[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 21 (Tuesday, February 7, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H1075-H1078]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FEDERAL MARIJUANA POLICY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California
(Mr. Rohrabacher) for 30 minutes.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to ask my colleagues to
join me in the legislation that I have submitted today, which is the
Respect State Marijuana Laws Act.
For too long, Washington's decisionmakers have pursued the same
policies over a whole range of issues without regard for whether those
policies are actually beneficial to the American people. In fact, they
continue to support policies that have utterly failed--many of these
things--because the intent sounds so good.
So, over and over again, we see failed policies remain in place,
wasting money. Rather than evaluating the reason for the policy
failures and ultimately deciding to change course in Washington, the
habit has been simply doubling down on regulations, personnel, and tax
dollars spent, believing that that will have and bring a different
outcome.
Last November, the American people registered their dissatisfaction
with this way of thinking by electing Donald Trump to the Presidency.
President Trump's statements on the campaign trail loudly and
aggressively challenged the status quo. We haven't had someone here
shaking up the status quo for a long time, but he did so by promising
to revisit a whole host of failed Federal policies that have been
crying out for attention for years and, in some cases, decades.
Once such failed policy has been the U.S. Government spending
billions of dollars and wasting the time of Federal employees--hundreds
of thousands, if not maybe tens of thousands of Federal employees--in
order to prevent adults from smoking a weed, marijuana.
Candidate Trump told the voters this was an issue to be left up to
the States, especially when it comes to medical marijuana.
At a 2015 rally in Sparks, Nevada, then-Candidate Trump said:
``Marijuana is such a big thing. I think medical should happen--
right? Don't we agree? I think so. And then I really believe we should
leave it up to the states.''
It should be a State situation, I think.
``In terms of marijuana and legalization, I think that should be a
state issue, state-by-state.''
I could not agree more with the President. Indeed, it is the very
approach that I have advocated for several years.
In this vein, I have reintroduced today, as I said, the Respect State
Marijuana Laws Act earlier today, along with Republican colleagues Tom
McClintock, Ted Yoho, Don Young, Duncan Hunter, Justin Amash, and Tom
Massie, as well as Democratic colleagues Steve Cohen, Mark Pocan, Earl
Blumenauer, Dina Titus, Jared Polis, and Barbara Lee.
My bill, which has not received a designation yet but is entitled the
``Respect State Marijuana Laws Act,'' will permit residents to
participate within the confines of a State's medical and recreational
marijuana program without running afoul of Federal law.
Admittedly, my personal preference would be to lift the Federal
Government's prohibition on marijuana entirely. However, I understand
that this approach would be a nonstarter for many of my colleagues,
which is why I have promoted an approach that simply gives the States
and their residents the room they need to take a different approach to
this issue, should they choose to take that different approach.
Under my proposal, if a resident or business acts outside the
boundaries set by a particular State, or if a State has chosen not to
allow medical or recreational use of marijuana by their residents, the
Federal Government would still be empowered to enforce Federal law in
those instances. If that is what the people of the State want--it to be
legal--the Federal Government can still get involved.
Of course, the number of States that have resisted the shift in
national opinion on this issue is small. To date, 44 States, including
D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico, have enacted laws that allow, to a varying
degree, the cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana for medical or
recreational purposes. For those States and territories that have
discarded strict marijuana prohibition, my bill would align Federal
policy accordingly.
{time} 2000
This is to those States and the people of those States who have
decided they don't want the marijuana prohibition. My bill would then
make sure that Federal law is aligned with the States' and the people
in those States' desires so that the residents and businesses wouldn't
have to worry about Federal prosecution. For those few States that have
thus far maintained a policy of strict prohibition, my bill would
change nothing. I think that this is a reasonable compromise that
places the primary responsibility of police powers back in the States
and the local communities that are most directly affected.
Over the past few years, the disparity between State and Federal
marijuana policies has confused and stifled banking, proper taxation,
research, natural resources development, law enforcement, and related
activities. A plethora of bills, many of which I have happily
cosponsored, have been introduced in the House to tackle these problems
on an issue-by-issue basis. However, my bill is the only one that would
solve all these problems in one fell swoop.
My bill is short, straightforward, and easy to understand. It amends
the Controlled Substances Act to add a new rule that reads as follows:
``Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the provisions of this
subchapter related to marijuana shall not apply to any person acting in
compliance with State laws relating to the production, possession,
distribution, dispensation, or administration or delivery of
marijuana.''
The major difficulties that landlords, dispensaries, banks, and
others find themselves in in those States where the majority of
people--maybe the vast majority of people--have voted to make marijuana
legal in their borders stems from the fact that the Federal Government
law considers that activity still illegal. By explicitly stating that
as long as these folks are following the State law, their actions are,
by definition, not illegal to the Federal Government, if we do that,
many of these obstacles, many of these confusions that people have to
deal with in those States, in the States where people have voted to
make sure they don't want marijuana illegal, well, their problems and
the complications, the banking rules and everything else would be
solved immediately.
[[Page H1076]]
Now that we have established President Trump's policy preference as
it relates to this issue, which is he believes it should be left up to
the States, as well as my legislative proposal, let us turn to the
reasons why Federal policy ought to change.
First, as a matter of philosophy, I, as a constitutional
conservative, have great faith in the ideals articulated by our
Founding Fathers. Their experience with the British monarchy, an all-
powerful, centralized British Government in which people had little
representation and no right to control their own lives and liberty, led
them to establish--meaning, led our Founding Fathers to establish--a
decentralized system of government, totally different from that of the
British, that their government was meant to protect the freedoms of the
citizenry.
One of the most important tenets of this system of government was the
idea that nearly all police power should be reserved to and exercised
by the State and local governments. Yet today, Congress continues to
fund an enormous Federal bureaucracy that is built around the idea that
we--meaning, the Federal Government--can and should regulate what
people may or may not choose to consume and has justified the Federal
Government's establishing a Federal police force and justified Federal
police actions directly on the citizens throughout our country.
This is totally contrary to what our Founding Fathers meant. There
was never an intent to have criminal law being taken care of by the
Federal Government. All of our Founding Fathers would have opposed it
and today would be supporting my legislation by bringing things back to
the ideals which they had in mind of limited government, especially
limiting the Federal Government's control directly over our lives.
Tragically, these laws, the laws which have been implemented and the
laws that have been encouraged by the Federal Government, these laws
concerning marijuana, disproportionately impact on the poorest
communities in our country. There is an incorrect perception that poor
people, particularly people of color, disproportionately break Federal
marijuana laws, leading to their disproportionate representation in
Federal prisons. However, as I indicated, that is an incorrect
perception.
Statistics show that affluent citizens are just as likely to grow,
sell, and use marijuana illegally as poor citizens. The sad difference
between these two, however, is that the poorest among us are somehow
unable to avoid prison time for similar offenses.
There is much that can be said about why this is. Some may respond to
this unfairness with the idea that we should just lock up more of the
affluent young people and older people as frequently as we lock up
their poor counterparts.
Well, I happen to believe that the Federal Government shouldn't be
locking up anyone for making a decision of what he or she should
privately consume, whether that person is rich or poor, and we should
never be giving people the excuse, especially Federal authorities, that
they have a right to stop people or intrude into their lives in order
to prevent them and prevent others from smoking a weed, consuming
something they personally want to consume.
We have been down this path before, of course. In the 1920s, a
coalition of progressives and evangelical Christians thought it would
be a good idea to institute a national prohibition on alcohol, which
was something else that people can do in excess--and do in excess--
which hurts them when they do it in excess or when they do it when they
are not totally in control, and they hurt their lives.
People do hurt their lives on alcohol, no doubt about it, just like
in all these other drugs and just as some people do on sugar, for
example. But the motives of the movement, no matter how well intended,
indeed, certainly they wanted to help the people that they were going
to stop from drinking. But like most efforts to limit freedom, the
freedom of Americans, they ultimately succeeded in convincing--they did
convince--the country to enact an amendment to the Constitution that
actually prohibited the production and sale of alcohol in the United
States.
What happened? Well, predictably, the policy failed at achieving its
intended goal, which is trying to prevent people from consuming a
liquid intoxicant, alcohol; and instead of just achieving that goal,
instead it resulted in a torrent of collateral damage that harmed
everybody in this country and created problems that we still have
today. The rise of organized crime, the death of people consuming booze
that was contaminated or otherwise deadly, that is what was going on
during Prohibition.
The mobster scene first arrived in America. We had organized crime.
We had people who were consuming alcohol from stills, and they had no
idea what company or what people were making this stuff that they were
consuming. They ended up dying in great numbers, and we ended up with
the Mob.
Does that sound familiar?
Fortunately, for future generations, the country wised up and
repealed the Prohibition amendment just about a decade after it was put
into place.
Today, the scourge of marijuana prohibition has fueled organized
crime here and south of our border and in our inner cities and
throughout the world. We now have organized crime on steroids, and
there is little that we can do to stop that because we keep feeding
them with money by having outlawed drugs that people want to consume,
and especially that drug that we are looking at tonight, which is
marijuana.
Yet despite the well-documented death and destruction permeated by
organized crime, the two groups who are most tragically harmed by the
Federal Government's intransigence--it is not necessarily the groups
that they are trying to save, but, in reality, they are trying to save
these people. They are putting them in jail. They are destroying
people's lives in that way, but they are also victimizing American
seniors and our veterans--yes, our veterans.
The Federal Government remains so fixated on the need to restrict
marijuana use that it has effectively promoted an opioid addiction. The
possibility that marijuana might be a viable alternative to the
management of pain and certain chronic disorders has been ignored and,
yes, suppressed. Thus, we have senior citizens who are in their senior
citizens homes, people over 70 and 80 years old, and they are being
prohibited from using marijuana that might make their day a little bit
easier or might bring back their appetite. Marijuana is now, instead,
designated as a schedule I substance and has prevented any meaningful
use that might be, as I say, for our senior citizens.
It has also prevented a robust research of the drug to find out
exactly what it could be used for in a positive way. Last year, to the
credit of the Obama administration, at the insistence of myself and
others here in Congress, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced
a policy change to expand the number of DEA-registered marijuana
manufacturers. That meant that they were able to expand that number.
Historically, only the University of Mississippi had been registered
with the DEA to produce marijuana for research purposes. Well, what we
have had in the past has limited the research supply of marijuana both
in quantity and in quality, making access particularly difficult to
legitimate scientists and practitioners. Thus, we have made it very
difficult, if not impossible, for us to get a full understanding: If
there are dangers, what are they? If there are some potential positive
uses of marijuana, what are they?
Through the policy that we have had, it has been a negative impact on
those people who are suffering who, needlessly, don't need to suffer.
They do not need to suffer, whether they are our veterans coming home
or whether it is our people who are basically older or are suffering
from other types of diseases. The policy change that we have made is a
positive step in the right direction so that now there can be more
research into marijuana to find out what the dangers are and what the
benefits can be.
We now can expect that research to pick up to some degree, although
barriers remain. It is unfortunate that barriers remain because a
plethora of anecdotal evidence suggests that this plant and its
constituent parts may offer relief from ailments such as post-traumatic
stress disorder, cancer, chronic pain, epilepsy, glaucoma, and multiple
sclerosis; and, yes, we know
[[Page H1077]]
that in some cases they have noted childhood problems where people go
into seizures, and it has been effective in that.
Why have we held marijuana back and not researched it even?
This paranoia has had severe negative consequences on the American
people, and that is not even considering the number of people whose
lives have been affected. You arrest some person who doesn't have the
money for a lawyer and they can't get it expunged from their record,
for the rest of their lives they have lower pay and they have trouble
getting jobs. We have trapped people in our poorer areas because we
have put this stigma on them when what we are talking about is the
consumption of a weed--not hurting somebody else, the personal
consumption.
I can't think of anything that our Founding Fathers thought that some
people have a right to control their lives, especially what they
consume. I, of course, don't agree that we should outlaw cups bigger
than this because some people might drink more soda pop if we have
bigger cups, no. People need to be responsible for their own lives.
That is what freedom is all about, and that is when people will start
being more careful about what they do.
{time} 2015
Yes, we also know that marijuana can adversely affect the mental
development of an adolescent brain. As such, it is vitally important to
discourage our youth from chronic use. Right now the youth won't even
believe what we are talking about half the time when it comes to
marijuana. So now we need to establish our credibility that we are not
being paranoid, we are being responsible, and we are being realistic.
We need to discuss with our young people and discourage the chronic
consumption of marijuana, just like we do when we discourage them from
the chronic consumption of alcohol use, which also is bad for young
people's brains.
But the fact is we do not know more, and we need to know more, about
the use of medical marijuana and the use of marijuana, period--both
positive impacts and negative impacts. The fact that we don't know what
it can be used for positively or what the negative impact is because we
haven't done the research, that is a travesty. That is a travesty.
It is a crime against older people who sit there and are being denied
the use of something when they are over 70 or 80 years old that might
enlighten their day and might bring back their appetite after they have
had some sickness.
It is a travesty when our veterans come home and they are given
opiates instead of maybe something they can derive from marijuana. We
need to research that. And our veterans end up killing themselves
because now they are addicted to an opiate. The Federal Government
should not stand in the way of the scientific community in learning
more about marijuana.
Many who oppose the change in course for Federal marijuana policy
will cite any number of excuses: Oh, but it is dangerous if people use
marijuana and then get behind the wheel of a car.
Well, that is something that needs to be worked out. We need to make
sure that we understand there are other challenges we have to face once
marijuana is legal and how we are going to protect people from being in
a situation. Well, I happen to believe that there will be no more
people smoking marijuana and driving a car if it was legal than they
are today. However, that may be an issue we need to look at.
What we need to do is find ways to discourage young people from
driving while drinking. Let's have drug testing in our schools not
aimed at putting young people in jail, not aimed at saying: Oh, you
have tested positive for marijuana, you are going to get arrested. By
the way, you can't do that because you can't force these kids to
testify against themselves by giving them a blood sample or a drug
test. But you can do it in order to say: If you test positive for
drugs, we are going to talk to your parents about it. If you test
positive for drugs and you are in school, you are going to have to take
a class to show you what you are doing to your brain.
Ultimately, this is all about freedom. It is all about whether
adults, not children, can use their decisionmaking process. This is the
land of the free and the home of the brave. Too many people get so
wrapped up in micromanaging our lives for our own benefit--of course,
it is always for our own benefit--that sometimes they end up causing
great harm to the people that they want to control for their own
benefit.
Well, many of my Republican colleagues have joined me in letting the
States do this. That is right. I understand it. I respect them. I hope
more will go along with the constitutional provision that those things
not enumerated in the Constitution are powers that should be granted to
the States.
I hope that my Republican colleagues will join me in recognizing
that, when we talk about individual freedom, this is what individual
freedom is. It also includes individual responsibility on the other
side of the coin. When we talk about limited government, we want
limited government and we want government that is closest to the
people, the State marijuana laws in the name of helping people. So that
they won't consume a weed by their own choice, we are destroying all of
those principles which we claimed as Republicans.
I believe in those principles. I think my fellow Republicans do as
well. That is why we need to talk about it and have this type of
discussion that I am opening up tonight on the floor of the House. In
fact, if someone says they believe in the Tenth Amendment to the
Constitution--we have heard it, and we will hear it in this body over
and over again--let's send that back to the States. That is supposed to
be a State rule of who is going to control the environment, who is
going to control the gun laws or marriage laws, et cetera. We are going
to hear that. But if someone really believes in the Tenth Amendment,
they will respect the State marijuana laws, and let the States decide,
and the people therein decide, what the laws should be.
Remember, as we discuss people's health care, Republicans over and
over again say: You shouldn't get in between a doctor and his patient.
We believe in the doctor-patient relationship. That is true for medical
marijuana as well.
Do we believe in these principles?
I say the Republican Party does believe in those principles. We need
to have a discussion and we need to make sure that the American people
understand that we are not just down here saying that we can control
their life when we think it is best. No. We are down here because we do
believe in liberty, we do believe in freedom, we do believe what our
Founding Fathers had in mind when they decided not to follow the
dictates of the king, not to permit the British government to establish
control over their lives here in the United States that they had in
Great Britain where they had fled from to get away from that type of
authority. We do not want to have Federal police--no matter what they
call them, DEA or anything else--down in our cities and our towns
conducting law enforcement operations.
That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. They had in mind
also that people would be responsible for themselves. Yes, when people
are free, some of them are going to make wrong decisions in their
lives. We need to make sure that we understand that when we legalize
medical marijuana, or even recreational use of marijuana, some people
will hurt themselves, just like with alcohol.
It is up to us not to try to put them in jail, not to try to hurt
them, not to try to force them to do what we want, but to try to reach
out to them, to help people who are in need, help people make the right
decision in our churches and our schools. This is the way to conduct
when you have a problem that threatens to bring down the society, not
establishing a Federal Gestapo to go and enforce laws that are going to
make everybody just prim and proper. I am sorry. What we need is to
reassert what our Founding Fathers had in mind for America: limited
government, personal responsibility, individual freedom, and, yes, the
Tenth Amendment.
I would ask my Republican colleagues to join me in supporting the
Respect State Marijuana Laws Act. It presents us with a unique
opportunity to support legislation that responds to
[[Page H1078]]
our constituent demands because across America, people are
understanding the reality of this. They don't want to put people in
jail, they don't want to have Federal law strike forces in their
community just to prevent adults from consuming a weed in their
backyard. It makes no sense at all. They know that people, once they
are arrested for just smoking a weed that is not hurting anybody else,
their lives are damaged and it is harder for them to become a decent
citizen. Americans are concerned about each other, and we know we can't
just leave it up to the government to control our lives.
With that said, I hope that my colleagues support this legislation
and support Congressman Blumenauer and myself and others in the
Cannabis Caucus that is being established in order to be consistent
with the goals and ideals of American liberty to make sure that we have
limited government and unlimited freedom in this country. That is what
America was supposed to be all about.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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