 In Colorado and the state of Washington, they voted to legalize marijuana, not for medical use but for recreational use. Oregon turned it down. This means that states can regulate, control and tax the sale of marijuana in small quantities. Today, the state of Washington looked at 75 years of a national marijuana prohibition and said it is time for a new approach. Initiative 502 was an initiative to legalize tax and regulate marijuana. We collected 355,000 signatures and turned them in on December 30, 2011, which then made it a bill before our local government, which they didn't choose to enact it, and so it became a ballot initiative for the November 6 general election. And Initiative 502 passed by a 55% majority of votes. Initiative 502 makes it legal after December 6 for individuals 21 and over to possess one ounce of marijuana in bud form, 16 ounces of marijuana in infused solid form, and 72 ounces of marijuana-infused products in liquid form. Welcome to the Greenwood Patient Co-op. We are the oldest established co-op dispensary in the city of Seattle and Washington state. We were about 3,000 patients, I would say 50% of my patients are cancer patients, and maybe about one-fifth of our patients are MS or MD patients. I love it. You could tell he's a ham, am I right? He knows what a camera is. He's a very special bird. He detects for my seizure disorder. I have three conditions for which I'm authorized for medical cannabis, and one of them is seizure disorder. It's like a mild epilepsy. And he gives me a 15-20 minute notice before I'm going to have a seizure. Really? Yes. They don't know how. In this country about 15% of dogs can be trained for such. About 50% of parrots. And as an interesting FY, 100% of the snakes get it. Really? Yes. So can you prevent the seizure itself? I then get medicated off the cannabis, and it stops my seizures from occurred. What do you think about the success of I-502? I am overjoyed. I am 54 years old. I have waited all my life to see cannabis be legal. I think it is absolutely the same position, re-appropriate resources, so that we can actually go after true crime. I really think that what one person does individually in his home, if it's not bothering other people, it should not really have any concern whatsoever with the federal government. This is not just an issue about marijuana. It's not just an issue about raising revenue by taxing marijuana. This is an issue of social justice. In Seattle, for instance, 35% of all of the marijuana arrests for years had been of African Americans, even though African Americans made up only 9% or 8% of the city's population. Whites actually use it a little bit more. But African Americans are arrested at three times the rate of white people. On average, it's about 9,000 to 10,000 marijuana arrests in Washington State per year. Since 2000 to 2010, over $216 million has been spent statewide for the enforcement of small amounts of marijuana possession charges across the state. The Washington State Looker Control Board will issue licenses to growers and producers and sellers. It will then enforce adherence to the rules and regulations that it's written. It starts a one-year rule-making process in December where the Looker Control Board, which is our statewide agency, will start promulgating all the rules when it comes to the supply side. There's no industry right now in the United States or in Washington State for the cultivation and distribution of marijuana. So there's a lot of regulations and rules that need to be promulgated with input from the public and input from the experts who know how to deal with marijuana, those that are growing right now. You have to be a resident of Washington State to be one of these licensees. You can be both a grower and a processor, but you can't be all three because we wanted to prevent vertical integration within the system and didn't want to have a monopoly established by one organization. Washington is best known for apples. We export them all over the world. And marijuana would be our number two cash crop after apples. And now what we're able to do is we're able to tax that market and bring some of those proceeds back to our own state. The Office of Financial Management, which is an independent agency within our government, did an analysis of the Initiative 502 tax structure and it projected about a half a billion dollars would be generated every year from the tax structure. And we know that the number one reason or a huge reason why people end up misusing drugs is because they lack certain basic health care and so we wanted to make sure that we were addressing that harm reduction approach by giving money to basic health. The state of Washington, I think, did it the right way. And it's substituted for criminal penalties. What I believe is a solid public health approach. Our marked funding will go through the Department of Health to establish an education campaign, public education, to provide treatment resources throughout the state. Funding will go to the Department of Social and Health Services to set up statewide prevention programs targeting young people in middle school and in high school. Funding will also go to the two major research universities in the state of Washington to conduct research on marijuana. For some people, marijuana is legitimately harmful and they ask a legitimate question. If marijuana is harmful, then why increase the harm by legalizing it? That misses some of the point because they don't see the harm of criminalizing it and they don't see the benefits of legalizing it. The access to marijuana already appears to be very high. Something like 50% of kids by the time they've graduated from high school have already had exposure to and experimented with marijuana and something like 50% of adults in Washington state report that they've used marijuana in times past, so access is already very high. We have many states in the United States that have decriminalized marijuana and they did not see a large increase of use. The difference between those states and this one is we are actually creating a mechanism where you can have the lawful production and sale of marijuana. There was another type of opponent for I-502 that we hadn't really seen before and those were medical marijuana industry activists. Everybody who was against the initiative was basically making money off the unregulated environment of marijuana, whether that's the Washington Sheriff's Association which in essence makes a living off the unregulated environment or many of my fellow medical marijuana dispensaries. We went from five dispensaries to about 140 in the space of six months. My belief is that once 502 has fully come in and the stores, the state licensed stores are set up, that whole industry kind of collapses. I don't like it personally, but it's time for a conversation about legalizing marijuana. What if we regulate it? Have background checks for retailers, stiff penalties for selling to minors. We could tax it to fund schools and health care. Less profit for the drug cartels and police will have more time to focus on violent crime instead. Yes, on 502, it's just common sense. I think that the campaign being based on polling data concerning the public's fears and the public's hopes was a very critically important aspect of how the campaign succeeded. The polling data made it very clear that the public did not want public safety to be endangered by people smoking marijuana and then driving. The initiative needed to be written to include provisions for penalties and those penalties needed to be widely publicized. The public does not want next door neighbors to have marijuana gardens. They want the sale of marijuana to be tightly restricted to specific stores. The campaign also succeeded, I think, by making it very evident that leading law enforcement authorities supported no longer wasting law enforcement resources on prosecution and imprisonment of marijuana users. We know firsthand that decades of marijuana arrests have failed to reduce use and the drug cartels are pocketing all the profits. Initiative 502 brings marijuana under tight regulatory control. 502 generates new revenue for education, health care and prevention. And if 502 passes, we'll have more resources to go after violent crime. Join us in voting yes on 502. The fear scenario of the DEA coming in and busing down doors is highly unlikely. As a practical matter, 99% of all drug charges for small amounts of possession are done at the state and local level. So we're talking about city and county law enforcement officers. The federal government not only doesn't have the time, but they don't have the resources to start enacting and enforcing those charges at the local level. But we could see a lawsuit. There might be some injunction as far as the implementation of the licensing structure. But again, 502 was drafted with that year-long rulemaking process in order to have that conversation and to have the time for that conversation with the federal government. These sorts of federal challenges are not a drawback for the marijuana law reform movement. This is how we have a national conversation about drug policy, about not only whether marijuana should be legal in an abstract sense, but in a very concrete way what sort of proposals we want, where should it be sold, how old should someone be, what should the advertising for marijuana look like. And that is a very responsible conversation. We can really change 75 years of failed policy. I think the fact that 502 had 55% majority isn't that perfect indication that we're ready and can be a model, not just for the United States, but for the world.