Rick Holmes: Fighting yesterday's war on pot

By Rick Holmes

It’s a message as old as the War on Drugs: If there’s anything you need to know about marijuana, just ask a cop.

For some members of the Massachusetts state legislature, faced with the possibility that voters will legalize marijuana in November’s election, the old playbook is the only one they have. So they invited some police in to explain drugs to them.

The results were as predictable as a middle school D.A.R.E. assembly. The cops, including an officer from Colorado traveling the country warning about the danger of legalizing recreational marijuana use, advised Massachusetts to “Just Say No.”

The assembly featured an old bogeyman in a new revival. “Marijuana is a gateway drug to the problems of the opioid crisis that we’re having today and to ignore that fact is at our own peril and the peril of our children,” Rep. Harold Naughton, D-Clinton, said.

The marijuana-as-gateway-drug is easily discredited. As researchers Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan pointed out decades ago, since large majorities of marijuana users never go on to try harder drugs, it could more accurately be called a “terminus drug.” They are scientists, not cops, so the House apparently has no interest in what they have to say about it.

But Naughton and friends ought to know that four out of five of today’s heroin addicts started with prescription painkillers. Now THAT’S a gateway drug.

Jim Gerhardt, a cop from Thornton, Colorado, and vice president of the Colorado Drug Investigators Association, told the Beacon Hill gathering of all the horrors that have befallen his state since voters legalized recreational pot in 2012: People driving under the influence; people overindulging in “edibles” and regretting it when the drug took effect; pets getting into the marijuana brownies; increased hospital admissions, marijuana falling into the hands of youth.

“My message is: Slow down. Study what’s going on,” Gerhardt, told the legislators.

But listening to police is no way to find out what’s going on. As Jim Borghesani, a spokesman for the group behind the ballot question, told State House News Service, “Getting perspective on marijuana prohibition from these career prohibitionists is like getting perspective on veganism from cattle ranchers.”

A state Senate commission actually visited Colorado, taking the advice to study the issue more seriously. If the House members studied harder, they’d find that Colorado very quickly adopted new rules on packaging and doses in response to incidents of people – especially cannabis tourists – eating too many cookies and falling into a non-lethal stupor. They would also learn about the public education efforts that are helping keep marijuana, like other adult products, out of the hands of kids.

         They would also hear, as I heard last summer from Colorado’s top marijuana regulator, that despite      some early bumps on the road, there is no momentum behind reversing the legalization vote.

If they spoke with people actually taking advantage of the freedom to smoke a joint without risking arrest, they might learn that there’s a learning curve, for users as well as regulators. Yes, legalization has resulted in new products and new strains, some of them pretty powerful. But no one has ever died of a marijuana overdose, and, as toxicologists have said for 500 years, “the dose makes the poison.”

Whiskey has eight times as much alcohol per volume as beer; that’s why it isn’t served in 12-ounce cans. It’s not that complicated.

The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, which is putting legalization on the Massachusetts ballot, has learned from the experience of Colorado and other states that have tackled the issue. Their initiative, for instance, creates a state Cannabis Control Commission that can write rules for dosages, products, signage and packaging. It could keep marijuana dispensaries from looking like theme parks peddling drugs that look like gummy bears.

If Beacon Hill lawmakers took their responsibilities more seriously, they would be writing the legislation that serves their constituents and organizes a new, regulated industry, instead of leaving the legislating to activists backed by the industry. For decades, bills have been introduced that would do just that, but they are never brought to the floor for a vote, and this year will be no different.

“The vast majority of legislators just want this to go to the ballot,” Sen. Jamie Eldridge, one of 10 co-sponsors of a bill legalizing and regulating marijuana, told me. The politicians have an irrational fear of being called “soft on drugs” – a worry that has paralyzed generations of lawmakers.

It’s an irrational fear, near as I can tell. Rep. Tom Sannicandro, D-Ashland, who is also on record favoring legalization, says he’s had no blowback at all from constituents over his position. Eldridge has heard a little disagreement, he said, but not enough to have any impact on his campaign prospects.

“Politicians are overly influenced by law enforcement,” he said. “But the people are ahead of the politicians on this issue.”

Come November, the people – not the politicians or the police – will decide.