Congress’ Top Legal Pot Advocate on the Future of Marijuana Policy

It’s been a lonely 20 years for Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, one of legal marijuana’s biggest champions in Congress. He’s introduced or co-sponsored more than two dozen pieces of legislation over those two decades, each one designed to chip away at the federal anti-marijuana monolith: laws that would make it legal for Veterans Administration doctors to speak to patients about marijuana, that would make sure students with marijuana-related convictions remain eligible for financial aid, and that would allow owners of marijuana-related businesses to have bank accounts and file normal taxes.

Most of them have failed, but the margins they’ve been defeated by have shrunk in recent years. That’s one of the signs Blumenauer sees indicating the anti-pot tide is finally turning at the federal level.

Blumenauer, who’s in New York to attend the United Nations’ Special Session on Drug Policy this week, spoke with Rolling Stone about how close we are to ending the federal prohibition on marijuana, who he thinks the best presidential candidate would be with respect to weed policy, and the prospect of a pot-related surprise announcement from President Obama in the last few months of his final term.

Tell me about the UN special session. What is a congressman like yourself doing there?
Part of what’s in the background of the effort to reform federal drug laws is the fact that we’re kind of hamstrung by previous UN conventions on drugs. We’re limited in our ability to unilaterally make major changes because we vowed to help other countries fight this scourge of illegal marijuana and other drugs.

The United States has not been an agent of change in terms of drug policy reform. We’re not aligned with the countries that are seeking to reform, like Yugoslavia and Switzerland. We’re not talking about more drug executions, like China, but we’re not reforming. We’re kind of in the comfortable middle — kind of leading from the middle. Ambassador William R. Brownfield [now the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs] was explaining to me in my office that he was really pleased that the United States is right in the middle: “That sweet spot.” But the United States, when it thinks something is right or important, it doesn’t hesitate to stand alone.Why not drug policy?

What’s going on now falls too heavily on the poorest and most vulnerable people, who are literally caught in the crossfire between these militarized forces and law enforcement and the cartels. They’re desperately poor. Why wouldn’t we be aggressively shifting from this hard-edged and expensive enforcement and spend some of this money to help these poor farmers profitably go into other crops? Why don’t we work hard to change the nature of incarceration? And not just in this country, which is an embarrassment, but in Central America, where prisons are community colleges for crooks. It’s a recruiting ground for the cartels; it’s where they learn the trade. The notion that we wouldn’t be able to help take the profit and the violence out of this, and try other approaches, and support the enlightened in different countries, I find it appalling.