Alcohol & Drug Policy Sub-Comittee on Prevention, 2-5-2010

This meeting was quite fun.

The AG was whining about the fact that the beer & wine tax is not going to go anywhere and there are only 6 pots of money that 30 agencies are fighting over every budget.

So I raised my hand and said, "Well, you DO have a foreign invasion force siphoning billions of dollars out of your economy running a completely untaxed industry: if you taxed and regulated marijuana for adult use, you could pay for all of your program and Healthcare too. Fact is, according to the Drug Availability Steering Committee, Oregon is number 7 nationwide for overall production, and 4th for indoor production and DASC says that 90% of the market is controlled by Mexico. Now, you collected 262,000 plants by August last year, and DASC says you only get between 10-25% of the harvest which means they had a multibillion-dollar year - untaxed. And those guys aren't playing. There were at least 2 mulit-thousand plant plots of poppies in Clackamas County this year. They control the market. You want to prevent drug use? You need to get rid of the folks controlling 90% of the market. It is time to nationalize the industry and give those billions of dollars to American taxpaying farmers. You don't have a choice anymore."

I wanted to throw up. But saying that to both the Attorney General and the Governonr's Drug Policy Analyst - to their faces, in front of the drug policy Sub-Committee on Prevention shows that this is a conversation that they can no longer avoid.