The House Speaker and Senate President stress how complicated the issue is in meeting with Statesman Journal editorial board.
BY JACOB PALMER | OB DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
Implementing new recreational marijuana rules comes with plenty of challenges.
The Statesman Journal editorial board recently discussed what the state legislature must do to smoothly introduce the new rules to Oregon.
The Legislature has a duty to work through the intricacies of marijuana policy, just as previous legislatures had to fix glitches in such voter-approved initiatives as the death penalty, lottery, assisted suicide and property tax limits. It becomes critical that every Oregon legislator invest in learning about marijuana science and policy, and especially how legalization has played out in Washington and Colorado.
“We all will be voting on marijuana,” Courtney said of this year’s legislators, “not only in 2015, probably 2016 and probably at least two or three more sessions afterwards to implement this measure. It is a voluminous measure that was placed on the ballot. Voluminous.”
Another gem from this article is the story’s lede, which offered useful advice for uncles across the state: “Get over the jokes about the Legislature’s “Joint Committee,” digging through the legislative weeds, and Oregon’s emergence “out of the Stone Age and into the Get Stoned Age.”
At a local level, Pendleton is taking steps to insulate itself from the new rules, according to OregonLive.com.
“When it comes to a lot of our laws, they are determined by a couple of counties and Portland,” said Pendleton Mayor Phillip Houk. “We are used to that, so what we have to do is buck up and figure out what we are going to do.”
For Pendleton, it may mean trying to ban marijuana retailers from the city.
