MICHAEL McNICHOLS is a man of marijuana-scented mystery.
McNichols is a Canby attorney who deals in bankruptcies, probate matters, and general civil litigation. He’s fiscally minded, an MBA who chairs the budget committee at Clackamas Community College. And, though he didn’t much want to talk about it with the Mercury, McNichols says pot should be legal.
“There’s no reason it shouldn’t be taxed,” he said recently in a brief phone conversation. “There’s this failed war on drugs.”
Which is a funny thing to hear from the person who, more than anyone else, is inhibiting what may be Oregon’s best shot at legal weed this year.
McNichols has temporarily blocked the path of Initiative 37, the well-funded, strong-polling proposal to put legalization up for a vote in November. Using a time-tested delay tactic, he’s slowing activists’ progress just as the Oregon Legislature’s made it clear that movement on the issue won’t come from Salem.
With a July 3 deadline looming, activists are anxious to begin gathering the nearly 90,000 valid signatures they need to make the ballot.
“The window is shrinking,” says Anthony Johnson, chief petitioner and director of New Approach Oregon, the political action committee behind the initiative.
How did McNichols manage to get pot activists on edge? He appealed the initiative’s ballot language before the Oregon Supreme Court, arguing the verbiage doesn’t adequately summarize the law change. Until the court rules—a move that could happen in two days or two months, for all anyone but the justices know—the proposal is on ice.
All the while, people are scratching their heads about McNichols’ intentions. Even Paul Stanford, the perennial pot activist who succeeded in getting a legalization measure on the 2012 ballot, questions McNichols’ apparent support of two measures that Stanford’s floating this year.
“I sometimes think when he says he likes ours better, maybe he’s trying to hurt us,” Stanford said recently.
“He’s a complete mystery,” says Johnson, who insists he’s not worried about the delay just yet. “I suspect that somebody’s put him up to it.”
In the meantime, New Approach is trying to hurry things along.
The group filed a separate, similar initiative in late January. Both proposals would legalize and tax marijuana use for people 21 years old and older, allow Oregonians to cultivate their own modest stash tax-free, and charge the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) with licensing and regulation. The new one offers a tiny change, specifically excluding “industrial hemp” from the definition of marijuana.
By filing the new initiative, Johnson says he’s partly trying to find out if it polls better. But the group also wants to dodge McNichols’ scrutiny, which seems unlikely. Ballot language the Oregon Department of Justice crafted for the new effort is nearly identical to the verbiage that was appealed in the first place.
McNichols didn’t return numerous calls for comment after language for the new initiative was revealed on March 7. He has until March 21 to file an appeal.
In February, McNichols insisted he’d appealed the first measure “strictly as a concerned citizen.” But he also said he prefers Stanford’s proposals over New Approach’s, calling them “very good in their simplicity.”
Stanford’s central initiative—the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act—resembles Measure 80, the proposal that garnered almost 47 percent of the vote in 2012, even as it failed to get much in the way of national backing.
This time around, Stanford’s tweaked the 2012 measure to include more regulatory oversight by the governor—who would appoint a regulatory board independent of the OLCC—and he’s gotten the attention of a Texas organization willing to send big checks. He’s also floating a constitutional amendment to allow for legal pot.
Both efforts have been gathering signatures since late last year, and, as of mid-February, they have 27,661 and 13,625 signatures, respectively, according to figures from the Oregon Secretary of State’s office. Stanford says the real number is larger.
“These measures will be on the ballot,” the activist boasted in a recent press release.
Stanford concedes the delays from McNichols could help his cause, since people might become confused if three separate marijuana petitions are in circulation.
“People will think they signed one when they really signed the other one,” he says. “Every signature we get will make it harder for them to get signatures.”
On top of that, he seems to have a lingering resentment toward New Approach. Until last summer, Stanford was working in tandem with the group. He says he was unceremoniously jettisoned, and that the group now only speaks to him through intermediaries.
Still, Stanford says he supports any effort to legalize marijuana, and he recently acceded to a request from New Approach that he reach out to McNichols.
“They asked me to call him and tell him to withdraw his challenge,” Stanford says. “I did try to call him and left him a message. He never called back.”
History suggests New Approach hasn’t run out of time to gather enough signatures, but that it should move soon.
In 2012, campaigners behind Measure 85, a proposal to partly dismantle Oregon’s so-called “kicker” law, got permission to begin collecting signatures on April 17. The campaign turned in more than 200,000 signatures by the July 6 deadline.
Still, there was a delay of nearly a month from the time the Oregon Supreme Court ruled on that measure’s ballot language and when the campaign was allowed to collect signatures. New Approach could be looking at kicking off its effort in April.
In a beautiful turn of events, New Approach has hired local signature-gathering firm Democracy Resources to carry out the petition effort when the time comes. That company recently hired a new vice president of strategy and business development: Former Multnomah County Chair Jeff Cogen, who resigned from office amid news of an affair and allegations of frequent pot use.
When the Mercury called Democracy Resources for an estimate of how long a successful signature-gathering campaign might take, it was Cogen who called back.
“It varies issue by issue, but on an issue like this one, where there’s broad and enthusiastic support, there’s still plenty of time,” he says. “It could become too late eventually, but now is not that time.”
The “War on Marijuana” has been a complete and utter failure. It is the largest component of the broader yet equally unsuccessful “War on Drugs” that has cost our country over a trillion dollars.
Instead of The United States wasting Billions upon Billions more of our tax dollars fighting a never ending “War on Marijuana”, lets generate Billions of dollars, and improve the deficit instead. It’s a no brainer.
The Prohibition of Marijuana has also ruined the lives of many of our loved ones. In numbers greater than any other nation, our loved ones are being sent to jail and are being given permanent criminal records which ruin their chances of employment for the rest of their lives, and for what reason?
Marijuana is much safer, and healthier to consume than alcohol. Yet do we lock people up for choosing to drink?
Let’s end this hypocrisy now!
The government should never attempt to legislate morality by creating victim-less “crimes” because it simply does not work and costs the taxpayers a fortune.
Marijuana Legalization Nationwide is an inevitable reality that’s approaching much sooner than prohibitionists think and there is nothing they can do to stop it!
Legalize Nationwide! Support Each and Every Marijuana Legalization Initiative!
Well said!
The best outcome for supporters of ending prohibition and regulating and taxing marijuana would be for both the Constitutional Amendment and the New Approach initiative to qualify for the ballot and pass. The Amendment would end marijuana prohibition first and then separate all the details of regulation to a next step. The Amendment doesn’t create a right to possess marijuana as the Oregonian wrongly reported recently, it addresses the wrong of using criminal penalties to regulate marijuana and instead requires that marijuana regulation be based on civil fines unless public safety (DUI) or children were involved. This is an important foundation for any tax and regulate model. The new approach initiative would build on this foundation with layers of regulation that would treat marijuana like alcohol. The combination of these two initiatives would give Oregon the best marijuana law on Earth. If voters want to ensure that Oregon moves forward, they should put these measures on the ballot. That means contacting the campaigns and helping by collecting signatures and donating money. Leaving our destiny to be shaped by out-of-state billionaires and mysterious lawyers delaying progress is not such a good idea. So, fellow marijuana lovers, get up, stand up and seize this moment in history!
You’ve got to appreciate Paul Stanford’s incredible luck. Having some unknown lawyer appear out of the blue, one who has never uttered a public word about marijuana reform, one who supports legalization and specifically Stanford’s proposal, who then issues a frivolous ballot title challenge to the other legalization plan, a challenge peppered with the words “we” and “our” (http://oregonvotes.org/irr/2014/037cbt.pdf), which the AG rejects as frivolous, who then appeals that to the Supreme Court, who then issues another frivolous ballot title challenge to the second interation of the other legalization plan which is again rejected by the AG, who then may still appeal that second iteration to the Supreme Court, who has no web site and rejects all Stanford’s pleas to cease and desist, I mean, wow, talk about coincidence!
I mean, with that kind of coincidence, combined with Stanford’s own admitting of bad blood between himself and the other legalization proposal, and admitting that not having to compete for signature gathering with a better-funded initiative benefits his proposal, why, more conspiratorial-minded people might draw hasty conclusions.
After all, one would have to suspect the worst of intentions to think that an under-funded initiative campaign that had failed in 2012 as well-funded Washington and well-funded Colorado succeeded by large margins would resort to such underhanded dirty tricks. One would have to presume that the 2014 iteration of Stanford’s proposal, that legalizes 24 plants and 24 ounces, were it to make the ballot alongside the other proposal that legalizes 4 plants and 8 ounces, would probably bring in fewer votes than the more conservative proposal. Since under Oregon law, if two initiatives pass, the one with the most votes wins, one would have to presume that keeping the other proposal off the ballot is the only way to succeed, if one were conspiratorial-minded.
One would also have to presume that the largely-volunteer campaign of Stanford’s that has turned in less than 30,000 of a 150,000 goal for signatures in over seven months might not be as well-funded and able to collect the other 120,000 by July as advertised, especially if a well-funded, professional campaign spending a million or more dollars on signature gathering and campaign advertising is in the mix.
And if one had been an activist in the local Oregon legalization movement for a decade, with direct and first-hand knowledge of various instances in which the word and ethics of Paul Stanford were questionable at best, one might be even more tempted to equate the quote “I sometimes think when he says he likes ours better, maybe he’s trying to hurt us” with Captain Renault’s shock that there’s gambling going on in Casablanca.
But that one wouldn’t be me. One of my friends is one of the chief petitioners for both of Stanford’s measures, and he assures me there is no connection between Michael McNichols and anyone associated with or funding the I-21 and I-22 campaigns. It is just a terrible coincidence to the best of my friend’s knowledge. And, ultimately, futile on McNichols part, as his Supreme Court appeals have zero merit, New Approach will get a ballot title, it will have plenty of funding to gather signatures even in a short April-July window, it will make the ballot and it will pass. It will just cost more.