Democrat Republican and two independents, voters had the option to rank their choices in order of individual preference. On election night, the votes were tabulated and Jared Goldman, the Democrat received 45% of first choice rankings, Bruce Pollack when the Republicans received 46% of first choice rankings and the independents received a total of 9% of the vote. Again, to my similar example, the independents are eliminated, neither one has, neither one can get to a majority even if they both crossed over and support each other. And so we pick up those ballots to see who is their second choice between their remaining candidates or who do they like best between Jared Goldman and Bruce Pollack when, in this case, it's one of the 10% of the time we find that it actually reverses the outcome or changes the outcome of the election because of franchise voting. In this case, the Jared Goldman received two to one, the preferences of voters who like the independent candidate. So it actually, Congressman Jared Goldman won with 51% of the vote to Bruce Pollack when it's 49%. In this election, 74% of voters said very easy, easy to use. It was interesting too, 62% of voters said that they thought having majority winners was very important in Maine's elections. 95% of voters participated all the way through to the final round of tabulation in this congressional race as well, and the school ballot rate was comparable. So any questions sort of on the mechanics or we can say at the end? No, go on. Okay. I noticed that people back to me did the rankings of the numbers. This is fine. When you're done and you count the number two vote, it's only for the people that should be moved, so it doesn't do the number two vote for the people that don't. So if you voted for Jared Goldman or Bruce Pollack when in the round, your candidate is still in the race, so your vote always counts for the candidate you ranked highest. So your first choice is in that race, you're sticking with your first choice all the way through. And your vote only counts for your second choice if your first choice is eliminated. That's right. So why does ranked choice voting matter? So ranked choice voting restores majority rule. Candidates who are opposed by majority can't win and allows voters to sort of build that coalition. It's the most cost-effective official way to conduct a runoff, as I said. And it gives voters the freedom to vote for the candidate they like the best. Without worrying, they'll have to elect the candidate they like the least. We heard this from a gentleman who called in. So from the voter's perspective, you never have to vote for the lesser of two evils when there's another candidate you really like. You never have to feel like your vote is wasted because maybe you gave it to a candidate that didn't seem like you could win, but you can still then participate in electing your representative or governor, whatever the case is be. And then what we find too with ranked choice voting encourages more positive issue-focused campaigns. So you can't simply win with 30, 35, 40% of the vote. You've got to really reach beyond your base, appeal more broadly for support, talk to voters who may like another candidate better and have a conversation about the issues and find commonality and say, you know, if I can't be your first choice, I really hope you'll, can I count on you to rank me as your second choice? So really interesting sort of collaborative conversation that now our current system doesn't encourage and encourages sort of the incentives are to sort of rally your base and turn them out to vote. And this, not that you don't want to have a base and rally to the vote, you do, but you also want to think about reaching out beyond that. And negative campaigning can backfire when voters have the option to rank candidates too, because you may not rank a candidate as your second choice if they slum mud at your first choice. And so there's some backfiring there. One thing that I like about this is it, it seems to eliminate the need or the desire to catch bullet votes. Jared Golden would be a prime example. He finished second in the first round. If they're only bullet votes, he, well, there would have been no second round. Yeah, I mean, Bruce Baldwin in this particular race was the plurality winner in the first round. So perhaps he would have won in a plurality race. Who knows if the other events would have run? There's a lot of different variables to consider. But you're right. So think about the voter experience. You walk into the voting booth and instead of having to think, what are the polls saying? Do I need to vote strategically? I don't want to waste my vote. You can walk in and say, I really like this candidate the best. I agree with them, I don't rank to my first choice. But if they can't win, I sort of have a second choice. And I have a say in who my leader is. And I know that along with my neighbors, a majority of us will achieve a consensus about who our representatives should be. And that's a different power dynamic than I think we've seen in other races. And so I just could have been closing this part. I also would say that I think we all agree we have a responsibility to vote to make our state and our country a better place for our children and grandchildren. And rank choice voting really is a change that gives more voice to the people. So happy to stop there and take any further questions about the main experience, or rank choice voting generally, or the impact. So that example you gave with your congressman, are there any, obviously because the person who got the most votes in the first round did not end up winning. Are there any challenges to that based on that this is a federal election, which might be different than say a state office? So great question. So this has been challenged in federal court. Bruce Pollock when brought litigation for throwing everything at rank choice voting in the US District Court in Maine, fully upheld rank choice voting and as did the first circuit in Boston. So it's sort of been litigated. There's another case that came out of the, I think the Ninth Circuit where they also upheld our CV on a constitutional ground. So this has sort of been vetted with the US Constitution without any challenges. Okay, so can you clarify what office this is for? So in Maine we use it for primary elections for governor, US Senate, US House, state Senate and state house. So the state races and federal races. In the general elections we use it for US Senate and US House of Representatives at the moment. We have in our constitutional polarity provision that we need to amend in order to use it in the governor's race and in general elections for the legislature, which a handful of states have, language similar to ours. Well, we have language for some of the kinds. That's correct, yeah. My understanding is you may need to amend your constitution to use it and more broadly. Simple process. Rod has a question. Can you speak to the cost of doing this compared to the more traditional? Is it more cost effective? Is it more expensive? So for Maine, Maine had plurality, first pass the post elections, no runoff system. It was estimated that range choice voting might cost $1.5 million to implement statewide and voters heard that argument and voted for it. When it came time to actually implement it, it took our secretary of state about two and a half, three months to implement it at a cost of about $100,000 to Maine taxpayers. So it ended up being very cost effective. The alternative, which we commonly talked about was if you wanna have a majority, which seemed to be the consensus of Maine voters, you have to do an actual runoff election, which could cost the state and localities up to a million dollars more. So the way we were able to structure it in Maine is the state picked up the tab for $100,000 to implement. There was no additional cost or administrative burden for town clerks. So the $100,000 is in addition to what? Mm-hmm, and most of that was startup costs. So we have the vendor we use for our tabulators. It needed a simple software upgrade. The only ongoing costs for rank choice, Hody, and Maine are printing additional ballots to accommodate increased voter participation and hiring a few staff for a couple of weeks to help with all the tabulation system just to make sure everything is tabulated properly. So those are the costs that are somewhat minimal. Thank you. John. So I'm looking at the fiscal note for Maine, which indicates a cost of more than $100,000 per election. Right, that's the fiscal note from the Citizens Initiative, that's right. Which is, no, it's not the actual cost. The actual cost was $100,000 to implement. So these numbers of $761,000 was not what it cost? Nope, it was not. Okay. Yep. Jim. Did you have a question? Yeah. Would you like to share it? I'm sure he's saying no. I'm just saying I don't have to yell at him. That's what my kids would say. You're yelling. There's a verse for everything. Do you like me to jump in? Yeah, please. I have a question as well. So I've done recounts on elections here in Vermont and our ballot I think is pretty straightforward, but it is stunning to me the number of times you see a ballot that has been spoiled and so I'm just absolutely intrigued at how you got such a low rate of ballot spoilage given the many opportunities there for somebody to miss a circle or accidentally rank two people as their third choice. I would assume that that would disqualify a ballot. So that's a great question. And I can point you to research not only around Maine where our rates in two elections were comparable, but actually cities across the United States have found that ranked choice voting spoiled ballot rates are comparable compared to big one and first pass votes or top two in California spoiled ballot rates. So what was interesting when we went and knocked on 150,000 doors and talk to many voters and showed them the ballot, sometimes their initial reaction was, oh, I get that, but I'm not sure my neighbor will be able to get that. It might be too confusing for them. And then they showed the ballot and they're like, yeah, I totally get that. I can do that. I rank choices. We rank choices every day, right? Deciding what restaurant we want to go to to dinner with our family with your first choice, my first choice. Sometimes we compromise, sometimes we insist. But that's the nature of it. And when we showed people the ballot, they thought it was very easy. And so when we heard this feedback too from people who were including people who were not supportive of ranked choice voting, that they thought the ballot was easy to use. So that was the self-reported feedback from voters. And I think the backend data that spoiled ballot rate just confirms what voters were expressing about their experience with our CV. One of the concerns we heard was hand counting at the local level. We have, I don't know, 100 towns that still hand count ballots. Do you have any towns in Maine that hand count in? How was this addressed? So most of our towns in Maine still hand count. Only towns of a thousand or more are provided, tabulators to the Secretary of State's office with HAVA funds. And so with ranked choice voting the way we used it in our state, the Secretary of State came up with a blueprint or roadmap that was similar to the way we would do a recount. So on election night, the town clerks were poured out the first choice rankings in a race. Who do voters like all the best? Then the Secretary of State's office did the work of aggregating the cast vote record. So from the tabulators, the cast vote record was produced and delivered to Augusta. And then from the hand count towns, the ballot boxes, which had 100 ballots in them or 200 ballots in them, were taken to the Secretary of State's office and they ran the statewide tabulation for the primaries and federal races and the number of elections. So the towns didn't actually... It was no more burden for the towns, right? It was all pushed to the state. It was on the Secretary of State, yeah. And the first time we did it, which was the first time ranked choice voting had been used in this way in a state, it took 10 days to finalize the tabulation. I think that process is speeding up in our state. But we sort of have a, in some ways, sort of a system that we've used for decades that sort of is the way that we've approached elections. So thank you. Hal? So you mentioned that you had to increase the number of ballots in your credit. So what has been the increase in terms of voters? So in the primary election, the increase was 7.5% participation as in the Democratic primary, the Republican primary also had increased voter participation. That was a five-way race with which the winner got actually an outright majority and didn't need to go to the ranked choice tabulation. And then the general election, Maine is consistently one of the highest turnout states. So the impact in the general was sort of minimal. But of course, there were broad voter turnout in November of 2018 across the country in most places. So we experienced a similar dynamic. And so ranked choice voting is sort of, if you look at cities that use it as well, it's somewhere between a 5% and 10% on average voter turnout increase. And so we've seen that, we've also seen other places that when you couple it with other reforms, sometimes that needle moves up a little higher as well. Thank you. So we have our deputy secretary state in the room with us and I wonder if I might put him on spot and see if he has any thoughts that he'd like to share with us. Do you want me to do it from here? Thank you all very much. Thank you. Yeah, I'm not going anywhere. I'll hang out right here because you have more questions. Thank you. Good morning for the record. Chris Winters, deputy secretary of state. Our elections director sends his regards. He has a sick child at home and no coverage. So he's there. And holding the bucket I think is how he was describing it this morning, too much information. Sorry about that. I have very high level sort of concepts to put in front of this committee. It would be preferable to have Will sending back, I think to talk about the details. But as this committee I think is aware and should be aware, there are practical implications to this very large change in how we would do our elections in the state of Vermont. You heard a little bit about the number of towns that we have. I think it's 135 who have tabulators of the 246. It's 80% of the total votes. So there are things in place. We would probably not take the approach that Maine did, which was to have to transport, and this is the committee's decision, but to transport to a central location. You heard that really significantly, delays election results. And we've become very used to election night reporting and knowing the night of the election who won our different races. So that's something for you to consider that trade off there if you do the central transporting and counting of votes to the state level, to the secretary of state's office without every town having a new tabulator capable of doing this, that you're gonna see a delay in the results being reported. It is a fundamental overhaul. We would require a replacement of all of our tabulators. The good news on that is we're planning to do that anyway. Our tabulators are aging out and it's time for us to upgrade any upgrade to our tabulators. We would want them to have the capability to do ranked choice voting. And I should have let off of this, but I will say that the secretary Kondos has always been a proponent of ranked choice voting. He still supports the concept, but he just wants the legislature to be very aware of the practical implications and the cost involved in moving in that direction. Not to mention that what we think would should be a very massive voter education and of course poll worker and clerk training that would have to come along with such a shift in the way that we do our elections. So those are my very high level talking points on that. And again, would invite you to have the secretary and the director of elections and at some point to talk about this. Jim. Sounds like I don't want to read into what you're saying, but it sounds like you think it will cost more than 100,000. I think it would cost more than 100,000 in Vermont, yes. So I mean, well this all seems very simple. It's actually very mathematical. As the secretary of state's office done any study of whether ranked choice voting mathematically is better than the current way we elect officials to state office. Mathematically. Yes. No, there's a whole body of research on this. And so I was just wondering if you had looked into it. I mean, there's arrows and possibility theorem. I was just wondering if you had all looked into the conclusions that were reached based on that theorem and ranked choice voting. I haven't personally, but I'm sure that Will's sending has and I can convey that question to him and have him get back to the committee. Can you get any questions for either Kyle or for our deputy secretary of state? Okay, so I want to start off, I'm going to do that. I want to start off by saying, we are very thankful for this opportunity to share our thoughts. My name is Christelle Tanoke. I am a junior at Champlain Valley Union High School. I am here with my friend Akush Dao who is a senior also from CVU. We came to speak on behalf of our peers. The CVU, if you ask other students, is not only said to be a school full of rich preppy kids, but a school with a serious drug problem. CVU has had numerous car searches due to students possessing drugs in class. Students have been suspended because they were caught dealing marijuana to sophomores and freshmen. This serious drug problem, is it really a CVU problem or is it a community one? According to the Vermont Department of Health, National Davis shows that more Vermonters, ages 12 and up are using marijuana compared to the country overall. The number of Vermonters who try marijuana for the first time between the ages of 12 and 17 is also higher in our state than in the country overall. Today's high potency weed has 90% plus THC. Clinical studies reveal that long-term moderate consumption of the drug impairs short-term memory, slows reaction time, increases the risk of heart attacks, and can result in birth defects, strokes, and damage to the respiratory system and brain. Furthermore, the National Research Council has concluded that the long-term use of marijuana may alter the nervous system in ways that do promote violence. Noplace serves as a better example than Amsterdam, though often treated as a well-functioning city with a relaxed attitude towards drugs. Amsterdam is also one of the most violent cities in Europe. The future rests on the shoulders of this generation. Let's ask ourselves, is this really going to benefit the minds of our budding leaders? Are these risks worth the financial benefits of a few individuals? Is the money worth putting our future at stake? These are not just my questions, but the questions of the students I go to school with. Believe me when I say that this bill is not in our favor, and we gravely fear the repercussions we will have to endure at the reality of our concerns are disregarded. I am a minor, and I'm concerned for my future, but I'm also in fear because of the skin I was born in. It has been said that marijuana commercialization will help promote social justice. I disagree. Here are some key takeaways from smart approaches to marijuana.org. Legalization has been heralded as a way to reduce the number of people of color incarcerated, yet despite reductions in the rest from marijuana possession, and states that have legalized the prison population has remained stable. Residents in lower income communities of color already have the blight of a liquor store on every corner. The reality of legalization and commercialization is that these same communities will now be burdened with an over-saturation of pot shops on every other corner as well. Where there are issues of systemic injustice and racism, legalization does not address the root of these issues, and instead only helps these problems by promoting increased drug use and the accompanying negative social consequences in disadvantaged communities. So I ask, instead of creating an industry, let's create opportunities. Instead of creating an industry, let's work to create a strong community that's healthy, safe, and drug-free. Thank you. Thank you, Eva. Good talk. Jim, ask a question. Jim. That's right. That's it. Sorry. Believe me, I know the feeling when you're in that witness chair, you want to... Ben, you're done there. Thank you very much. You did a very nice job. Thank you. I want to hold you. I'm 16. Okay, so I want to put you in the perspective of a 16-year-old in the future of Vermont. It's been sort of suggested, some of us older types need to re-look at the way we do things and need to attract a, make Vermont a tractor for young people to stay here and create opportunities. I mean, we have a demographic issue. Yes, we do. There's too many like me, especially this one next to me. Yeah. So anyhow, it's been suggested that doing things that perhaps a younger population might be more attractive to, that could be a commercialization of marijuana will help our demographic long-term. It sounds like you disagree with that. I do. I don't believe that. I guess my first like, this bill was summed up to me, it was we're gonna like commercialize and legalize this to help a lot of things, but also the mindset behind it is it's already, like it's already going on. We already have people with drug issues. So like kids like, yeah, I guess people like it. So why not continue to provide, to give access to these kids so they can stay? But we don't want it. We don't want it. And that's why a lot of kids, like all the kids in my class and in my school, like once I'm 18 or once I graduate, I'm out, like I'm leaving Vermont. And not just because they're people that look like you, but because like Vermont is just. There's nothing wrong with the, you know. You're right. You're right. I mean, clearly why that's the right thing. You're right. Him, I, you know. It's not, and I'm just gonna say, at least for me, not just a diversity thing, but like, is Vermont what's best for me, for my education, for my younger sister? Like I fear, like if we do this, my younger sister, what we, kids worry about and it's sad, but what they were like having worried about since when you guys were going to school, which is not too long ago, but like, you know, but, but we can't breathe. We can't breathe. Is popularity. And I like personally, I just don't believe drugs like will help me in any way. I don't need to jeopardize my future that way. But my younger sister, you know, she's young and she's popular. She's 10. I can't control what she does or what she tells me. So she might try because on the bus, we've already had like younger students, like, you know, 10th graders already like exposed to these products on the bus. Like they get it from their older siblings or I don't know, parents, but like it's already a problem and that scares me so much. So if I can move her away from this and other younger kids away from this, I will gladly do so. So for us to stay for a month, this cannot happen. That's just my view. Yeah, no, no, no. And very, very much appreciate that. That's great. Thank you. Just for the record, I totally agree with your statement about it. So, Crystal, thank you so much for sharing what you shared. So, what do you think is missing in school life and community life that leads so many young people to be attracted to marijuana? Just from like speaking as like just a student, I would just say a question. Just more like issues with like themselves. You know, these days, the way like we commercialize drugs and the way like social media like promotes drugs, it's like this will help with anxiety. This will help with depression. This will help, I don't know, make you just feel relaxed overall. And so a lot of kids like coming to high school with all these expertise, like this generation is all crazy, you know? So we just wanna do whatever we can to like go disappear into like an alternate like reality. I feel like that's what drugs do for kids. So like it's just, like that's how they get stuck. You know, they do that and then they think that it's helping them, but really in the future, it's just gonna mess them up. So it's nothing that like, I feel there's something that like we can do to like help kids not go to drugs, except like limit access to it. Like it's just like family and friends and like just our personal like the adolescents mind kids these days, you know? So it's just. So it sounds like there's a lot of stress that you've had through it. Yes, just like school, like college, just like boys, just stress. So it's not, it's not. Yeah. Got you. Got you. So, problem. Rob? First off, you and your, I guess, schoolmate have done an excellent job. You're doing a very, very good job, but it's tough sitting there. We've talked a lot about prevention and education. What would that look like from your perspective? What do you think need would have to happen to help address the concerns that are out there around us? I just think it's a lot of like, just awareness around why drugs are bad. Cause like kids, we know drugs are bad, but like that's what I mean when I say they're addicted. Cause like I'll be like, I'm around all the time, see you, I'm telling you, drug problem. And it's like, oh look, we know it's bad, but like it feels so good. Like I just got to clear my mind, I have a test, let me just do this, you know? For me, I remember dare, like and do you know what dare is? Like I don't know what stands for it, but like dare, I don't know, they're like fifth grade where like they came in and it wasn't really like marijuana they talked about. I think it was just like alcohol mostly and I guess cigarettes I don't really remember, but it was just like, we signed a whole, we signed a thing, a waiver or whatever, promising that we wouldn't ever try the way that people broke this waiver. But I don't know, I just like stuck to it because the health risk and society, like just think the risk weren't worth like just myself. Like I just don't see, I know it's just safe, it's just not safe. So I feel like we should just try best to raise awareness around safety issues surrounding like drugs. We think because so many people are doing drugs that it won't make a difference, but I truly believe that it will. Especially, and we need to start in like younger communities such as like elementary schools, like we shouldn't think oh they're young, so they're not ready, but they're not trying, they're thinking about it. They are, so we should start there and move to high schools. Like as much as we, like as we're discussing like really putting like pot shops in Vermont and we already have a problem, we need to talk about why this isn't, why this is bad. Like as much as we can always talk about why this is bad. Very good, thank you. No problem. Nelson? How much do you think it's based on peer fresher itself? You know, kids in school want to have their various groups and so forth. And what happens sometimes, in fact in my youth when I was kind of not the best kid in school, you would do something to attract the other kids and then all of a sudden they would do the same because they wanted to be part of what you were part of. Do you see a lot of that happening or is that am I not attracted there? That's, no, that mentality has stuck and I am sure it will stuck throughout, you know, years of like schooling. But with drugs, I kind of just try to think of like school. Drugs, I don't think that. I mean, so for me personally, like I don't, I can't fall into peer pressure. Like if I don't want to do it, I'm simply not going to do it. But other people who do strive to be popular and who aren't sure of themselves might, you know, try to do through their friends trying it. But then again, that goes back to like their own insecurities and their own anxieties and their own, maybe if I do this, I'll be like this. But we already, we've already ruined it for them by letting them have these drugs, by giving them access to these drugs in the first place. But like answering your question, it has a little bit to do with peer pressure, but like everything has to do with peer pressure from like sex to drinking, to cheating, like to fighting like everything has to do with peer pressure when it comes to like kids or even adults. So peer pressure is a part of it, but it's not the main problem. How do you think that we would be able to, from an educational point of changing the nature of how people, younger people think when they come in and trying stuff like that, is there something that we can do in a way of funding or otherwise that would change that in any way? Give kids more opportunities in something different for, is there anything different that we can offer? I'm, no, I wasn't ready for these questions. I, I can't, Tim, you're too far a friend if you want to, you're too far a friend. You're too far a friend if you want to. Tim, I like, every, like all around our school we have posters like, oh, in the bathroom, like in the stall, it's like the same bacteria and nasty stuff that's in the toilet is in your vape pen, blah, blah, blah, because that's, because people like, they go to the bathroom to do this thing. They go out on the car to do this thing. So I don't know, Tim, do we turn, Calvin? Do you want to defer to me? I mean, you're. So, friend. You want to answer your question in my perspective or? Sure, sure. Because you, From your perspective, you, you have to work with it every day. Right. There's a number of things in, you know, there's a lot of countries who are doing some great things. You've heard about the Iceland mom, right? They're, we actually as a state have done tremendous, tremendous work. We've done tremendous work. So if we go back to the 70s, you know, the rates of use were up here, around 40%. And then they dropped down, and they're dropping down. 90s, they picked up a little bit, and then they're dropping down. So when people talk about 24%, I always reframe that with my kids, right? So that means there's 66%, is that human's random, 76% of kids who actually are making healthy choices most of the time. So there's a reframe that we need to do and in a positive reframe, because most of the time our kids are making healthy choices. The reality is, no matter how much money, so back in the day, Governor Douglas supported a lot of funding for prevention. We had 110 SAPs in schools. There was 17, there's more than 17 coalitions. There's a lot of programs that got cut in the past 10 years, prevention. And so what we've learned, and I think Amy Morehouse, I don't know if she's presented, but they talk about a third space, right? So you got home, school, and a third space. In particular, in Iceland, right? They figured out that nothing good happens after midnight. And so they have a curfew, but they actually follow through on the curfew. No law, no law or curfew or anything is any good unless it's followed through, period. And so in Iceland, they're doing a really good job. And so the biggest thing that they saw in Iceland is parent engagement. Parent engagement, parent engagement, parent engagement, parent engagement, right? And so when you have kids using this third space and they're doing different things, like let's provide opportunities. Let's provide opportunities for kids. And the biggest thing is in terms of funding. Here's the rub, you guys. So when individuals who are in the lower SES, socioeconomic status, they don't have the opportunities. They don't have the opportunities. In my school, we took away our late bus and our early bus. And that was a protective factor. We didn't realize it until afterwards. So we need to increase our protective factors for our kids and we need to minimize our risk factors, period. So how we do that as a state and as communities, we gotta figure that out. Mike. Thank you. This is a little bit of a left hand term. You're probably one of the most articulate witnesses we've had here a while and I noted that you're 16 years old. Thank you. There are some people who would like to give the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds for local elections. What do you think about that? They wanna say yes, but I'm so scared because they're like. Yeah. I can't hear you. Because I think of, for example, this matter, how many people do drugs? And so I have, a close friend of mine has schizophrenia. And I'm so against marijuana. I feel like people think it's so shocking because of certain reasons, but I feel like why, why? So when I told him about what I was doing, he was like, why? Because I want this so I could get it. But I like the guy from Denver. I don't know his name, but TV. I believe it was maybe Corey. But he was talking about how psychosis and how this promotes that, and this helps that. So I was doing this not only for him, but he doesn't know that, but for many other people. So I don't know, I do want kids like us. I feel like kids like us just coming and speaking and influencing your mind. But I don't know about giving us a whole vote because we need like, we aren't prefrontal cortex, isn't really developed yet. So we need that time, we need that extra two years to get it right. So, I don't know. I can't even keep his clothes off. Six grade teachers used to sit out like all the time. So I feel like that two years, so it can like help just continue to develop. Like, I don't know. I feel like we're still really like immature. And I'm still speaking for myself, like immature and young. So we need time to like, just really think about, like every vote counts, like the vote is our voice. So if we vote for something, and we don't really know what we're voting for, because some people would just vote for fun. You know, so if we're voting for something and we don't know like the result and that, we might just mess ourselves up. So two years, it's wait 18, wait, yeah. Thank you.