welcome everybody i will brownsburg are state senator from the second suffragan middlesex district which is belmont watertown and a good chunk of boston most of my district in boston and this is the first of a new series of broadcasts that we're doing on public policy issues related to my service of the state government and local local issues and belmont watertown to boston i'm very pleased to start this series off with a special guest pat ja of cambridge grade and so you've recently come through the whole marijuana issue in a leadership role don't tell us a little bit how you got engaged in that initially well i supported question for last year i was one of i think three people supported legalizing marijuana how many of them you know how many senators actually came out on the other side no no ok all right but there was it was it was a minority they were willing to support it so both you and i were strong supporters of the question of legalization from marijuana but it's never been like my main passion but i thought right that's right you're about education what are your other top priorities older people elderly yeah what else you people education education and the environment yeah ok so those are those are those are where you've devoted most your time and i'm very aware of your leadership on the on the education issue you were very involved in the church campaign you probably spent most your jury question right so you've got a long record of interest in education and the elderly you are the chair i was shareholder affairs for ten years for ten years so that's that's a deep that's a deep involvement in that issue and of course environmental issues which you you want to maintain and i want to would say yeah that's right i'm all about maintaining and i always feel a little bad one and resources go ahead of that priority but i'm glad to see we have to do both we have to do both so i think it's a good project so but why did you support the marijuana question and actually well i think the war on drugs has really been counterproductive it doesn't mean that a lot of people use marijuana and it's reported to be universally accessible including by students in high school so the war on drugs has not been successful in getting people to not use drugs instead it's meant that a lot of people got involved in the criminal justice system and it meant that kids or anybody that bought marijuana was buying it from somebody who is likely selling other things and was involved in their culture that was not not healthy so i thought bringing it out of the shadows into the light of marijuana i imagine that if i a lot of people experiment with marijuana most of them don't continue to exist right i mean in my own case it's been about forty five years or maybe fifty cents more like forty five  i smoked a joint there was a period in there when when i certainly tried it and more than once i would try to probably the wrong word maybe six months or a year in high school there were was not that common thing for me to do but that's like a lot of people almost a majority of people try it and they're in their late ten timely twenty's yeah yeah but they're not doing it when they're forty right fortunately because i don't think we have this stuff this is not good for us it does it does make a silly but the i think a lot of people enjoy it i so and i think the medical uses are important medical uses are important i mean to disparage it has it has but but for recreational purposes it's something you tend to grow out of it's many people  unfortunately people don't grow out of alcohol right right the better if they but we do we do to people do grow out of abuse of alcohol right to be fair i mean you know good kids drink you know five drinks on a saturday night or seven drinks that they're not doing that at thirty five public health negative and we worked on that will come to that some more but i do think that the motivation that you have i think is very much the same motivation that i had which is look we don't want this we don't want people to be drawn into the criminal justice system we there's too many ways that people get in trouble criminal justice system is to big of what footprint in our society and we want it reduced the way that people get in trouble and this is seemed like a significant opportunity to him to do that and also the disparate effect on different communities that when the public health association testified to our marijuana committee their first point was that the war on drugs if it is a public health problem that the cars people are incarcerated or have have records it cost them family home jobs so they could and all of those have public health implications so that was the first issue they raced with us what is the effect of the war on drugs on people and minority communities because not because they use marijuana or any other drug more but because a has to be different results yeah absolutely so there's an equity issue in this whole thing as well so so the proposition of the bell was to legalize marijuana talk about what that word means a little bit because i think people tend to think it is certainly when you first approach is like legalization is the opposite of probation i mean you know today we have prohibition which was a system in which if you do it you you go to jail or you get punished or scolded that's prohibition legalization is you stop doing that first of all but what it's really much more than that what so what does it mean to legalize a drug well the getting left here people could grow up to six plants in their home twelve if they if they were two people they could consume marijuana and they could possess up to an ounce of marijuana with no legal consequences announce outside their house yes and inside the house they could have these plants right which might be a hike of a lot more than an ounce in fact right ok so that's the new freedoms that's that much is the opposite of prohibition but the problem is that you can do that and then if they have no legal force aside growing at themselves for most people that they're not going to be able to do that exactly so that we might work that out in use that's right so that goal i think one of our goals in the in the legislation that you and i work on less to make sure that there is a place for people to buy regulated marijuana right so so it means so the opposite of so legalization is not just the opposite of prohibition it's creating a new freedoms but much more than that it's creating a whole new system we want to create a whole new distribution system right now we have an illegal distribution people you know drive the stuff around or ship it on boats or whatever and we're not supposed to know about it i mean we it's invisible to us it's not transparent and they sell it on street corners and beepers and text messages and all that so that's the system that's the distribution system today but we're trying to displace that distribution system and in fact create a new distribution system which we hope will be just as effective in delivering marijuana so people will actually use it right now so we have the means rolling out a series of rolling out stores all over the commonwealth and in places that will accept them  and creating mechanisms for people to legally cultivate marijuana and legally process marijuana and that legally retail marijuana and we have a little bit of that now the medical marijuana  to talk a little bit about the the size and scope of the medical marijuana right now well there's twelve stores and massachusetts now but it's been almost four years that that's been rolling out and it hasn't it's taken a long time not processing things were not if you in regulation that getting up to speed more recently at other kinds of barriers have been communities resisting having medical facilities in their  their borders and i think another problem has been that they are required to be nonprofit so it's hard to raise the capital to get involved so one of the things that the bill of and i worked on it does is allow us th medical facilities to be for profit well that's interesting i'm not sure i realized why we were doing that i mean i get interested they want to be for profit but if you think that will actually help the market to evolve it's hard to raise millions of dollars in capital if you don't wanted somebody i think the president wanted somebody that had been in favor to cherish and then my co chair my vice chair was somebody who had led the campaign against question four so he wanted a committee that people who  we had five hearings around the state and hundreds of people testified and seems like hundreds of people came and visited us in the state house and wrote us letters and e mails and we received a lot of information i did a lot of research  and what was striking to me in that and that conversation was how divergent people's view as the facts were that people have very different ideas about what marijuana is does the dangers that if it were sort of the big divergence as well the biggest aversion was there were people who came in and said repeal that repeal the ballot question and right there her other people who came in and said do not change a comma right so those were so that left your pretty you if you clear guidance yes but i think that the remarkable thing about it is that i think we came out with a bill  that most people are satisfied with the possible exception of the tax rate i think we did five because we see on common ground that nobody in the lead well not a lot of people in the legislature want  lot from the will of the voters and i think a lot nobody wanted to increase or they wanted to discourage use by young people and they wanted to make sure that products were safe and that people and the public health was protected so i think given those things we were able to find a lot of common ground so all right so that it's very important i think i can testify to the viewers i'm telling you you did not get angry you you you were too you were firm i got so you got upset you were firm but it was always in they it was always in a respectful way i mean it was always and we're trying to get something done together way and that's not a given  there the thing i want to say about that was that you were totally preoccupied totally committed with the question of being faithful to the will of the voters i mean that was that was what kept you up at night and made you uncomfortable the whole you know feel the process was very difficult as your commitment to given and so we were actually two laws they wanted to repeal and replace both the i felt useless and the medical marijuana law right and so we did and we don't know what all the consequences of that would have been right replace we also fought first of all that to not change any of the fundamental freedoms right there was and they didn't really push to do that i mean nobody was trying to reduce the ability to possess marijuana that the election gave us no bill no nobody accepted the basic will of the voters on those issues but then more than that i think we were committed to saying ok let's make this process work we want to respect the will of the voters in a sense of building out a legalized marijuana the were doing that when one of the biggest sources local control how do how do we handle in the family that the conference committee well the idea was that if people in a community had voted in favor of the referendum they should keep the power to ban or severely limit the number of establishment in their in their community but if people had voted against the referendum question if they voted against legalisation that the  town officials could ban or severely limit so that was a compromise but i don't think it's that it makes a difference because in those communities where people voted against legalization they would very unlikely they would depend very unlikely to end a referendum with a much smaller group of people much more locally first pokus group of people would have been very unlikely for them to vote against it then yes it makes your impact a little bit about the about of those complex notice complex  but just just the politics so this is the basic idea of what we did a simple it will first of all the ballot question said if you're going to prohibit or or severely limit the number of marijuana stubs once in your community you need to go to the people for a  and we basically accepted that principle but we accept in the cases where people have already voted once in the referendum against marijuana so is in those cases the local officials can do what they want and it's a minority of communities and they're mostly small and you can only do that for the for intel for the next couple of years we're going to basically as a fresh impression people are already voting twenty sixteen why should they have to vote in get that that makes sense i'm ok with that and i believe it works out to be twenty eight percent of the population affected by that it's there are there mostly smaller communities but there are some is the the difference between the election that happened in twenty sixteen and the other and other election twenty twenty sixteen election was a special election in the sense that it was a presidential election it was everybody voted if you if you had a pulse and cared all about what was happening in the country you voted twenty sixteen and so those are going to be here to watch it but most of the elections that we have are much smaller that the local officials can put this on for a special election or a local general election whatever maybe a anything those makes it more likely that they would vote against marijuana right and they were they would support prohibition or severe limitation on establishment in their community so that forcing communities that are already voted in that broad general election to vote again is a complete waste of resources because you know that's going to go so i think we not i think i think we lost nothing in terms of freedom a role outside by that compromise i thought that was a good compromise  talk let's talk a little bit now about the about the money issues which i guess was that was sort of the toughest thing when we were done right always is at the end of the day comes the last house and it makes sense percent of the retail price that ten percent would be well six point two five would be the state sales tax three point seven five would be the special sales tax a special excise tax on marijuana and up to two percent could be a local sales tax so it could be up to twelve percent of its one percent and that two percent say optional right as a so if you're if you're busy but ten dollars a marijuana you would pay a buck twenty in taxes or something like that or if you bought a dollar's worth of marijuana you pay twelve cents in taxes ok and it's important that nobody in massachusetts proposed at least in this process taxing medical marijuana right that is so important glad you brought that out because some people look at this and thinking and are going to get taxed for their medical marijuana so they know that medical marijuana needs to know if you're using medical marijuana this doesn't change a thing still tax free but the  mean five percent for the local ok so then whatever the differences would be the state excise yeah sixteen or something yeah ok so so it was something about level total was in their package was twenty eight total is total is twenty percent of what three percent is a local option tax ok all right all right so let's go so the so well it is higher than we advocated for and we advocated pretty strongly this have this is one of things i can testify to is you know it's how hard you fought for god and how difficult it was for you to ultimately you did you really didn't do it until you had to turn it to to get th oregon which has been relatively successful in their role that right i mean i find you know if you think about what's good what's going to happen if you are somebody who uses marijuana today and you buy from an illegal drug dealer you're going to have the two minutes two minute well ok i was rolling along and we should just point out that there are so many other good things in this bill you know that and that's why i think at the end so there's the social justice pieces opportunities for people to participate  get jobs and yeah and go ahead and opportunities for farmers that hemp is a new product that we can grow in in massachusetts and will help a lot of small farmers survive know so i think and i think that people need to understand that i think you and i moved on this tax issue we were both at the initial zero change issue with the vision that this will help the rollout give local officials a reason to say yes you know if they can have some tax revenue give state officials a reason to see us and move forward get this done so the because if we don't if they don't move forward they have infinite power to drag their feet that's one of the realities of you know you can't fight city hall we don't want to be fighting with city hall we want city hall want to do this and hopefully hopefully will get done and people have access to this i guess we should wrap up there i think it's been i think why don't you we do one thing we did touch on i just want to say to the public is there's a lot in here to protect public health and you work to put that in the house work to put that in we did gather we think we built a bunch of things to really put you know the packaging the labeling the testing this is going to be a clean safe well labeled product people are going to know what they're using and  hopefully that will be much better avoiding a lot of the problems other states have faced and i just end by saying that i was so fortunate to have you you were not on the marijuana policy committee but you know so much about local government and the law us for this and we'll be back in another month or so actually will be back in september with i don't know we're going to do next hopefully will be is we'll have someone as wonderful as bad to talk to thank you again