Blumenauer wants his party to embrace pot legalization
As he prepares to exit Congress, a final push
WASHINGTON — As a 23year-old serving his first term in the Oregon state Legislature, Representative Earl Blumenauer co-sponsored the first bill in the country to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.
More than 50 years later, as Blumenauer is preparing to retire after nearly three decades in Congress, he is mounting a lonely campaign to persuade his fellow Democrats, including President Biden, to press for legalization of marijuana at the federal level as a central plank of their political platforms.
“I have been doing this longer than any other politician in America, and I can say unequivocally, no politician was ever punished for being on the cutting edge of legalization of cannabis,” Blumenauer, who has become Congress’s top advocate for changing marijuana policy, said. “This is something every candidate should embrace.”
Blumenauer has urged officials close to Biden to make the issue a more prominent part of the president’s reelection message. He argues that legalization is not only good policy, but a potentially “electric” political issue that could help the 81-year-old Biden appeal to young people who polls show have drifted away from him, and whose backing could be vital to his chances of winning a second term.
“I take every chance I get to nudge my friends in the Biden administration,” he said this month at a cannabis policy forum. “The quickest way to engage young people, minority voters, to break the mold, is to come out foursquare for legalization. For compassion. For people who have been caught up in the legal morass of the failed war on drugs, and make a clean break of it.”
Legalization, in some form, is overwhelmingly popular across the country, with 88 percent of Americans saying marijuana should be legal for medical or recreational use, according to a January survey by the Pew Research Center. Twenty-four states have legalized small amounts of marijuana for adult recreational use, and 38 states have approved it for medicinal purposes.
But federal law still prohibits the use and possession of weed, and it puts marijuana under a classification reserved for the most dangerous drugs, including heroin and LSD, that the government deems to have a “high abuse potential” and “no accepted medical use.” Advocates have urged the federal government to reevaluate that classification and remove it from the list of controlled substances altogether.
Blumenauer, now 75, estimated that he has been involved, in some way or another, with every state-level cannabis policy initiative that has cropped up since his days as a “child member” of the state Legislature. Back then, the government was still jailing chronic late-stage alcoholics and a movement to relax antiweed laws was growing in the face of the war on drugs.
On Capitol Hill, Blumenauer, with his signature bow tie and bicycle-shaped lapel pin (he is an avid cyclist), has led the charge to make marijuana more widely accessible. He has pushed legislation to expunge federal marijuana use and possession crimes from criminal records, expand medical marijuana research, ensure veterans can access medical marijuana, tax and regulate marijuana, and allow legal marijuana businesses to access financial services.
He founded and is a co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, and he was honored this month by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws with an inaugural “Trailblazer Award” named for him.
“He has literally been our most important and most influential advocate. He’s played an enormously powerful role,” Keith Stroup, the organization’s founder, who lobbied the Oregon state Legislature on cannabis policy during Blumenauer’s early State House years, said in presenting the award.
Blumenauer, who announced in the fall that he would not seek reelection, argued that this was the year to “break the logjam” and get federal changes across the finish line.